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Video: When to use rain, rein and reign.

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

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

Dan Poynter

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

Thomas Jefferson

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

Socially, a journalist fits in somewhere between a whore and a bartender. But spiritually he stands beside Galileo. He knows the world is round.

Sherman Reilly Duffy

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

Raymond Chandler

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

Roald Dahl

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

Clarence Budington Kelland

The road to ignorance is paved with good editors.

George Bernard Shaw

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

Christopher Hampton

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.

Oscar Wilde

If the sex scene doesn’t make you want to do it — whatever it is they’re doing — it hasn’t been written right.

Sloan Wilson

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

Thomas Wolfe

Work on a computer that is disconnected from the Internet.

Zadie Smith

Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.

Robert A. Heinlein

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

C. J. Cherryh

Do you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage.

Edward Albee

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

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.