Because every
story begins
with words

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr

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.

Easy reading is damn hard writing.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

Oscar Wilde

A writer is a world trapped in a person.

Victor Hugo

A true author, no matter the medium, is an artist with godlike knowledge of his subject, and the proof of his authorship is that his pages smack of authority.

Robert McKee

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

Michael Burke

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

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

Stan Lee

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

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

William Shawn

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

Romulus Linney

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

T.S. Eliot

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

Jodi Picoult

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

Plot is, I think, the good writer’s last resort and the dullard’s first choice.

Stephen King

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

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

Just don’t be boring!

Robert Liebmann

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

Roald Dahl

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