A moment of silence, please, for a giant of a writer.

09 Jan, 2020

Buck Henry, screenwriter and actor, 1930-2020.

Buck Henry, the legendary screenwriter, has died. With Mel Brooks, he co-created Get Smart (1965-1970). He adapted the screenplay for The Graduate (1967), and wrote:

The Owl and the Pussycat
What's Up, Doc?
The Day of the Dolphin
To Die For

He hosted Saturday Night Live 10 times. He acted in more than 40 films. He played himself pitching a movie in The Player. He directed films and TV shows. Twitter has been flooded with tributes, including this one, which had me laughing for five minutes:

Rest in peace, brother. You shall be missed.

A moment of silence, please, for a giant of a writer.

January 9, 2020July 21, 2023

Buck Henry, the legendary screenwriter, has died. With Mel Brooks, he co-created Get Smart (1965-1970). He adapted the Read More...

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Bob Dylan

Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.

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

Christopher Hampton

Easy reading is damn hard writing.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

E. B. White

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

Good instincts usually tell you what to do long before your head has figured it out.

Michael Burke

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

Thomas Wolfe

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

Jodi Picoult

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

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

When writing a novel, that’s pretty much entirely what life turns into: “House burned down. Car stolen. Cat exploded. Did 1,500 easy words, so all in all it was a pretty good day.”

Neil Gaiman

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

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

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

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.

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

M. K. Simmons

Work on a computer that is disconnected from the Internet.

Zadie Smith

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