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You’ve heard of writer’s block. But have you heard of reader’s block?

August 5, 2019May 9, 2025 698

I found this in the August 2nd, 2019, New York Times. Fun reading…if you’re not suffering from reader’s block:

Reader’s block article

A writer is a world trapped in a person.

Victor Hugo

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

Robert A. Heinlein

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

M. K. Simmons

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

There are three primal urges in human beings: Food, sex, and rewriting someone else’s play.

Romulus Linney

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

Editor: A person employed by a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed.

Elbert Hubbard

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

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

Stephen King

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

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

Tom Clancy

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

Steven Bochco

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

The road to ignorance is paved with good editors.

George Bernard Shaw

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

Jim Morrison

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

Gloria Steinem

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

Edward Albee

To me, movies and music go hand in hand. When I’m writing a script, one of the first things I do is find the music I’m going to play for the opening sequence.

Quentin Tarantino

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