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Pauline at Barnes & Noble reportedly said: THAT’S NOT HOW IT WORKS!

September 17, 2017May 9, 2025 676

Can you use a good laugh?

David Thorne is an Australian writer, humorist and satirist. I think he’s a really funny guy.

He’s got a website that I discovered today. I clicked on a page that details a 2015 email exchange with a book-signing coordinator with Barnes & Noble by the name of Pauline. Apparently David set up a book-signing date at a B&N store without notifying B&N. It came to the attention of Pauline. And it rapidly went downhill from there.

Really funny stuff. Here’s the link. Have fun!

That’s not how it works.

The fact is, I don’t know where my ideas come from. Nor does any writer. The only real answer is to drink way too much coffee and buy yourself a desk that doesn’t collapse when you beat your head against it.

Douglas Adams

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

G.K. Chesterton

Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade, just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.

Truman Capote Quote

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

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

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 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

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

Jim Morrison

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

T.S. Eliot

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

Sidney Sheldon

Just don’t be boring!

Robert Liebmann

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

Thomas Wolfe

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

Roald Dahl

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

Romulus Linney

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

C. J. Cherryh

Read a thousand books and your words will flow like a river.

Lisa See

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

E. B. White

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

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.