Because every
story begins
with words

John Legend

I have a structured songwriting process. I start with the music and try to come up with musical ideas, then the melody, then the hook, and the lyrics come last.

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

Oscar Wilde

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

You may be able to take a break from writing, but you won’t be able to take a break from being a writer.

Stephen Leigh

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

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

Jodi Picoult

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

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

It always comes down to characters, and individual stories about courage.

Steven Bochco

Work on a computer that is disconnected from the Internet.

Zadie Smith

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

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.

Harlan Ellison

My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.

Anton Chekhov

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

C. J. Cherryh

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

Thomas Jefferson

I have a structured songwriting process. I start with the music and try to come up with musical ideas, then the melody, then the hook, and the lyrics come last.

John Legend

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

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

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

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

Stan Lee

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

Mickey Spillane