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The Washington Post’s neologism contest winners.

December 2, 2019May 9, 2025 2705

I came across this today and broke up laughing. These are seriously clever! Thanks to the Washington Post. I wasn’t aware of their neologism contest, but I am now! Read and enjoy. Pass it along.

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

Romulus Linney

Read a thousand books and your words will flow like a river.

Lisa See

The road to ignorance is paved with good editors.

George Bernard Shaw

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

Mickey Spillane

Biography should be written by an acute enemy.

Arthur Balfour

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 took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.

Robert Benchley

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

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

Steven Bochco

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

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

Roald Dahl

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

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

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.

Gloria Steinem

Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret.

Matthew Arnold

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

Sidney Sheldon

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

Jodi Picoult

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

Thomas Wolfe

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

Jim Morrison

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.