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The Washington Post’s neologism contest winners.

December 2, 2019May 9, 2025 2481

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.

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

Dan Poynter

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

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

Lawrence Wray

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

Jodi Picoult

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

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

Every writer with half a brain knows to surround himself or herself with editors who are smarter, far more articulate and infinitely better looking.

Chris Claremont

I get up in the morning, torture a typewriter until it screams, then stop.

Clarence Budington Kelland

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

Mickey Spillane

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

Gloria Steinem

What I loved most about calling myself a reporter was that it gave me an excuse to show up anyplace.

Jeanette Walls

Easy reading is damn hard writing.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

Robert A. Heinlein

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

Matthew Arnold

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

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 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

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.

Christopher Hampton

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

Thomas Wolfe

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