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The Washington Post’s neologism contest winners.

December 2, 2019May 9, 2025 2304

I came across this today and broke up laughing. These are seriously clever! Thanks to the Washington Post. I wasn’t aware of their neologism contest, but I am now! Read and enjoy. Pass it along.

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

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

Mickey Spillane

Good instincts usually tell you what to do long before your head has figured it out.

Michael Burke

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.

Gloria Steinem

Stories are never too long or too short. They’re too interesting or too boring.

William Shawn

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

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 have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has just put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae or banana split.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr

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

Roald Dahl

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

It’s an accepted fact that all writers are crazy; even the normal ones are weird.

William Goldman

A true author, no matter the medium, is an artist with godlike knowledge of his subject, and the proof of his authorship is that his pages smack of authority.

Robert McKee

If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it’s to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.

Jim Morrison

Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret.

Matthew Arnold

If you start with a bang, you won’t end with a whimper.

T.S. Eliot

There are three primal urges in human beings: Food, sex, and rewriting someone else’s play.

Romulus Linney

The road to ignorance is paved with good editors.

George Bernard Shaw

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

Biography should be written by an acute enemy.

Arthur Balfour

Keep a small can of WD-40 on your desk — away from any open flames — to remind yourself that if you don’t write daily, you will get rusty.