WaPo's neologism contest winners - blog | 888-743-9939

Blog

The Washington Post’s neologism contest winners.

December 2, 2019May 9, 2025 2557

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.

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

Mickey Spillane

A writer is a world trapped in a person.

Victor Hugo

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

I’m writing a book. I’ve got the page numbers done.

Stephen Wright

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

Roald Dahl

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

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

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

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

Steven Bochco

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

Sidney Sheldon

Biography should be written by an acute enemy.

Arthur Balfour

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

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

The road to ignorance is paved with good editors.

George Bernard Shaw

I haven’t got 10 rules that guarantee success, though I promise I’d share them if I did. The truth is that I found success by stumbling off alone in a direction most people thought was a dead end, breaking all the 1990s shibboleths about children’s books in the process.

J.K. Rowling

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

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

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

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.