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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

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

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

Romulus Linney

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

Dan Poynter

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

Sidney Sheldon

Keep a small can of WD-40 on your desk — away from any open flames — to remind yourself that if you don’t write daily, you will get rusty.

George Singleton

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

Clarence Budington Kelland

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

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

Work on a computer that is disconnected from the Internet.

Zadie Smith

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

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

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

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

Jeanette Walls

Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don’t see any.

Orson Scott Card

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

Raymond Chandler

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

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

C. J. Cherryh

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

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