Because every
story begins
with words

Stephen King

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

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

Stan Lee

I do not over-intellectualize the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.

Tom Clancy

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

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

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

My aim is to put down what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way I can tell it.

Ernest Hemingway

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

Edward Albee

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

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

Robert A. Heinlein

If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it’s to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.

Jim Morrison

Just don’t be boring!

Robert Liebmann

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

To me, movies and music go hand in hand. When I’m writing a script, one of the first things I do is find the music I’m going to play for the opening sequence.

Quentin Tarantino

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

Dan Poynter

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

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

The road to ignorance is paved with good editors.

George Bernard Shaw

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

It is only natural to pattern yourself after someone. But you can’t just copy someone. If you like someone’s work, the important thing is to be exposed to everything that person has been exposed to.

Bob Dylan

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