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

August 5, 2019June 5, 2026 1247

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

No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader’s intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing.

E. B. White

I get up in the morning, torture a typewriter until it screams, then stop.

Clarence Budington Kelland

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

Lawrence Wray

I don’t care if a reader hates one of my stories, just as long as he finishes the book.

Roald Dahl

A writer without interest or sympathy for the foibles of his fellow man is not conceivable as a writer.

Joseph Conrad

A blank piece of paper is God’s way of telling us how hard it to be God.

Sidney Sheldon

You may be able to take a break from writing, but you won’t be able to take a break from being a writer.

Stephen Leigh

Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don’t see any.

Orson Scott Card

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

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

Tom Clancy

If you wait for inspiration to write, you’re not a writer. You’re a waiter.

Dan Poynter

Books aren’t written, they’re rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn’t quite done it.

Michael Crichton

The first chapter sells the book; the last chapter sells the next book.

Mickey Spillane

The reason 99% of all stories written are not bought by editors is very simple. Editors never buy manuscripts that are left on the closet shelf at home.

John Campbell

I write the last line, and then I write the line before that. I find myself writing backwards for a while, until I have a solid sense of how that ending sounds and feels. You have to know what your voice sounds like at the end of the story, because it tells you how to sound when you begin.

John Irving

The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.

Thomas Jefferson

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

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

Substitute “damn” every time you’re inclined to write “very”; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

Mark Twain

No writer has ever yet been known to hang himself as long as he had another chapter left.