Top 100 On Writing Well Quotes
#1. I don't read a lot of inspirational books for life. But for writing, I think the two best books are The War of Art and William Zinsser's On Writing Well. I read a lot of classics;
Donald Miller
#2. Well, I always say that the two things I was most disastrous at in my life, being a teenager and being a wife, were the two things I really wound up cashing in on when I was writing fluffy magazine pieces.
Ann Patchett
#3. Now everybody who knows anything at all knows perfectly well that even a business letter does not deserve the paper on which it is written unless it contains at least one significant phrase that is worth waking up in the night to remember and think about.
Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
#4. You need that pride in yourself, as well as a sense, when you are sitting on Page 297 of a book, that the book is going to be read, that somebody is going to care. You can't ever be sure about that, but you need the sense that it's important, that it's not typing; it's writing.
Roger Kahn
#5. I thought one way to try to hold on to the power was to write the script myself. That way, I could say to filmmakers, "I'm not asking you to hire me unseen. I'm just saying, 'Here's my script. Can we work together?'" So that worked out well.
Emma Donoghue
#6. Having reached the halfway mark in the alphabet, my prime focus is on writing each new book as well as I can.
Sue Grafton
#7. I always felt better co-writing something - always co-writing. Because if I was the lead of it and it failed, then it failed on my own accord. I would say, "Well, I liked it or I screwed up. I take the hit on this one."
Bill Hader
#8. A writer is obviously at his most natural and relaxed when he writes in the first person. Writing is a personal transaction between two people, conducted on paper, and the transaction will go well to the extent that it retains its humanity.
William Zinsser
#9. I always tell my students that you can do anything you can get away with, that implausibility is a problem of style. If people bring issues of plausibility to bear on what you're doing, you're not doing it well enough.
Marilynne Robinson
#10. Theological writing is usually done in essays or books, but I hope to show that if we concentrate on sentences, we may well learn something we might otherwise miss.
Stanley Hauerwas
#11. My worries travel about my head on their well-worn path, and it is a relief to put them on paper.
Mary Ann Shaffer
#12. One thing we do really well on Archer and one thing I've always tried to do in my comedy and my writing and my podcast is to never speak down to my audience.
Aisha Tyler
#13. I remember people would talk about Country Music like it was this sexist, lame thing. Well, no, because Dolly Parton is writing songs and playing her guitar and producing. She's doing it all and she's got hits on the radio.
Neko Case
#14. And suddenly she resembled not so much a bland dish of pudding as the surface of a well-known, yet never explored lake, and he, standing on the banks, had just seen a movement underwater, an enigmatic shadow that disappeared so quickly he wasn't sure he hadn't imagined the whole thing.
Sherry Thomas
#15. I am writing to make sure that kids don't lose very important traits like curiosity that can drive social change because oftentimes I think parents emphasise more on doing well in school, which is important, but perhaps that sometimes comes at the cost of a child's natural curiosity.
Adora Svitak
#16. 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
#17. Questioning my spiritual life has always been germane to what I was writing. Always. It's because I'm not quite an atheist and it worries me. There's that little bit that holds on: 'Well, I'm almost an atheist. Give me a couple of months.'
David Bowie
#18. Your success as a writer will probably not depend on how well you write so much as in how you handle rejections.
Gilbert Morris
#19. I always loved strange stories like the Dr. Seuss stuff. 'Go, Dog. Go!' was one of my favorite stories - it still is. It's just such a bizarre yet true book. And I did well reading and writing as a kid throughout school. I think early on that's what made me realize what an advantage that is.
Jon Scieszka
#20. Writing isn't difficult. Writing well is difficult. What is most difficult is being with the interior experience that manifests as resistance to writing.
H. Raven Rose
#21. There is nothing on earth more exquisite than a bonny book, with well-placed columns of rich black writing in beautiful borders, and illuminated pictures cunningly inset. But nowadays, instead of looking at books, people read them. A book might as well be one of those orders for bacon and bran.
George Bernard Shaw
#22. I have a blog where I keep in touch with my fans. I write about things that are important to me. Sometimes on there I'll just tell a little story about the things that happen in my everyday life. People seem to enjoy them well enough.
Patrick Rothfuss
#23. Writing a book is a bit like going on location for a movie. You're absent from your life, your family, and your friends. You're psychologically gone, so you might as well be physically gone.
Michael Crichton
#24. I've always relied a lot on landscape in my books, the atmosphere of a particular place, as well as a fair amount of external action. While writing 'Chance,' it occurred to me that this is the most internal book I've ever written. So much of the action takes place in Chance's head.
Kem Nunn
#25. Mohr was one of the most talented people on the staff of Time, in print as well as in person - the two are often different.
David Halberstam
#26. We live in the best of worlds. But still, it's like we've lost something on the way to here: a sense of life. I can't know for sure, I might be the only one who's lost it. Maybe everybody else is living the now, thinking they're having it well. Anyhow, that motivated me to write the books.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#28. For the first few years I wrote jokes and performed them word for word and then wrote tags for them and did that word for word and that worked pretty well. Now, I do almost all of my writing on stage and then record and listen for any new things and then I write those down.
Gary Gulman
#29. Go on writing plays, my boy, One of these days one of these London producers will go into his office and say to his secretary, "Is there a play from Shaw this morning?" and when she says, "No," he will say, "Well, then we'll have to start on the rubbish." And that's your chance, my boy.
George Bernard Shaw
#30. I've written poetry since I was a kid. As the years went on, I got into writing stories and screenplays, but I always, always kept up with poetry as well.
Blake Jenner
#31. I had real concerns about the relationship between nature and culture and places I wanted to write about. I thought, well, maybe I should try prose. It was a real struggle to begin because, first of all, there were so many words on the page - it was terrifying. Beginning was awful.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
#32. Well, I'd like to think I am, and I'd also like to think that we're all having a lot more fun getting older than we pretend. It was interesting to me when I first started working on this book that I'd mentioned that I was writing a memoir about aging and everybody would moan and groan and carry on.
Anna Quindlen
#33. The literature of the Spanish Civil War is also important to me. Above all George Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia" as well as the writing of John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway. They worked on a film together in Spain during that war, which ended their friendship.
George Packer
#34. Like Thomas Hardy with his Casterbridge, my own fictional Pennington is based on a well-known English county town, which I embellish with buildings, parks, and houses from my imagination.
Catherine George
#35. I am bigger and stronger than ever. My Chen Taiji and health regimen has served me well all of these years, thanks to Master Ren Guang-yi. I look forward to being on stage performing, and writing more songs to connect with your hearts and spirits and the universe well into the future.
Lou Reed
#36. I love it, I hate it, it's ecstasy when I'm writing well, it's despair when I'm not. I wouldn't wish this life on anyone, nor would I, could I, ever give it up.
Jillian Medoff
#37. I see many people trying to write well about the wilderness, and essentially failing. To me there are basically two aspects of a failed outdoor story. One is the phony epiphany on the mountain top.
Tim Cahill
#38. Once, lovers on faraway shores sat by candlelight and dipped ink to parchment, writing words that could not be erased. They took an evening to compose their thoughts, maybe the next evening as well.
Mitch Albom
#39. Yeah, well I can't see a situation where I wouldn't at least re-write as a director something I was going to direct. At the moment, I wouldn't direct anything that I hadn't written. I can now say, as everybody else says, that it all depends on the script.
William Monahan
#40. If a woman writes about herself, she's a narcissist. If a man does the
same, he's describing the human condition. But people seem to evaluate
your work based on how much they relate to it, so it's like, well, who's
the narcissist?
Emily Gould
#41. If you show up to work five days in a row, nobody's going to pat you on the back - everyone does that. Well, do that with your writing. Just show up. Be there for it. When you get an idea, write it down somewhere and then be a steward of that idea.
John Darnielle
#42. My stories are my children. Some are sweet infants that I coddle and care for. Others are old enough now, they need to damn well get a job!
Christy Hall
#43. He asked, "What makes a man a writer?" "Well," I said, "it's simple. You either get it down on paper, or jump off a bridge.
Charles Bukowski
#44. What's interesting to me is how many vampire/urban fantasy authors are writing young adult series as well, often set in the same world as their adult books, but focused on a younger audience.
Carrie Vaughn
#45. I'm too impatient to wait for things to happen to me. If I should be out of work for two months I would go crazy. So as soon as I'm free, I start writing. While it is necessary for me to write, I know that if I go too long without acting on the stage I don't feel well.
Erland Josephson
#46. In the business world, I did fairly well, but wasn't happy. A bout of sciatica put me flat on my back. All I could do was read, listen to my mother's stories about the Sandovals, and daydream: a return to self. My writing career had begun.
Sandra Cisneros
#47. I can't imagine myself outside any kind of social or political involvement. Yes, I'm a writer, but I live in this world, and my writing doesn't exist on a separate level. And if people know who I am and read my books, well, good; that way, if I have something more to say, then everyone benefits.
Jose Saramago
#48. Writing that sort of [songs like "Let is Roll"]made me try to almost sort of ingrain it in my own head every time I sing it live as well. It's like therapy. It's like "Move on, Pip! Come on. You can do this! You can do this."
Ladyhawke
#49. Some writers are curiously unmusical. I don't get it. I don't get them. For me, music is essential. I always have music on when I'm doing well. Writing and music are two different mediums, but musical phrases can give you sentences that you didn't think you ever had.
Barry Hannah
#50. Writing is such a lonely work that I try to keep myself cheered up.
William Zinsser
#51. When I'm writing a score, I'm constantly looking for ways to improve on it, even when I think it's working well. I don't give up on things, and am always trying to make incremental improvements, which means I never finish writing a score early!
Geoff Zanelli
#52. I had decided to be a magician well before I decided to be a writer. I was the little boy who would get up on-stage and do magic wearing a fake mustache, which would fall off during the performance. I'm still trying to perform those tricks. Now I do it with writing.
Ray Bradbury
#53. Teaching well draws from the same well that writing draws from: the reserves of compassion and ability to listen and concentrate on another. So I have to have fine line between teaching and writing. I try not to ever think of career. I just try to go to the dream world every day.
Andre Dubus
#54. [On book promotion:] The reward for writing well appears to be not to be able to do it for a long time.
Rosellen Brown
#55. It is unclear how much longer people will write on dried and flattened wood. Trees do so much for humans and for our planet that it hardly seems fair to ask them to carry our thoughts as well. From Life from an RNA World: The Ancestor Within.
Michael Yarus
#56. Eliot admitted later on that science-fiction writers couldn't write for sour apples, but he declared that it didn't matter. He said they were poets just the same, since they were more sensitive to important changes than anybody who was writing well.
Kurt Vonnegut
#57. We can no longer allow them to write just stories and poems; we must teach them the forms of nonfiction writing as well, specifically that of writing on demand.
Troy Hicks
#58. Once upon a time, I was a workaholic clocking more than 80 hours per week. That changed after I began to write. I now work only around 35 hours per week. I do not work on weekends because these are the days that I use for research as well as for my writing.
Ashwin Sanghi
#59. They tell me that So-and-So, who does not write prefaces, is no charlatan. Well, I am. I first caught the ear of the British public on a cart in Hyde Park, to the blaring of brass bands,and this ... because ... I am a natural-born mountebank.
George Bernard Shaw
#60. I'm often dismayed by the sludge I see appearing on my screen if I approach writing as a task--the day's work--and not with some enjoyment.
William Zinsser
#61. A well-composed book is a magic carpet on which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter in any other way.
Caroline Gordon
#62. I don't think age has much to do with writing. I think it's something that can certainly improve in time, but there's no age limit on how old you need to be to write well.
Sandy Hall
#63. You want to write a book for so many reasons ... The main reason ... is because it will make you well-known and beloved and popular and successful and famous and respected. You also write ... to make money, but that motivation is not first on the list.
Helen Gurley Brown
#64. Well, Bud," he said, looking at me, "I'll be damned if you don't go to a lot of trouble to have your fun. Kidnapping, then fighting. What do you do on your holidays? Burn houses?
William Faulkner
#65. I've always felt profoundly about what's going on in the world on a daily basis. What I hadn't felt was that I was at a point in my writing career where I could write about these things in songs and do it well.
PJ Harvey
#66. I feel successful when the writing goes well. This lasts five minutes. Once, when I was number one on the bestseller list, I also felt successful. That lasted three minutes.
Jacqueline Briskin
#67. A script arrived, and on the front cover - scrawled really big, as if it were a book report - is 'Django Unchained, written by Quentin Tarantino.' And I thought, 'Well, no art department came up with this; this is Quentin's writing.'
Dennis Christopher
#68. It's not so much that I write well, I just don't write badly very often and that passes for good on television.
Andy Rooney
#69. ...being "rather unique" is no more possible than being rather pregnant.
William Zinsser
#70. As for the historical inspirations I drew on in writing The Snow Queen, I suppose I would call them more cross-cultural inspirations, though they frequently involve past societies as well as present day ones.
Joan D. Vinge
#71. How would you start to write a poem? How would you put together a series of words for its first line - how would you know which words to choose? When you read a poem, every word seemed so perfect that it had to have been predestined - well, a good poem.
Ashley Hay
#72. Never pump the well dry; always leave a bucket there.
Truman Capote
#73. If you want to be a singer, you've got to concentrate on it twenty-four hours a day. You can't be a well driller, too. You've got to concentrate on the business of entertaining and writing songs. Always think different from the next person. Don't ever do a song as you heard somebody else do it.
Otis Redding
#74. Silk Road to Ruin has all the analysis and it's structured very well. I rely on my notes more and I use direct quotes. But there's nothing like writing about it right away.
Ted Rall
#75. Well I've been writing books. So that, by its nature, is kind of a solitary occupation. And from time to time I have research help, but mostly I've done those completely on my own.
Caroline Kennedy
#76. Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realize that literature depends on doing several things well at the same time.
Julian Barnes
#77. What happens on 'Mad Men' in terms of the acting and the writing and the directing, it's superior. And yes, it has tremendous cache and buzz because it's become iconic, but it also deserves all the kudos and the awards as well, because it's a beautiful show to look at.
Kurt Sutter
#78. I have high hopes for the book and have already made a down payment on a Ferrari. Well, it's actually a small metal model of a Ferrari, kind of like a Dinky Toy, but a little bit bigger.
Paul Benedetti
#79. A change of work is a good rest for the mind if you're constantly focused on writing. I like to work with timber and be creative on that side sometimes as well.
Angus Stone
#80. I'm just focusing on 'Let's Stay Together' and slowly building my production company. I'm trying to get into writing as well.
Kyla Pratt
#81. The inspiration for my novels comes from the depths of a creative well, based on asking myself questions over and over. I try to write something different each time I sit down to write; I try to surprise the readers.
Nicholas Sparks
#82. The only way to write complex software that won't fall on its face is to hold its global complexity down - to build it out of simple pieces connected by well-defined interfaces, so that most problems are local and you can have some hope of fixing or optimizing a part without breaking the whole
Eric S. Raymond
#83. Personally, I am always more impressed by simplicity, clarity; it is the mark of a writer who knows his subject well and is secure enough not to 'lay it on' in the telling. Aim for complexity of thought, not expression.
Noah Lukeman
#84. I think I'm probably going to be one of those unnoticed Authors that get discovered well after I have passed on. I better drill into my daughter now on how I want my books to be abstracted into Television or Film before it's too late lol
Ellie Williams
#85. If I am unhappy, I can write "damn it" in my personal diary, but I can't do that on a microblog so I might as well not start one.
Fan Bingbing
#86. [On her use of quotations:] When a thing has been said so well that it could not be said better, why paraphrase it? Hence my writing, is, if not a cabinet of fossils, a kind of collection of flies in amber.
Marianne Moore
#87. What makes me want to keep reading a nonfiction text is the encounter with a surprising, well-stocked mind as it takes on the challenge of the next sentence, paragraph,
Phillip Lopate
#88. I work daily, but not always on comics. I'm doing quite a bit of writing now, and I teach as well.
Jessica Abel
#89. All I ask is that you do as well as you can, and remember that, while to write adverbs is human, to write he said or she said is divine.
Stephen King
#90. They fuck you up, your mum and dad', and if you're planning on writing that's probably a good thing. But if you are planning on writing and they haven't fucked you up, well, you've got nothing to go on, so then they've fucked you up good and proper.
Alan Bennett
#91. But on the question of who you're writing for, don't be eager to please.
William Zinsser
#93. We need to have music that contributes to the well-being of the spirit. Music that cradles people's lives and makes things a little easier. That's what I try to do, and what I want to do. You don't want to close the door on hope.
Merle Haggard
#94. Don't annoy your readers by over-explaining--by telling them something they already know or can figure out. Try not to use words like "surprisingly," "predictably" and "of course," which put a value on a fact before the reader encounters the fact. Trust your material.
William Zinsser
#95. People who work on the user interface side need to have empathy as a key characteristic. But if you are writing device drivers you don't really need to understand humans so well.
Andy Hertzfeld
#96. Don't beat yourself up, son. I'm sure there is a culture on this spinning ball of dirt where you can be pretty. If not, do rock 'n roll, or practice words. That shit's pretty as well.
R.X. Bird
#97. Well, [bluntness in songwriting]'s a lot cheaper than therapy ... There's been a lot of things going on for the past 10 years that I just never really confronted, or used metaphors to do so. This time out I wanted to make sure that everyone knows what I'm talking about and where I'm coming from.
Brent Smith
#98. I mean there are tons of reasons. Well first of all. I write my own record. I don't take other people's materials. And I have a job which is being Willa Ford on top of getting back in the studio and writing and recording.
Willa Ford
#99. I write well on the road. I have the energy, I have the motivation to write. I'm happy when I'm on the road.
Pam Houston
#100. The writer, his eye on the finish line, never gave enough thought to how to run the race.
William Zinsser
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