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Video: Military ghostwriting opportunities.

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

Do not place a photograph of your favorite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide.

Roddy Doyle

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

Lisa See

I’m writing a book. I’ve got the page numbers done.

Stephen Wright

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

Michael Burke

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

William Shawn

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

Ever heard of a carpenter not going to work because he has “carpenter’s block”? If a writer can’t write, it’s because he doesn’t really want to, he isn’t ready to get it on paper or he’s just plain lazy.

Chet Cunningham

A writer is a world trapped in a person.

Victor Hugo

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

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

M. K. Simmons

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

Dan Poynter

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

Thomas Jefferson

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 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

Easy reading is damn hard writing.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

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

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

Matthew Arnold

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