Top 100 Quotes About Good Writers
#1. 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
#2. There are so many stories to be told, by so many good writers.
Sean Bean
#3. Good writers are monotonous, like good composers. They keep trying to perfect the one problem they were born to understand.
Alberto Moravia
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. good writers know how to shift around their alphbet
Smrithi Eswar
#7. 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
#9. Good writers look it up.
Great writers experience it.
Ebony Easter
#10. Good writers borrow from other writers. Great writers steal from them outright.
Aaron Sorkin
#11. Do we have good writers, producers and actors in the U.K.? Yes we do.
Eric Fellner
#13. 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
#14. 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
#16. That's the trouble with good writers. Only the bad ones make you want to do the human thing and look away.
Nick Hornby
#17. Now, practically even better news than that of short assignments is the idea of shitty first drafts. All good writers write them.
Anne Lamott
#18. When the fad changed from folk to rock, they didn't take along any good writers.
Mary Travers
#19. That has to remain the principal reason for doing it, doesn't it? I know it's possible to write for money, and many very good writers have done so. But for me, it has to remain the principal thing that I actually want to do the writing.
Jonathan Kellerman
#20. I have friends, some of whom are spectacularly good writers, who really want someone to edit them. I don't register that impulse. It's like the impulse for wanting a dog.
Fran Lebowitz
#21. Good writers will, indeed, do well to imitate the ingenious traveller ... who always proportions his stay in any place.
Henry Fielding
#22. Since Caesar, we know his historians are liars. The good writers get read. Bad history doesn't get read.
Peter Greenaway
#23. My heroes were never scientists. They were Graham Greene and Christopher Isherwood, you know, good writers.
James D. Watson
#24. But most good writers are Don Quixote at heart, and unreasonableness is often a condition of art.
Ha Jin
#25. One of the qualities essential to writing exciting stories, whether for page or screen, is an ability to abandon one's morality. We simply cannot be good writers and good people. One must be able to access one's darkest self, one's venality and pettiness and murderousness.
Russell Smith
#26. Writers, when they're good, open windows to worlds held precious and priceless by the soul. It is a sad day when they leave the earth, like having the windows shut for good. Where will the world be without good writers?
Psyche Roxas-Mendoza
#27. The good writers touch life. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her.
Ray Bradbury
#28. All good writers speak in honest voices and tell the truth.
Eudora Welty
#29. What's not realized about good novelists is that they're as competitive as good athletes. They study each other - where the other person is good and where the person is less good. Writers are like that but don't admit it.
Norman Mailer
#30. My mother is changing history. She is making her balalaika-smashing mother into a heroine. Does she want me to do the same for her? Is that what good children do for their parents? What about good writers?
Gary Shteyngart
#31. I'm not famous for my back story investigations; I'm lucky that I work with good writers and it's usually in the script.
Bill Nighy
#32. All good writers are thieves. The best get away with a heist.
Michael Stutz
#34. Anybody can direct, but there are only eleven good writers.
Mel Brooks
#35. Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear. It doesn't matter whether the good writer wants to be useful, or whether the good writer wants to be harm.
Ezra Pound
#36. In the hands of good writers, you have the opportunity to present both sides of an opinion equally and that you leave it to the audience to listen and then make up their own minds.
Mandy Patinkin
#37. Bad writers have influences. Good writers steal.
S.M. Stirling
#38. All good storytellers are of necessity good writers - even if they may be poorly edited ones. Unfortunately, not all good writers are good storytellers.
Nupur Tustin
#39. All the good writers of confessions, from Augustine onwards, are men who are still a little in love with their sins.
Anatole France
#40. On the other hand, at some level the mass of unresolved issues in Northern Ireland does influence the fact that there are so many good writers in the place.
Paul Muldoon
#41. The good stories, of course, write themselves. And somebody wants to know who are the really good writers, and how many of them there are. There aren't any. Most of the writers are likeable frauds. Some are unlikable frauds.
R.A. Lafferty
#43. Good writers show rather than tell. Stories are told in action. Life stories are no different.
Donald Miller
#44. The news business is simple but it's not easy to do well. You know the story, you have to cover it, you need pictures, you need good writers, you have to get it to the screen but it's obviously not easy to do well.
Jai Courtney
#46. Mice: But reading all the good writers might discourage you.
Y.C.: Then you ought to be discouraged.
Ernest Hemingway,
#47. All good writers are weird. Proudly weird.
Margo Rabb
#48. I was able to work out all sorts of attitudes to style and event and character, all of which affected the way I came to think about my own writing. I believe that all good writers are original.
Margaret Mahy
#49. Good writers hate bad writing but hating bad writing doesn't make you good. Writing badly does.
Dan Harmon
#50. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more 'literary' you are ... The good writers touch life often.
Ray Bradbury
#51. Style and voice are different. Style is standard conventions of writing; voice is the distinct way an individual puts words together. All good writers have a near-uniform understanding of style, but a voice all their own.
Naveed Saleh
#53. Why has the South produced so many good writers? Because we got beat.
Walker Percy
#54. Most writers write to say something about other people - and it doesn't last. Good writers write to find out about themselves - and it lasts forever.
Gloria Steinem
#55. I don't think that there are very many good writers who don't live without a sense of tension. If they haven't got one immediately available to them, then they usually manage to manufacture it in their private lives.
John Le Carre
#56. My grandfather had been a newspaper reporter, as was my uncle. They were pretty good writers and so I thought maybe somewhere down the line I would do some writing.
Gene Hackman
#57. Stop to read good writers who are witty and are fun, 'cause that's the kind of fuel on which your Train of Thought will run.
Mister Lemur
#58. I think that money is devoted to serious journalism, with analysis, interestingly presented, by good writers can still sell newspapers.
Phillip Knightley
#59. I find that with any good run on a show with good writers, they put something on paper, and you put something back on film, and that affects what they put on the paper the next time.
Dallas Roberts
#60. Fans write to us via our publisher and more than ever via the Internet, blogs and fan sites, and good writers should be actively seeking out that interaction. Gone are the days when writers are dead or hidden away in dusty attics; nowadays, you've got to get out there.
Chris Riddell
#61. She was in a class by herself. It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writers. Charlotte was both.
E.B. White
#62. Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don't see any.
Orson Scott Card
#63. There are some good songs, but not the kind of song-writing that I remember, that I like. Springsteen still does it. Paul Simon, and there are also good writers, but that doesn't dominate the charts.
Jackie DeShannon
#64. Good writers are in the business of leaving signposts saying, Tour my world, see and feel it through my eyes; I am your guide.
Larry King
#65. Usually people who do bad things make good writers.I did a lot of bad things, which is why my novels are interesting.
Jakucho Setouchi
#66. Good writers have two things in common: they prefer to be understood rather than admired; and they do not write for knowing and over-acute readers.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#67. I knew I would read all kinds of books and try to get at what it is that makes good writers good. But I made no promises that I would write books a lot of people would like to read.
Carl Sandburg
#68. Good writers define reality
Bad ones merely restate it.
Edward Albee
#69. The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.
Ray Bradbury
#70. Good writers borrow. The best writers steal.
Aaron Sorkin
#71. Good writers are often excellent at a hundred other things, but writing promises a greater latitude for the ego.
John Cheever
#72. I've always thought that a lot of really good writers go wrong by getting so into the craft and the technique and perfection. Perfection can be the enemy sometimes. Some songs don't need to be told perfectly. Life is messy and has loose ends, and sometimes I think the songs should reflect that.
Patterson Hood
#73. Indeed, I am repeatedly astonished by the number of really good writers who understand human beings so well on paper but don't know how to deal with them in real life.
Mark Haddon
#74. Good writers know that crime is an entre into telling a greater story about character. Good crime writing holds up a mirror to the readers and reflects in a darker light the world in which they live.
Karin Slaughter
#75. Stargate by far is the top of the pile when it comes to Sci-Fi. The quality is great. They have really good writers, production design, lighting, wardrobe.
Corin Nemec
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. All writers start out mimicking other writers. I've never relinquished that. I have a good ear for speech and writing patterns.
Jesse Kellerman
#80. 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
#81. [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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. American writers want to be not good but great; and so are neither.
Gore Vidal
#88. Some people desire to be famous. I probably wouldn't be very good at it.
Sarah Warman
#89. 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
#90. I don't think that writers have any responsibility to be good neighbors to the audience.
Jez Butterworth
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. I write because I always want good to win over evil
Anamika Mishra
#100. 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
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
