Because every
story begins
with words

video how we select our professional writers

Video: How we select our professional writers.

Do you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage.

Edward Albee

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

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

M. K. Simmons

Biography should be written by an acute enemy.

Arthur Balfour

Ever heard of a carpenter not going to work because he has “carpenter’s block”? If a writer can’t write, it’s because he doesn’t really want to, he isn’t ready to get it on paper or he’s just plain lazy.

Chet Cunningham

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

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

William Shawn

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 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 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

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

Matthew Arnold

Work on a computer that is disconnected from the Internet.

Zadie Smith

Books aren’t written, they’re rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn’t quite done it.

Michael Crichton

If you start with a bang, you won’t end with a whimper.

T.S. Eliot

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

Lawrence Wray

Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade, just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.

Truman Capote Quote

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

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

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

Sidney Sheldon

No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader’s intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing.

E. B. White