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The Washington Post’s neologism contest winners.

December 2, 2019June 5, 2026 3257

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.

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

It’s an accepted fact that all writers are crazy; even the normal ones are weird.

William Goldman

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

A writer is a world trapped in a person.

Victor Hugo

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

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

William Shawn

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

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

Stephen King

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

Dan Poynter

Reading and weeping opens the door to one’s heart, but writing and weeping opens the window to one’s soul.

M. K. Simmons

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

G.K. Chesterton

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

Lisa See

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

Gloria Steinem

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

Mickey Spillane

The road to ignorance is paved with good editors.

George Bernard Shaw

Don’t annoy an author, you’ll end up in their book and you won’t look good.

Lawrence Wray

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

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

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