Rick Killian

Lessons from a ghost . . .

Getting it wrong is part of
getting it right.

—Charles Handy

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I used to write because I wanted to become rich, and when I didn’t become rich, I wrote because I wanted to become famous, and when I didn’t become famous, I wrote because I liked to write. And that’s when I began to make a little money and gain a little notice.

—Thomas Sullivan

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Respect your reader. The niftiest turn of phrase, the most elegant flight of rhetorical fancy, isn’t worth beans next to a clear thought clearly expressed.

—Jeff Goldfield

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. . .  novelists . . . have, on average, about the same IQs as the cosmetic consultants at Bloomingdales’s department store. our power is patience. We have discovered that writing allows even a stupid person to seem halfway intelligent, if only that person will write the same thought over and over again, improving it just a little bit each time. It is a lot like inflating a blimp with a bicycle pump. Anyone can do it. All it takes is time.

—Kurt Vonnegut, Palm Sunday, 128

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Good writing occurs because a writer passionately desires to say something. . . .
Students do not need more abstract advice about how to write.
They need somehow to have their feelings kindled.

—X.J. Kennedy

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I once stayed in a hotel, next door to a well-known writer.
He never talked about writing.
Each night I heard his typewriter,
hour after hour,
past midnight.
Everyone else in the hotel was asleep.
The sound of that machine reminds me, still,
that what writers do is write.

—Richard Bach

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If there is a secret about writing,
I haven’t found it yet.
All I know is to sit down,
clear your mind,
hang in.

—Mary McGrory

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