Quotes About Good Writers

#1. You have very short travel blogs, and I think there's a split among travel writers: the service-oriented writers will say, 'Well, the reader wants to read about his trip, not yours.' Whereas I say, the reader just wants to read a good story and to maybe learn something.

Tim Cahill

#2. Neophyte writers tend to believe that there is something magical about ideas and that if they can just get a hold of a good one, then their futures are ensured.

Lynn Abbey

#3. I think one of the things the writers' festival does that is very good is that it brings writers from around the world and around the country and locally and puts them all in the one spot together, and that's what a lot of the world's great writers' festivals do.

Nick Earls

#4. All writers start out mimicking other writers. I've never relinquished that. I have a good ear for speech and writing patterns.

Jesse Kellerman

#5. Generally speaking, writers who have been at it for a while, and who are any good at it, suffer from an acute kind of self-knowledge. The unexamined life is not a risk for them.

Mark Slouka

#6. [I]t is the writer's duty to write fiction which promotes virtue, the good, the beautiful, and above all, the true ... It is the writer's duty to hate injustice, to defy the powerful, and to speak for the voiceless. To be ... the severest critics of our own societies.

Edward Abbey

#7. 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

#8. It's not unusual for writers to look backward. Because that's your pool of resources. If you were to write something now, I bet there's a pretty good chance you'd call on your teenage years, your experiences then, stuff you learned then.

Paul McCartney

#9. I always think that good writers should be growing up on the brink of death - it really lets them see mortality very clearly.

Gary Shteyngart

#10. We writers don't really think about whether what we write is good or not. It's too much to worry about. We just put the words down, trying to get them right, operating by some inner sense of pitch and proportion, and from time to time, we stick the stuff in an envelope and ship it to an editor.

Garrison Keillor

#11. These young writers nowadays. They spend more time networking to promote their writing careers than writing their books. Maybe that's why there are so few good ones anymore.

Lauren Carr

#12. Simon Gathercole argues that both Paul and the Gospel writers considered the good news to have three basic elements: the identity of Jesus as Son of God and Messiah, the death of Jesus for sin and justification, and the establishment of the reign of God and the new creation.12

Timothy Keller

#13. American writers want to be not good but great; and so are neither.

Gore Vidal

#14. Some people desire to be famous. I probably wouldn't be very good at it.

Sarah Warman

#15. Writers - we're much more comfortable at parties standing in the corner watching everybody else having a good time than we are mingling.

Neil Gaiman

#16. I don't think that writers have any responsibility to be good neighbors to the audience.

Jez Butterworth

#17. There are so many stories to be told, by so many good writers.

Sean Bean

#18. Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones. - It is not fair. - He has fame and profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of other people's mouths. - I do not like him, and do not mean to like Waverley if I can help it - but fear I must.

Jane Austen

#19. When you think back in history about producers and artists or writers who've had good synergy, a lot of times they date, or they're married, or there's a friendship and a kinship.

Solange Knowles

#20. More and more I don't have any philosophy about writing, except that it is something we can do if God is good to us. Of course we are the ones who have to do the paperwork.

M.V. Carey

#21. Good horror offers a sense of an upended, lawless world and that's appealing to anyone who grew up feeling like an outsider.

Christopher Rice

#22. Good writers are monotonous, like good composers. They keep trying to perfect the one problem they were born to understand.

Alberto Moravia

#23. God is the creator of all good plot twists!

Shannon L. Alder

#24. 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

#25. I'd never be where I am if more successful writers hadn't taken an interest in me and done me a good turn - be it chiming in with constructive criticism or giving me sound advice about my career plan.

Sara Sheridan

#26. Bad writers don't practice, Stella. It's the good ones who care enough to try, who worry about getting the words just right. You are probably better than you think -Papa

Sharon M. Draper

#27. I write because I always want good to win over evil

Anamika Mishra

#28. I regard posterity as vulgar as success. I don't trust posterity. I don't think what's good is necessarily recognized in the long run. Too many good writers have disappeared.

Peter Biskind

#29. This branch of mathematics [Probability] is the only one, I believe, in which good writers frequently get results which are entirely erroneous.

Charles Sanders Peirce

#30. I ended up at fifty, over-the-hill, thinking I had no future. Finally, I realized that I had allowed myself to write less than I could ... As writers true to ourselves, it will always be hard, and if we're good, we'll always be in trouble. Let's be sure we deserve it.

Waldo Salt

#31. good writers know how to shift around their alphbet

Smrithi Eswar

#32. Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for.

Alice Walker

#33. Since many things we see were once an idea, let us create good ideas today because they will be the realities of tomorrow! When you create an idea, do not forget that you shape the future! Idea is your God side! With ideas, you can change the universe, but only with very great ideas!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#34. To present a whole world that doesn't exist and make it seem real, we have to more or less pretend we're polymaths. That's just the act of all good writing.

William Gibson

#35. You do an awful lot of bad writing in order to do any good writing. Incredibly bad. I think it would be very interesting to make a collection of some of the worst writing by good writers.

William S. Burroughs

#36. Us writers all like each other and want to write stories with each other; we're having a good time.

Charles Soule

#37. When you translate the American writers who are best with dialogue into German - someone like Elmore Leonard, or Tom Wolfe, who's also quite good with dialogue. It's very hard to translate them well.

Daniel Kehlmann

#38. A good reader has the power to move the world.

Aman Jassal

#39. And the writers are good in that it's easy to memorize, and good writing has an innate rhythm to it. And I've always felt that it's easier to get in your head than writing that has very kind of mind busting moments.

Glenn Close

#40. World War II is the greatest drama in human history, the biggest war ever and a true battle of good and evil. I imagine writers will continue to get stories from it, and readers will continue to love them, for many more years.

Ken Follett

#41. Good food warms the heart and feeds the soul.

A.D. Posey

#42. 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

#43. Good writers are of necessity rare.

George Henry Lewes

#44. I think that, for physicians who want to become writers, they have the material, the smarts, they have the logic, they know the stories; it's just a matter of being able to connect with their emotional sides - that's the key to writing good fiction.

Tess Gerritsen

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

Patricia T. O'Conner

#46. Reviews are for readers, not writers. If I get a bad one, I shrug it off. If I get a good one, I don't believe it

William Meikle

#47. Good writers look it up.
Great writers experience it.

Ebony Easter

#48. Good writers borrow from other writers. Great writers steal from them outright.

Aaron Sorkin

#49. I used to be opposed to collaboration, and that's probably why the music in the past wasn't as good. Writing with other people, especially the great writers that I've had the privilege to write with, it activates something in your mind that you wouldn't use alone.

Charlie Puth

#50. Not that the writers weren't good. I believe in those books and those writers very much. It's just that in the climate it's really hard to keep the lights on and the doors open when you're selling poetry and literature that appeals to a fringe audience.

Henry Rollins

#51. I read about writers' lives with the fascination of one slowing down to get a good look at an automobile accident.

Kaye Gibbons

#52. One of the problems we have as writers is we don't take ourselves seriously while writing; being serious is setting aside a time and saying if it comes, good; if it doesn't come, good, I'll just sit here.

Maya Angelou

#53. 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

#54. Do we have good writers, producers and actors in the U.K.? Yes we do.

Eric Fellner

#55. 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

#56. I know of three ways to recognize another writer: Writers are shamelessly nosy. Writers tell good stories, even about dumb old, daily things. On most writers, the earmarks of thrift, if not outright povery, are evident.

Joyce Thompson

#57. 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

#58. Writers would submit scripts to me, and if I liked one well enough to submit to magazine editors, I had the know-how whether the story was good or bad.

Julius Schwartz

#59. Good writers are visible just behind their words.

William Zinsser

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

Maya Angelou

#61. All great writers begin with a good leather binding and a respectable title.

James M. Barrie

#62. All good writers express the state of their souls, even (as occurs in some cases of very good writers) if it is a state of damnation.

G.K. Chesterton

#63. 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,

#64. When you consider all the writers who never even had a machine. Who would have given an eyeball for a good typewriter. Any typewriter. All the ones who wrote on a matchbook covers. Paper bags. Toilet paper. Who had their writing destroyed by their jailers. Who persisted beyond all odds.

Sam Shepard

#65. There aren't enough good roles for strong women. I wish we had more female writers. Most of the female characters you see in films today are the 'poor heartbroken girl.'

Gal Gadot

#66. Writers are cannibals. They really are. They are predators, and if you are friends with them, and if you say anything funny at dinner, or if anything good happens to you, you are in big trouble.

Nora Ephron

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

Susan Sontag

#68. Copywriters, journalists, mainstream authors, ghostwriters, bloggers and advertising creatives have as much right to think of themselves as good writers as academics, poets, or literary novelists.

Sara Sheridan

#69. I think that writing should be honest and simple, and it should say something about what it means to be a person. When God is good to us, we write in such a way that the act of reading becomes a pleasure to those who buy our books.

M.V. Carey

#70. That sun is lookin' good ... and hot! Get it? Hilarious! My joke writers are awesome.

Tom Bergeron

#71. Nobody tells young writers it's okay if you're not very good, you'll get better. So I just thought I'm not very good, so I should try to do every other thing besides writing. That's how I ended up being a hitchhiker, a world traveler, and a mathematician.

Bonnie Jo Campbell

#72. New writers seem to pop up from everywhere. And quite a few of them are really good and original.

Toni Jerrman

#73. 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

#74. Well, you know when people are no good at anything else they become writers.

W. Somerset Maugham

#75. The only thing a closed book is good for is a table that wobbles. Be an open book.

A.D. Posey

#76. In ten episodes, we were able to do our writers' room first. We did that all summer and wrote for 15 weeks and got everything in really good shape.

Lennon Parham

#77. Probably writers should forget what it was like to write the last novel, and the one before that, and the one before that, or we should all be plumbers. It must be good to be a plumber. Everyone is happy to see you, and no one reviews your work.

Susan Fromberg Schaeffer

#78. Most great writers suffer and have no idea how good they are. Most bad writers are very confident. Be willing to be a child and be the Lilliputian in the world of Gulliver, the bat girl in Yankee Stadium. That's a more fruitful way to be.

Mary Karr

#79. 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

#80. I'm a really good team player. That's what it takes to work in the theater. That's what it takes to work in a band with musicians and writers.

David Cassidy

#81. Good writers can't die. Their words live on forever.

Kensington Gore

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

Tarang Sinha

#83. That's the trouble with good writers. Only the bad ones make you want to do the human thing and look away.

Nick Hornby

#84. He possessed the logic of all good intentions and a knowledge of all the tricks of his trade, and yet he never succeeded at anything, because he believed too much in the impossible. Surprising? Why so? He was forever in the act of conceiving it!

Charles Baudelaire

#85. One of the problems I have with many writers is their stories are all somewhat similar. They might be very good, but they're always on the same turf. I don't have those limitations.

T.C. Boyle

#86. 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

#87. Writers are always envious, mean-minded, filled with rage and envyat other's good fortune. There is nothing like the failure of a close friend to cheer us up.

Peter Carey

#88. It's not Jane Austen, it's not Henry James. But this writer, or writers, well, they're pretty damn good too.

Richard Curtis

#89. 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

#90. Writers: read books. Read good books. Read bad books. Learn what does and does not work.

Kira Hawke

#91. Writers are different," said Waldegrave. "I've never met one who was any good who wasn't screwy.

Robert Galbraith

#92. Now, practically even better news than that of short assignments is the idea of shitty first drafts. All good writers write them.

Anne Lamott

#93. I never wanted to be a literary writer. I wanted to be an entertainer. All I wanted was to give what a lot of writers had given me: a good time on a bad day.

M.C. Beaton

#94. A good preview makes you can't wait to see the whole movie.

A.D. Posey

#95. A good writer sells out everybody he knows, sooner or later.

Alice McDermott

#96. A good writer of history is a guy who is suspicious.

Jim Bishop

#97. I think writers like to see how people bring their words to life, and it's always surprising. Always, no matter what, whether it's good or bad, it's always surprising because a whole human being is coming to that piece of writing.

Lisa Edelstein

#98. The only way to defend language is to attack it ... ' - Proust. Every good writer in history had, in order to ensure adequate expression, broken a range of rules laid down by previous writers.

Alain De Botton

#99. Most comic scriptwriters are very bad. The artists are good, but the writers are so bad.

Harry Harrison

#100. Yet, it ought to be obvious that good music generally occupies a higher plane that mere politics. Great writers can express moods through melody and capture experiences we share most powerfully - love, lust, longing; joy, rage, fear; triumph, yearning and confusion.

Tony Snow