The Washington Post’s neologism contest winners.

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The Washington Post’s neologism contest winners.

December 2, 2019July 21, 2023 1948

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.

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.

Christopher Hampton

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

Jodi Picoult

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

Romulus Linney

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

Michael Burke

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

Sidney Sheldon

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

G.K. Chesterton

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

Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

E. L. Doctorow

If you haven’t got an idea, start a story anyway. You can always throw it away, and maybe by the time you get to the fourth page you will have an idea, and you’ll only have to throw away the first three pages.

William C. Gault

Every writer with half a brain knows to surround himself or herself with editors who are smarter, far more articulate and infinitely better looking.

Chris Claremont

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

Gloria Steinem

Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

Mickey Spillane

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

William Goldman

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

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

Roald Dahl

If you have an idea that you genuinely think is good, don’t let some idiot talk you out of it.

Stan Lee

Thank your readers and the critics who praise you, and then ignore them. Write for the most intelligent, wittiest, wisest audience in the universe: Write to please yourself.

Harlan Ellison

To me, movies and music go hand in hand. When I’m writing a script, one of the first things I do is find the music I’m going to play for the opening sequence.