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.
Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
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.
Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.
Every writer with half a brain knows to surround himself or herself with editors who are smarter, far more articulate and infinitely better looking.
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.
The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.
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.
I write the last line, and then I write the line before that. I find myself writing backwards for a while, until I have a solid sense of how that ending sounds and feels. You have to know what your voice sounds like at the end of the story, because it tells you how to sound when you begin.
Socially, a journalist fits in somewhere between a whore and a bartender. But spiritually he stands beside Galileo. He knows the world is round.
My aim is to put down what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way I can tell it.