The Washington Post’s neologism contest winners.

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The Washington Post’s neologism contest winners.

December 2, 2019July 21, 2023 1458

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.

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

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

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

A writer without interest or sympathy for the foibles of his fellow man is not conceivable as a writer.

Joseph Conrad

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

Jim Morrison

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

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

Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.

Truman Capote

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

Tom Clancy

Anecdotes don’t make good stories. Generally, I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdotes were about.

Alice Munro

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

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

Jodi Picoult

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

Sidney Sheldon

Work on a computer that is disconnected from the Internet.

Zadie Smith

Biography should be written by an acute enemy.

Arthur Balfour

The character that lasts is an ordinary guy with some extraordinary qualities.

Raymond Chandler

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

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

Christopher Hampton

Keep a small can of WD-40 on your desk — away from any open flames — to remind yourself that if you don’t write daily, you will get rusty.

George Singleton

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.