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The Washington Post’s neologism contest winners.

December 2, 2019May 9, 2025 2095

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.

Robert A. Heinlein

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

G.K. Chesterton

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

Raymond Chandler

I’m writing a book. I’ve got the page numbers done.

Stephen Wright

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

Roald Dahl

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.

Robert Benchley

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

Gloria Steinem

Every writer with half a brain knows to surround himself or herself with editors who are smarter, far more articulate and infinitely better looking.

Chris Claremont

A writer is a world trapped in a person.

Victor Hugo

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.

J.K. Rowling

The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.

Thomas Jefferson

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

Michael Burke

If you wait for inspiration to write, you’re not a writer. You’re a waiter.

Dan Poynter

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

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

Steven Bochco

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

Socially, a journalist fits in somewhere between a whore and a bartender. But spiritually he stands beside Galileo. He knows the world is round.

Sherman Reilly Duffy

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

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

William Shawn

Just don’t be boring!