A Good Writer Quotes

#1. To be a good writer, you not only have to write a great deal but you have to care. You do not have to have a complicated moral philosophy. But a writer always tries, I think, to be a part of a solution, to understand a little about life and to pass this on.

Anne Lamott

#2. A good writer does not write as people write, but as he writes.

Baron De Montesquieu

#3. I'm not a good writer. It takes me a long time to get there. I write and then rewrite and revise and do it over and over until I'm satisfied.

M.J. Rose

#4. A bench in the street can be a good writer because all kind of material comes onto it like a heavy rain!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#5. I am not a writer, but I have been told I write good emails.

Isabel Gillies

#6. To be a good writer you must be a good reader".

Abdulazeez Henry Musa

#7. When I give myself over to a good novel, I surrender to the truths fashioned from one writer's heart, mind and soul. I do not waste a nanosecond wondering whether what I'm reading 'really happened.'

Julia Glass

#8. I love nonfiction the most. It's hard to find a good nonfiction story, and that's why I'm not as prolific, I guess, as a lot of people. They're hard to find. I love the nonfiction writer Ben Macintyre. I think he's terrific at the form of telling a story in a cinematic way.

Robert Kurson

#9. And the good writer chooses his words for their 'meaning', but that meaning is not a a set, cut-off thing like the move of knight or pawn on a chess-board. It comes up with roots, with associations, with how and where the word is familiarly used, or where it has been used brilliantly or memorably.

Ezra Pound

#10. To be a good poet, you must care more about the writing, than the writer.

Lucille Clifton

#11. Absolutely breathtaking, nail-biting, and edge-of-your-seat. Michael Koryta is a master at maintaining suspense and a hell of a good writer. THOSE WHO WISH ME DEAD is one of the best chase-and-escape novels you'll read this year-or any other year. The pace never lets up.

Nelson DeMille

#12. A good short-story writer has an instinct for sketching in just enough background to ground the specific story.

Lynn Abbey

#13. I want to become a very good writer.

Kellie Martin

#14. The things that make you a functional citizen in society - manners, discretion, cordiality - don't necessarily make you a good writer. Writing needs raw truth, wants your suffering and darkness on the table, revels in a cutting mind that takes no prisoners ...

Natalie Goldberg

#15. That's a really good question - what is it like living with a writer? I guess it depends on the writer. You know what? They live in a fantasy world a lot of the time. My husband lives in a fantasy world.

Rene Russo

#16. I cannot stand Tolstoy, and reading him was the most boring literary duty I ever had to perform, his philosophy and his sense of life are not merely mistaken, but evil, and yet, from a purely literary viewpoint, on his own terms, I have to evaluate him as a good writer.

Ayn Rand

#17. Sylvester has a great popular sense, as good as any writer I've ever worked with. He knows what audiences want to see, and what they don't want to see.

Ted Kotcheff

#18. Mark Twain was so good with crowds that he became, in competition with singers and dancers and actors and acrobats, one of the most popular performers of his time. It is so unusual, and so psychologically unlikely, too, for a great writer to be a great performer, too ...

Kurt Vonnegut

#19. I learned that you have to respect how much time and work a writer has put into their book. I always give the writer I'm publishing a good deal of control in shaping the book and figuring out how it looks, but I'll make suggestions on how to make it stronger.

Kevin Sampsell

#20. You cannot be a good writer of serious fiction if you are not depressed.

Kurt Vonnegut

#21. Grub Street turns out good things almost as often as Parnassus. For if a writer is hard up enough, if he's far down enough (down where I have been and am rising from, I am really saying), he can't afford self-doubt and he can't let other people's opinions, even a father's, keep him from writing.

Wallace Stegner

#22. Personally, I see little distinction between an artistic mentality and criminality. You couldn't possibly create a compelling story without some wickedness or some fascination with the disgusting. Being good is a hindrance to a writer.

Russell Smith

#23. Good or bad, words have an impact on each of us. As a writer, I can only hope that the effects my words have on others are more often good than bad.

Jessica Lave

#24. Maybe you could be a great writer - maybe even good enough to write a book or articles in a newspaper - but you might not know it until you write that English paper - that English class paper that's assigned to you.

Barack Obama

#25. It's not often you find someone who is a good friend and good writer, Charlotte was both.

E.

#26. Insofar as I'm good at directing, it's because I've become a writer.

David Hare

#27. Don't hedge your prose with little timidities. Good writing is lean and confident ... Every little qualifier whittles away some fraction of the reader's trust. Readers want a writer who believes in himself and in what he is saying. Don't diminish that belief. Don't be kind of bold. Be bold.

William Zinsser

#28. Deciding to write a novel about something - as opposed to finding you are writing a novel around something - sounds to me like a good evocation of writer's block.

Martin Amis

#29. There is no motivation higher than being a good writer.

Tom Wolfe

#30. I wasn't encouraged to write just stand there and sing and I never thought I was a writer. I always figured if I couldn't write something as good as "He Stopped Loving Her Today," then what's the point?

Shelby Lynne

#31. Primarily, I am a prose writer with axes to grind, and the theatre is a good place to do the grinding in. I prefer comedy to 'serious' drama because I believe one can get the ax sharper on the comedic stone.

Gore Vidal

#32. Most people do a good deal of whatever they do motivated by love. For me, few stories are truly complete without it.

Sara Sheridan

#33. There is a natural disposition with us to judge an author's personal character by the character of his works. We find it difficult to understand the common antithesis of a good writer and a bad man.

Edwin Percy Whipple

#34. I didn't become a good writer until I learned how to rewrite. And I don't just mean fixing spelling and adding a comma. I rewrite each of my books five or six times, and each time I change huge portions of the story.

Louis Sachar

#35. I was a better writer when I was teaching. I was constantly going over the basics and constantly reminding myself, as I reminded my students, what made a good story, a good poem.

Gil Scott-Heron

#36. Maybe Shooter was a writer. He fulfilled both of the main requirements: he told a tale you wanted to hear to the end, even if you had a pretty good idea what the end was going to be, and he was so full of shit he squeaked.

Stephen King

#37. A writer's life is so hazardous that anything he does is bad for him. Anything that happens to him is bad: failure's bad, success is bad; impoverishment is bad, money is very, very bad. Nothing good can happen ... Except the act of writing.

E.L. Doctorow

#38. It's a completely powerful and serious book, as good as anything in prose or poetry written by a 'beat' writer, and one of the most alive books written by any American for years. I don't see how it could be considered immoral.

Robert Lowell

#39. A good writer should draw the reader in by starting in the middle of the story with a hook, then go back and fill in what happened before the hook. Once you have the reader hooked, you can write whatever you want as you slowly reel them in.

Roland Smith

#40. A good book laces invisible fingers into the shape of a winter armchair or a hammock in the sun. I'm not talking about comfort, necessarily, but support. A good writer might take you to strange and difficult places, but you're in the hands of someone you trust.

Brenda Walker

#41. I've always felt, as a writer, that radicals are fascinating because they're relations, they have a place in the American family. They're the relatives everyone wishes would go away. They're the embarrassments to decorum and good taste.

E.L. Doctorow

#42. Somehow, some way, incredibly enough, good writing ultimately gets recognized. If you're a really good writer and deserve that honored position, then by God, you'll write, and you'll be read.

Rod Serling

#43. No good writing flows from a polluted well - you can write about monsters, but you can't be one ...

John Geddes

#44. Two easy steps to be a good writer:
1. Don't write what everyone is writing.
2. Write what everyone is trying to write.

Himanshu Chhabra

#45. To be a good writer ... read a lot and write every day.

Neil Gaiman

#46. I always advise children who ask me for tips on being a writer to read as much as they possibly can. Jane Austen gave a young friend the same advice, so I'm in good company there.

J.K. Rowling

#47. You can't be both a writer and a politician, at least not a good writer. A writer must always tell the truth as he sees it. And the politician must never give the game away.

Gore Vidal

#48. I have never pretended to be a great writer. I am totally immodest about being a great reporter and a good news writer. I write fast and I write accurately, nearly as accurately as anybody can be, and that's my skill.

Walter Cronkite

#49. As a writer of philosophy, it's good to ask oneself, 'Will I still believe this a week from now, or months, or even years?

Criss Jami

#50. A good writer is one you can read without breaking a sweat.

Patricia T. O'Conner

#51. I got a fortune cookie that said, "To remember is to understand." I have never forgotten it. A good judge remembers what it was like to be a lawyer. A good editor remembers being a writer. A good parent remembers what it was like to be a child.

Anna Quindlen

#52. Any writer is inevitably going to work with his own anxieties and desires. If the book is any good it has got to have in it the fire of a personal unconscious mind.

Iris Murdoch

#53. I'm just trying to tell a nice story. Whether you're a writer or a producer, all you want to do is tell a good yarn.

Irwin Winkler

#54. And I think a good writer's gonna make it interesting. From the first paragraph it will all be interesting. Just work at it and work at it and work at it.

Kurt Loder

#55. The same tools that make any writer good, plus a cheerful willingness to suspend belief.

Fred Saberhagen

#56. If you're a singer you lose your voice. A baseball player loses his arm. A writer gets more knowledge, and if he's good, the older he gets, the better he writes.

Mickey Spillane

#57. A person might see that I've blurbed a certain book and decide they want nothing to do with it! Like, 'If that reprobate Toews likes it, forget it!' So, it's a crapshoot. But it feels good to be able to praise a book that I love or that has been written by a new writer.

Miriam Toews

#58. I would like it to be said that I was a good writer of detective and thriller stories.

Agatha Christie

#59. while it is impossible to make a competent writer out of a bad writer, and while it is equally impossible to make a great writer out of a good one, it is possible, with lots of hard work, dedication, and timely help, to make a good writer out of a merely competent one. I

Stephen King

#60. You can't be a good writer in the States anymore because to be a good one you have to have a country where you can be poor and still eat, and still make your living standard secondary to your writing. Thoreau himself couldn't do that in the States today.

Nelson Algren

#61. I'm very happy with the way I write. I think I do it good. But I've never really considered myself a writer.

Quentin Tarantino

#62. Want to be a writer? take a good book a good pen and a notepad to bed with you every night of your life.

Ken Scott

#63. Most people can start a short story or a novel. If you're a writer, you can finish them. Finish enough of them, and you may be good enough to be publishable.

Neil Gaiman

#64. I'm not a very good writer. But I'm a HELLUVA re-writer.

Laini Giles

#65. Writing is not magic. It's a craft, a process, a set of steps. As with any process, things sometimes break down. Even in a good story, the writer runs into problems. So the act of writing always includes problem solving.

Roy Peter Clark

#66. Oh, it's a beautiful day, it's an elegant, graceful day, and I'm sailing down the Strip in glamorous Las Vegas, on my motor scooter, in company with a certified illegal prostitute who loves poetry and remembers it. Sonofabitch, I'm a real writer! I used to worry about it, but no more. Life is good.

Peter S. Beagle

#67. I'm blessed in my good friends, and some of them happen to be writers, though that's almost never what our friendships are about. And every writer I've ever read, living or dead, has in one way or another helped and inspired. I have a feeling it's important not to mix the two up.

Ali Smith

#68. There's nothing I need or want to know from the writers I admire that isn't in their books. It's better to read a good writer than meet one.

John Irving

#69. As a writer, I'm convinced that encouraging children to write fiction, to hook into that marvelous machine called the imagination, has to be good for everyone.

Rodman Philbrick

#70. I'm a writer and writers either have good memories or nothing at all.

Maya Angelou

#71. If you are stymied as a writer, if it's just not coming together, then take the pressure off and don't feel that you need to write 1,000 words today; just write one really good sentence.

Chris Bohjalian

#72. A writer can be compared to a well. There are as many kinds of wells as there are writers. The important thing is to have good water in the well, and it is better to take a regular amount out than to pump the well dry and wait for it to refill.

Ernest Hemingway,

#73. To be a writer you should read, write and talk to people, hear their knowledge, hear their problems. Be a good listener. The rest will come.

Jean Craighead George

#74. I do believe that it takes a strong dose of alienation to make a good artist or writer in the modern world. You can't be too well-adjusted and still have anything interesting to say.

Howard Sounes

#75. A certain slightly cruel disregard for the feelings of living people is simply part of the package. I think a writer, if he's any good, is not an entirely benign entity in the world.

Michael Cunningham

#76. I like performing because it's direct contact with live people. I write a good deal of the time but that's introspective creation rather than interaction.

Oliver

#77. A great writer has all 4 - but you can still be a good writer with only 1 and 2.

Susan Sontag

#78. A lazy writer (it's easy to hate things) or a versatile one? I don't believe in an afterlife. We live and then we stop living. We exist and then we stop existing. That means I only get one chance to do a good job. I want to do a good job.

Lindy West

#79. There are three things you need to be a good writer: you need to read a lot, you need to write a lot, and you need a lot of feedback.

Clay Shirky

#80. A good fiction writer can write any character or any story that she wants to write. The importance, IMO, is a burning desire to tell that person's story.

Suzanne Brockmann

#81. Music is just a really fun hobby that I do, because I'm actually really good about writing songs and producing. People don't realize this, but I am an excellent writer for artists.

Tila Tequila

#82. A writer needs to ingest love to be passionate. Passion is a metabolite of love, and good writing is an active metabolite of passion.

Roman Payne

#83. The greatest compliment a writer can be given is that a story and character hold a reader spellbound. I'm caught up in the story writing and I miss a good deal of sleep thinking about it and working out the plot points.

Iris Johansen

#84. The gift of a writer as good as Dickens is not to explain everything; that way, the reader has, in terms of their imagination, somewhere to go.

Ronald Frame

#85. I do increasingly feel like becoming a better writer is about trying to find new ways to solve the same problems over and over again, and I'll maybe be a good writer after I have solved the same problem ten million times.

Mike Young

#86. Good. Coffee is good for you. It's the caffeine in it. Caffeine, we are here. Caffeine puts a man on her horse and a woman in his grave.

Ernest Hemingway,

#87. The good thing about being a writer is that you don't need anything except for a laptop. You can really do your own work and if you're not manically compelled to write all the time before you do it professionally, it's probably not a business for you anyway.

Thomas Lennon

#88. I think the press does, too; it's just the few crazies and paparazzi that give them a bad name. Real writers write good things. My daughter's a writer, and she's a quality writer.

Debbie Reynolds

#89. It's true that we, writers, write (create) books, but eventually, a good book gives birth to a good, established writer.

Tarang Sinha

#90. I say that being a smart writer doesn't make you a good writer. There's obviously a difference between talent and intelligence. And it may be that at some point intelligence begins to impinge on talent, or talent on intelligence.

Gustavo Perez Firmat

#91. If you are a good editor, your relationship with every writer is different.

Robert Gottlieb

#92. As a writer and director, I want to know what is behind the good manners and soft voice. Who is inside the silhouette?

Federico Fellini

#93. And I'm a slow writer: five, six hundred words is a good day. That's the reason it took me 20 years to write those million and a half words of the Civil War.

Shelby Foote

#94. I think people just want to hear good songs and I just want to keep getting better as a writer so that I can deliver good songs.

Corey Smith

#95. I don't read other writers because I'm writing all the time. It's too disturbing to read a writer with a good style when you're in the middle of putting your work together.

Norman Mailer

#96. I'm not as good a writer as I'd like to be; therefore, I like to use images to tell stories.

Tibor Kalman

#97. Writing is physical work. It's sweaty work. You just can't will yourself to become a good writer. You really have to work at it.

Wil Haygood

#98. A good writer is one that can see the goodness in others and helps them to be better.

Debasish Mridha

#99. Part of being a fiction writer is being able to imagine how someone else is thinking and feeling. I think I've always been good at that.

Andrew Clements

#100. Learning to write is not a linear process. There is no logical A-to-B-to-C way to become a good writer. One neat truth about writing cannot answer it all. There are many truths. To do writing practice means to deal ultimately with your whole life.

Natalie Goldberg