Top 100 Best Writing Quotes
#1. The best writing has no lace on its sleeves.
Walt Whitman
#2. The best writing really does come from the deepest, most private part of you.
Michael Arndt
#3. I think my one of my strengths in standup is my ability to adlib. I do all my best writing on stage. I can sit down and write jokes, but I'd rather go on stage with a premise or an idea and let the jokes come that way. My creative juices are never flowing any better than when I'm onstage.
Henry Cho
#4. You learn to do your best writing on story rather than off story. Very often at the beginning of their careers, writers including me do their best dialogue writing off story - the best lines, the best observations - but they haven't got enough to do with the plot to stay in.
Victor Levin
#5. As a piece of literacy criticism, Freud's best writing is about Dostoyevsky. It's a kind of displaced literacy criticism.
Dennis Potter
#6. I tend to be more of a novel writer. In fact, some of my novels started out as short stories, and I just got carried away! I think some of my best writing is in the short story form, but novels come more naturally to me.
Bruce Coville
#7. To Grandma,
for being my first editor and giving me the best writing advice I've ever received: Christopher, I think you should wait until you're done with elementary school before worrying about being a failed writer.
Chris Colfer
#8. I get my best writing done when I'm supposed to be doing something else entirely. And that's why I keep my day job.
Joyce Rachelle
#9. Since I'm a fan of collections and anthologies, believe that the best writing often shines in shards and galloping stretches, I never find myself lobbying for a writer I enjoy reading regularly to hole up in Heidegger's hut for four or five years to bring forth a mountain.
James Wolcott
#11. There are times when the best writing you can do is to go for a walk or drive, a long drive is ideal.
Terry Pratchett
#12. Writing can't be too calculated. My best writing is when I set it aside, move on. It's not when I'm crafting a sentence, thinking about what word should follow another.
Nathaniel Philbrick
#13. The best writing is not about the writer, the best writing is absolutely not about the writer, it's about us, it's about the reader.
Ben Okri
#14. Write about what you care about. If you do that, you're probably going to do your best writing, reach off the page and touch the reader. How are you going to make the reader care if you don't care yourself?
Jerry Spinelli
#15. The best writing is embarrassing; that's all there is to it.
A.D. Posey
#16. The best writing advice I ever got was "Keep moving forward, don't retreat into rewrites." The worst came from a book that said "Writing fiction is like telling lies," which just seems stupid to me.
David B. Coe
#17. The best writing takes you places you don't want to go. It drags you by the hair against your will and leaves you drained, shaky, spent. Sometimes with a bad taste in your mouth.
Penfist
#18. The golden rule of writing is to write what you care about. If you care about your topic, you'll do your best writing, and then you stand the best chance of really touching a reader in some way.
Jerry Spinelli
#19. This quiet place exists as we exist, here on the earth. It just is. That is where the best writing comes from and what we must connect with in order to write well.
Natalie Goldberg
#20. I've always been drawn to the best writing that I can find. I don't care if it's in movies or theater or whatever - if you want to be in front of an audience, you have to do writing you believe in.
Ethan Hawke
#21. Cinema, which is influenced by every single part of life, is direct and reaches you immediately. And writing - the best writing is complex ideas communicated concisely. And music - if it's a good tune, make sure people can bloody hear it.
Alex Kapranos
#22. Mort moved my ending to the beginning, took out all the adjectives, cut the whole thing in half, and made it one hundred percent better.
'That's how it's done,' he said. Best writing lesson I ever had.
Anita Diamant
#23. When I was younger I used to get my best writing done at night, but now it has to be during the day. I usually finish work at half past seven, then go back to the house to open a bottle of wine, have dinner, and then read or watch television.
Antony Beevor
#24. Television is what we're all very attracted to because that's where the best writing and the best characters are.
Ioan Gruffudd
#25. I like to be surprised. The best writing is when it defies me, when it starts going a different way than I had planned.
Wally Lamb
#26. If you are willing to take the trip through 'Analogue,' you'll be rewarded with some of the best writing in gaming today and a look into the future of what kind of meaningful stories video games are capable of telling.
Rob Manuel
#27. Everything I've written has been personal and touched on things that I needed to deal with in my personal life. So I just feel that writing is great therapy, and the best writing comes from truth, and so I mine my life constantly for that.
Gina Prince-Bythewood
#29. 'Police Story' had some of the best writing on television, and one reason for that is because most of the scripts were based on real cases.
Michael Mann
#30. I just personally feel like the best writing for actors exists in cable television.
Donal Logue
#31. My best writing has to do with an internal process that I'm working out unconsciously and put into my characters.
Lyle Kessler
#32. The best writing comes out when you find yourself broken. Your heart is ripped open and all the feelings spill out into a beautiful mess on paper.
Shannen Wrass
#33. I don't write books because I have answers. I write books because I have questions. What we are is the questions that we ask, not the answers that we provide. It's all about the process of self-examination. I think that's what the best writing always contains.
John Edgar Wideman
#34. You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or, rather, you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love.
Ernest Hemingway,
#35. You may be wonderful with words, but your best writing comprises of the words that had been said to you by somebody else and had engraved on your memory forever...
Gaurav Sharma
#36. Sometimes I think that my best writing comes from exposing my fears and vulnerabilities and hoping that nobody notices it's about me.
Victoria Laurie
#37. I'm of the school 'Write what you know.' You can educate yourself, but the best writing usually comes from the heart.
Terrence McNally
#38. The best writing reflects the author's ideas and communicates them clearly to the reader.
Steve Dunham
#39. Write what you care about. If you do that, you stand the best chance of doing your best writing.
Jerry Spinelli
#40. Some of the best writing I've done, whether I'm shooting a story or thinking of a script, I write it in my head as I'm running. Running literally jogs my brain.
Natalie Morales
#41. Of course newspaper sportswriting is mostly terrible - and of course it is usually the best writing in the paper.
Donald Hall
#44. Somewhere In Time is the story of a love which transcends time , What Dreams May Come is the story of a love which transcends death ... I feel that they represent the best writing I have done in the novel form.
Richard Matheson
#45. The word is only a representation of the meaning; even at its best, writing almost always falls short of full meaning. Given that, why in God's name would you want to make things words by choosing a word which is only cousin to the one you really wanted to use?
Stephen King
#47. The best advice on writing I've ever received was from William Zinsser: 'Be grateful for every word you can cut.'
Christopher Buckley
#48. I like to write about people who are real and likeable. I like to write about people who tell their stories in that close and intimate voice we use with best friends. I love the closeness and honesty and vulnerability that come from characters who can talk that way.
Katherine Center
#49. Only when one is connected to one's inner core is one connected to others. And, for me, the core, the inner spring, can best be re-found through solitude.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
#50. So if you are writing a story where love is the meaning, where love is the highest and best of all, where love is the point, then you have to allow each person a choice.
John Eldredge
#51. I have chosen to parody the writing styles of Carlos Castaneda, James Redfield, Richard Bach, Lynn Andrews, and several other best-selling new age authors.
Frederick Lenz
#53. Read widely, not in order to copy someone else's style, but to learn to appreciate and recognize good writing and to see how the best writers have achieved their result. Poor writing is, unfortunately, infectious and should be avoided.
P.D. James
#54. When you teach, it's sometimes necessary to consciously not write for a month or two - and then pick a time in the future to sink back in. It makes you less frustrated and more in control. I do best when I give myself breaks and come back hungry.
Tom Barbash
#55. Good writing is difficult no matter what the reader's age-and children deserve the best.
Aaron Shepard
#56. We still and always want waking. We should amass half dressed in long lines like tribesmen and shake gourds at each other, to wake up; instead we watch television and miss the show.
Annie Dillard
#57. I love writing - it's the best. But I really hate collaboration.
Norm MacDonald
#58. At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it.
Annie Dillard
#59. The research. It is always the best part of writing. And, of course, it is the great excuse to travel.
Michael Scott
#60. Writing, for me, is the best occupation I can think of, and there is nothing in the world I would rather do.
Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
#61. The best of fiction, as we know, of course, doesn't tell the truth; it tales the truth.
Criss Jami
#62. If you write in the paper 'Lee stinks,' that's not going to affect me. I'll just laugh. And if you write 'Derrek Lee is the best player in the league,' that won't affect me either. I'll laugh.
Derrek Lee
#63. The best novels capture the times in which the writer lives, which accounts for the current, if contrasting taste for lost utopias and dystopian nightmares peopled by vampires and wolves.
Chloe Thurlow
#64. He would stab his best friend for the sake of writing an epigraph on his tombstone.
Oscar Wilde
#65. Some of my affectionate envious friends say, "You write too much." Maybe, I answer. But as long as the best of your little is worse than the worst of my much, I will keep on doing so.
Juan Ramon Jimenez
#66. "Best in the world," "lowest price in existence, " etc are at best claiming the expected. But superlative of that sort are usually damaging. They suggestion looseness of expression, a tendency to exaggerate, a careless truth. They lead readers to discount all the statements that you make
Claude C. Hopkins
#67. The goal is always just to write the best song that you can write. I mean, the process for writing a song is the process for writing a song. It's not something I look at it as something I need to do something different.
Chris Stapleton
#68. Science fiction at its best should be crazy and dangerous, not sane and safe.
Paul Di Filippo
#69. You know, I've always wrote my best stuff when it takes me hardly any time at all. Actually I wrote ... this is actually a really funny story ... 'Ghost Of Vincent Price', I've been wanting to write a song about Vincent Price coz he's one of my favorite characters of all time.
Wednesday 13
#71. Nothing teaches great writing like the very best books do. Yet, good teachers often help students cross that bridge, and I have to say that I had a few extraordinary English teachers in high school whom I still credit for their guidance.
Julia Glass
#73. For me, writing post-apocalyptic novels isn't so much about exploding helicopters and fifty-megaton doomsday bombs as it is about the pleasure of dealing with the best of everything that makes us human: cleverness, grit, loyalty, and self-sacrifice.
Jeff Carlson
#74. The best reason for putting anything down on paper is that one may then change it.
Bernard DeVoto
#75. The best thing about being a writer is that 'work' is always something you love, plus usually accompanied by tea, coffee and cakes of some sort.
Jamie L. Harding
#76. Then Snowball (for it was Snowball who was best at writing) took a brush between the two knuckles of his trotter, painted out MANOR FARM from the top bar of the gate and in its place painted ANIMAL FARM. This was to be the name of the farm from now onwards.
George Orwell
#77. Search your own life for the story only you can tell. The best thing about writing from life is that you can be sure of using original material. And no research is needed beyond the time you spend looking deep inside your own heart.
Elizabeth Held Forsyth
#78. I've never been high. Writing is my drug of choice. You don't ever have to come down from that kind of high, I tell ya. And, best part is, it's free.
Christy Hall
#79. For those whose ganglia were formed pre-TV, the mimetic deployment of pop-culture icons seems at best an annoying tic and at worst a dangerous vapidity that compromises fiction's seriousness by dating it out of the Platonic Always, where it ought to reside.
Jonathan Lethem
#80. Being a good author is more important than being a best-selling one.
Tarang Sinha
#81. Sometimes, I make 50 songs and pick out the best 10. I've been in the studio all day, all night, making the beat, writing the raps. You never know what's gonna be a hit.
Juicy J
#82. The best advice I can give to any aspiring author is to write every single day. Work at the craft of writing. Take it seriously.
Andrea Davis Pinkney
#83. I've always just wanted to earn my living by writing. The best thing is to go into my study in the morning and put words together.
Robert Harris
#84. I don't like to make a distinction between the writer and the painter , finally , because I do both things anyway . Everybody's dreaming and trying to put down their dreams in the way that their hand knows best . I feel as much a unity , as much comradeship , with painters as I do writers .
Clive Barker
#85. The good thing about being undiscovered is that every time you begin a new writing project it feels like this work will be the best one you have done, this one will be better than the last, a higher standard of writing, and that's the way it should be.
Robert Black
#86. Ask yourself, what makes my book so different? So interesting? Don't write to be a best seller. Write for and from your heart, not your wallet. Write something you want to be remembered by.
Leon Nacson
#87. People do support themselves as artists and writers, so there's no need to be all doom and gloom about it. You just have to push forward. You have to follow your vision and hope for the best. You have to write for love.
Cheryl Strayed
#88. Writing studio movies is the best job in the world ... it's awesome.
Thomas Lennon
#89. In recent years, I've been writing because I'm fortunate enough to work in the world of food television, to travel and taste and learn about cooking from the best chefs in the business.
Ted Allen
#90. I really wasn't too interested in writing "Father Knows Best" and "Ozzie And Harriet." I thought they were pleasant enough, but it wasn't really what I wanted to do.
Garry Marshall
#91. It is harrowing for me to try to teach 20-year-old students, who earnestly want to improve their writing. The best I can think to tell them is: Quit smoking, and observe posted speed limits. This will improve your odds of getting old enough to be wise
Barbara Kingsolver
#92. When a writer has done the best that he can do, he should then withdraw from the book-writing business and take up an honest trade like shoe repair, cattle stealing, or screwworm management.
Edward Abbey
#93. I tried to stick with what I knew best, which is writing rock n' roll songs and melodies. I am as passionate as I was when I was 20.
Gary Cherone
#94. Writing is not just my Hobby . Pen is mouthpiece of my feelings,I have no another one But paper is my best friend. and My Best Friend always Listen so patiently whatever,whenever i speak
Mohammed Zaki Ansari
#95. Yesterday is gone, and tomorrow is beyond our reach. The best time to write is now, in the present.
M. Kirin
#96. All the best songs are, I think, the easiest write because they just come out.
Benji Madden
#97. I think the book you always like best is the one you're about to write.
Margaret Atwood
#98. I just want to touch something deep in the heart of humanity. I don't know if that's in movies, producing films, or writing a book, but I'm concerned about our spiritual well-being as a human race. I want to impact people in a way that makes us all reach for our best.
Nicole Ari Parker
#99. Your best authorial self is always one about to ruin the story.
Chuck Wendig
#100. Of the small number of things which I have liked and done well, drinking is by far the thing I have done best. Although I have read a lot, I have drunk more. I have written much less than most people who write; but I have drunk more than the majority of the people who drink.
Guy Debord
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