Top 100 A Good Writer Quotes
#2. A good writer reveals beauty in the mundane and truth in tragedy. Words are a tool; a currency of the mind, and the best writers weave passages into our hearts that our bones remember.
Maria Reeves
#3. Any hack can safely rail away at foreign powers beyond the sea; but a good writer is a critic of the society he lives in.
Edward Abbey
#4. Thinking is a great joy for a good writer and a great torture for the bad one!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#5. A good writer does not receive anywhere near the number of poison-pen letters that is commonly assumed. Among a hundred jackassesthere are not ten who will admit to being jackasses, and at most one who will put it in writing.
Karl Kraus
#7. A writer is like a gypsy. He owes no allegiance to any government. If he is a good writer he will never like any government he lives under. His hand should be against it and its hand will always be against him.
Ernest Hemingway,
#8. [Imagination] is the one thing beside honesty that a good writer must have. The more he learns from experience the more he can imagine. If he gets so he can imagine truly enough people will think that the things he relates all really happened and that he is just reporting.
Ernest Hemingway,
#9. A good writer refuses to be socialized. He insists on his own version of things, his own consciousness. And by doing so he draws the reader's eye from its usual groove into a new way of seeing things.
Bill Barich
#11. A good writer is not, per se, a good book critic. No more so than a good drunk is automatically a good bartender.
Jim Bishop
#12. I'm not a good photographer, not a good writer. I'm a pretty regular person whose insecurity is so pervasive that it makes me always feel vulnerable.
Sally Mann
#13. A good writer must be like the birds of a dark forest; you can't see them, but you can hear their mysterious and wise voices!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#14. Being a good writer meant he could make a living and do as he chose. Being a great one would bring responsibilities and expectations he had no desire to face.
Nora Roberts
#15. When I was younger, the main struggle was to be a 'good writer.' Now I more or less take my writing abilities for granted, although this doesn't mean I always write well.
Jonathan Franzen
#16. I believe writers need to be chameleons, or like Meryl Streep, who can play all sorts of characters. A good writer should be able to cross gender lines and people of all social classes. So for me, writing from a male point of view would be a great challenge, that I would look forward to taking on.
Marisha Pessl
#17. I want to be a good man, a good writer."
"Be one or the other, Ernest, not both.
Naomi Wood
#18. Any one who wishes to become a good writer should endeavour, before he allows himself to be tempted by the more showy qualities, to be direct, simple, brief, vigorous, and lucid.
Henry Watson Fowler
#19. Nowadays I'm not even sure if newspapers take into account whether a person is a good writer.
Bob Schieffer
#20. A good writer can watch a cat pad across the street and know what it is to be pounced upon by a Bengal tiger.
John Le Carre
#21. Bucky Katt: A bad writer is just a good writer with writer's block.
Darby Conley
#22. Hemingway was a jerk. I mean he was really a great jerk. He was a good writer, and he did all sorts of things that I would never have the courage to do, but I don't think I'd enjoy being in the same room with him. He's not my kind of person.
Joe Haldeman
#23. He who is afraid to use an "I" in his writing will never make a good writer.
Lin Yutang
#24. A good creative-writing teacher can save a good writer a lot of time.
Richard Hugo
#25. When a good writer is having fun, the audience is almost always having fun too.
Stephen King
#26. The starting point for becoming a good writer is to be a good reader.
Steven Pinker
#27. I think you can be taught to write. You can't be taught to be a good writer. For that, you have to bring something to it, yourself, something that can't be given to you.
James Salter
#28. The struggle to write with profundity of emotion and at the same time to live like a millionaire so exhausted F. Scott Fitzgerald that he was at last brought down to the point where he could no longer be both a good writer and a decent person.
Nelson Algren
#29. No theoretician, no writer on art, however interesting he or she might be, could be as interesting as Picasso. A good writer on art may give you an insight to Picasso, but, after all, Picasso was there first.
David Hockney
#30. I'll never be a good writer, and no chance of being a good actor.
Matthew Vaughn
#31. A good writer knew when not to write. Anybody could type. Not that I was a good typist; also I couldn't spell and I didn't know grammar. But I knew when not to write. It was like fucking. You had to rest the godhead now and then.
Charles Bukowski
#32. What I always wanted to get seen as was as a good actor, when it was the acting I was doing. When I'm writing, I want to try to be seen as a good writer. Not as somebody with a particular idea to sell, or something like that.
Alan Alda
#33. Disney was not a good animator, he didn't draw well at all, but he was always a great idea man, and a good writer.
Chuck Jones
#34. I think my job is to try and be as honest as I can with what is in my mind and how I feel - I think that's what you're supposed to do, if you're a good writer. So I try to do that. I know I do that. I do do that.
Paul Thomas Anderson
#35. Listen to your critics. Because if you go through life denying what they say, you'll never be a good writer. The only way to improve, is to listen to those who tell you what you need to work on
Adam Snowflake
#36. A good writer is always a people watcher.
Judy Blume
#37. Wilbur never forgot Charlotte. Although he loved her children and grandchildren dearly, none of the new spiders ever quite took her place in his heart. She was in a class by herself. It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.
E.B. White
#38. My father told us all the time: to become a good writer takes writing. Because the more you do it, the better you get at it. It's like bull-riding. You can't do it once, you know. You've got to practice it and practice it.
Thomas Steinbeck
#39. It's impossible to be a good writer if you haven't lived badly. A past life of drinking heavily, fighting and whoring all help to ease those words onto the page.
Ken Scott
#40. The only difference between a good writer who publishes a book and a good writer who doesn't is that the writer who publishes actually finished her book.
Hanya Yanagihara
#41. I'm an author who likes assignments, who needs suggestions, ideas I would never have thought of otherwise - then something happens inside my alien head. Other people have to decide whether or not I'm a good writer, but I do have the ability to write in different styles.
David Lagercrantz
#42. A good writer cannot avoid having social consciousness. I don't mean this about small pieces of writing, but about a big book. If it's a big book, there has to be more than one undertow.
Marguerite Young
#43. Honestly," he says, "I judge writers on how they write queries. If you're a good writer, you're a good writer." And if not, then not.
Keith Gessen
#44. You have to be an extremely good reader to appreciate what a good writer is. There are some people who are completely insensitive to good writing.
Robert Caro
#45. I don't care whether they're men or women, that's bullshit. A good writer can get into any gender, can get into any mouth. When I write I may be a Brando creep, or a girl laying on the floor, or a Japanese tourist, or a slob like Richard Speck. You have to be a chameleon when you're writing.
Patti Smith
#46. I became a good writer when I saw the age of forty coming at me
Pat Mora
#48. A good writer should be able to write comedic work that made you laugh, and scary stuff that made you scared, and fantasy or science fiction that imbued you with a sense of wonder, and mainstream journalism that gave you clear and concise information in a way that you wanted it.
Neil Gaiman
#49. Philip Roth is a good writer, but I wouldn't want to shake hands with him.
Jacqueline Susann
#50. We never end up with the book we began writing. Characters twist it and turn it until they get the life that is perfect for them. A good writer won't waste their time arguing with the characters they create ... It is almost always a waste of time and people tend to stare when you do!
C.K. Webb
#51. There is no one like you on this planet. Not everyone may have the gift of being a good writer, but each one of us has a story to tell.
K.J. Kilton
#52. A good reader is nearly as rare as a good writer. People bring their prejudices, whether friendly or adverse. They are lamp and spectacles, lighting and magnifying the page.
Robert Aris Willmott
#53. How do I know I'm a good writer? Every single time I arrive or leave my hometown, I'm the only passenger always being checked for drugs.
Daniel Marques
#54. I retained no records and I am not a good writer anyhow. So the best approach is for historians like you to extract the facts directly from people like me.
Shunroku Hata
#55. I'd like to have money. And I'd like to be a good writer. These two can come together, and I hope they will, but if that's too adorable, I'd rather have money.
Dorothy Parker
#56. Appealing to the five senses is the feature that will always set writing apart from the visual media. A good writer will tell us what the world smells like, what the textures are, what the sounds are, what the light looks like, what the weather is.
Janet Fitch
#58. I'm an actor. I'm just a creative person. I figure if I wasn't a good writer, I'd take to renovating homes ... not renovating ... decorating homes.
Andrea Gabriel
#59. I think I'm a good writer. I think I have my own voice, which is unique to everyone - everyone has their own voice; if they would just write from a vulnerable embarrassing place, it's going to be universal, and it's going to be entertaining. Because everyone is the same, and everyone is unique.
Nicole Holofcener
#60. If you want to be a good writer, make sure you read. I'm amazed by how many people don't bother to do that.
Mitch Albom
#62. A good journalist, as you know, is a great listener. And so's a good writer. And I got to listen to people for almost 20 years. That serves me well, I hope, when I try to understand how a character might be feeling, or how they might react.
Louise Penny
#63. A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#64. I believe no one qualification is so likely to make a good writer, as the power of rejecting his own thoughts.
Alexander Pope
#65. A good writer wants from us - or has no right to ask more than - intelligence, good faith and time.
John Jeremiah Sullivan
#66. A writer is a performer as well. A writer isn't the literary department. That gets tried on but nothing's a script unless a good writer goes away and does his thing alone.
William Monahan
#67. If you need drugs to be a good writer, you are not a good writer.
Rod Serling
#68. To be a good editor or a good writer, I think you really need to be a great reader first.
Karen Thompson Walker
#69. A good writer can set a thriller anywhere and make it convincing: the trick is to evoke the setting in such a way that it highlights the crime or unsettles the reader.
Garry Disher
#70. There is no such thing as a good writer and a bad liar.
Amy Bloom
#71. Whatever the word "great" means, Dickens was what it means. Even the fastidious and unhappy who cannot read his books without a continuous critical exasperation, would use the word of him without stopping to think. They feel that Dickens is a great writer even if he is not a good writer.
G.K. Chesterton
#72. The most despised sector of Hollywood are the writers. A good writer is quickly promoted to a 'concept man' - and then a producer - because he's too valuable to simply be a writer.
John Rhys-Davies
#73. If you want to be a good writer, be the best writer in the world. That's what I've done.
Ray Bradbury
#74. A good writer gets better only by learning to cut, to remove the ornamental, the descriptive, the narrative, and especially the deeply felt and meaningful. What remains? The story remains.
David Mamet
#75. I'm such a coward that unless I get a good writer, I don't want to make a picture.
Howard Hawks
#76. I feel like I'm a secondary artist, a kind of a conduit for the writer, and if it's a good writer, then I have a great road map.
Mamie Gummer
#77. I would like it to be said that I was a good writer of detective and thriller stories.
Agatha Christie
#78. Out of the thousand writers huffing and puffing through movieland, there are scarcely fifty men and women of wit and talent ... Yet, in a curious way, there is not much difference between the product of a good writer and a bad one. They both have to toe the same mark.
Ben Hecht
#79. It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.
E.B. White
#80. I felt like I was never going to be a great writer. I felt like I was going to be a good writer at best. I wanted to be great at something.
Gene Weingarten
#81. You cannot teach creativity - how to become a good writer. But you can help a young writer discover within himself what kind of writer he would like to be. Mario Vargas Llosa
Mario Vargas-Llosa
#82. There's a really nice moment in the life of a piece of writing where the writer starts to get a feeling of it outgrowing him - or he starts to see it having a life of its own that doesn't have anything to do with his ego or his desire to 'be a good writer.'
George Saunders
#84. A good writer of history is a guy who is suspicious.
Jim Bishop
#85. A good writer sells out everybody he knows, sooner or later.
Alice McDermott
#86. 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
#87. A good writer is one that can see the goodness in others and helps them to be better.
Debasish Mridha
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. A great writer has all 4 - but you can still be a good writer with only 1 and 2.
Susan Sontag
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. You cannot be a good writer of serious fiction if you are not depressed.
Kurt Vonnegut
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. There is no motivation higher than being a good writer.
Tom Wolfe
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