“Murder Your Darlings,”(On Style, chapter 12) is a quote from Arthur Quiller-Couch’s series of  published lectures (On the Art of Writing, 1916) He encouraged writer’s to, “…perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it–wholeheartedly–and delete it before sending your manuscript to press…” He failed to mention, however, that tapping the delete button would require Hershey Kiss therapy for at least a month. Source: http://grammar.about.com/od/rhetoricstyle/a/murderquiller.htm