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You’ve heard of writer’s block. But have you heard of reader’s block?

August 5, 2019June 5, 2026 1459

I found this in the August 2nd, 2019, New York Times. Fun reading…if you’re not suffering from reader’s block:

Reader’s block article

My aim is to put down what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way I can tell it.

Ernest Hemingway

Don’t annoy an author, you’ll end up in their book and you won’t look good.

Lawrence Wray

What I loved most about calling myself a reporter was that it gave me an excuse to show up anyplace.

Jeanette Walls

You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.

Jodi Picoult

It is only natural to pattern yourself after someone. But you can’t just copy someone. If you like someone’s work, the important thing is to be exposed to everything that person has been exposed to.

Bob Dylan

Anecdotes don’t make good stories. Generally, I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdotes were about.

Alice Munro

Critics are people who sit on the mountaintop and look down on the battlefield. When the fighting is finished, they take it upon themselves to come down from the mountain and shoot the survivors.

Robert Altman

My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.

Anton Chekhov

Reading and weeping opens the door to one’s heart, but writing and weeping opens the window to one’s soul.

M. K. Simmons

I do not over-intellectualize the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.

Tom Clancy

It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil, trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.

William Faulkner

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.

Robert Benchley

In Hollywood, the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can’t read. If they could read their stuff, they’d stop writing.

Will Rogers

Socially, a journalist fits in somewhere between a whore and a bartender. But spiritually he stands beside Galileo. He knows the world is round.

Sherman Reilly Duffy

Just don’t be boring!

Robert Liebmann

The character that lasts is an ordinary guy with some extraordinary qualities.

Raymond Chandler

It is perfectly okay to write garbage — as long as you edit brilliantly.

C. J. Cherryh

Editor: A person employed by a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed.

Elbert Hubbard

Work on a computer that is disconnected from the Internet.

Zadie Smith

Do you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage.