Pauline at Barnes & Noble reportedly said: THAT’S NOT HOW IT WORKS!

Can you use a good laugh? David Thorne is an Australian writer, humorist and satirist. I think he's a really funny guy. He's got a website that I discovered today. I clicked on a page that details a 2015 email exchange with a book-signing coordinator with Barnes & Noble by the name of Pauline. Apparently David set up a book-signing date at a B&N store without notifying B&N. It came to the attention of Pauline. And it rapidly went downhill from there. Really funny stuff. Here's the link. Have fun! That's not how it works.

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

E. B. White

Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don’t see any.

Orson Scott Card

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

Romulus Linney

Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret.

Matthew Arnold

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

Oscar Wilde

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

Jeanette Walls

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

Michael Burke

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

Raymond Chandler

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

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

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

A writer without interest or sympathy for the foibles of his fellow man is not conceivable as a writer.

Joseph Conrad

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

T.S. Eliot

I have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has just put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae or banana split.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr

Easy reading is damn hard writing.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

The road to ignorance is paved with good editors.

George Bernard Shaw

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.

Chet Cunningham

Books aren’t written, they’re rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn’t quite done it.

Michael Crichton

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

Edward Albee

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

Sidney Sheldon