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Video: When to use rain, rein and reign.

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

Stan Lee

The road to ignorance is paved with good editors.

George Bernard Shaw

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

Clarence Budington Kelland

What I loved most about calling myself a reporter was that it gave me an excuse to show up anyplace.

Jeanette Walls

When writing a novel, that’s pretty much entirely what life turns into: “House burned down. Car stolen. Cat exploded. Did 1,500 easy words, so all in all it was a pretty good day.”

Neil Gaiman

The character that lasts is an ordinary guy with some extraordinary qualities.

Raymond Chandler

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

T.S. Eliot

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

I haven’t got 10 rules that guarantee success, though I promise I’d share them if I did. The truth is that I found success by stumbling off alone in a direction most people thought was a dead end, breaking all the 1990s shibboleths about children’s books in the process.

J.K. Rowling

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

Jodi Picoult

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

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

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

Mickey Spillane

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

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

Thomas Wolfe

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

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

E. B. White

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

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.