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The Washington Post’s neologism contest winners.

December 2, 2019May 9, 2025 2546

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

I don’t care if a reader hates one of my stories, just as long as he finishes the book.

Roald Dahl

Keep a small can of WD-40 on your desk — away from any open flames — to remind yourself that if you don’t write daily, you will get rusty.

George Singleton

Substitute “damn” every time you’re inclined to write “very”; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

Mark Twain

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

Gloria Steinem

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

Lawrence Wray

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

What I loved most about calling myself a reporter was that it gave me an excuse to show up anyplace.

Jeanette Walls

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

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

Jodi Picoult

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

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.

John Irving

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

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

William Shawn

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

Work on a computer that is disconnected from the Internet.

Zadie Smith

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

Read a thousand books and your words will flow like a river.

Lisa See

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

You may be able to take a break from writing, but you won’t be able to take a break from being a writer.