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The Washington Post’s neologism contest winners.

December 2, 2019May 9, 2025 2227

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.

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

Romulus Linney

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

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

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

William Goldman

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

Clarence Budington Kelland

Do not place a photograph of your favorite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide.

Roddy Doyle

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

Edward Albee

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

William Shawn

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

Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

E. L. Doctorow

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

T.S. Eliot

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

It is only natural to pattern yourself after someone. But you can’t just copy someone. If you like someone’s work, the important thing is to be exposed to everything that person has been exposed to.

Bob Dylan

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

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.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

Raymond Chandler

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

Sidney Sheldon

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.

Oscar Wilde

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.