Top 100 Quotes About Good Writing
#1. Writing is not about making a buck, not about publishers and agents. Writing is not about feeling good. Writing is about pain, suffering, hard work, risk, and fear.
Sue Grafton
#2. The devil had not only acquired a monopoly of the good music and the good fun, but has of late acquired a controlling interest in the good writing.
Ambrose Bierce
#3. Just as a good rain clears the air, a good writing day clears the psyche.
Julia Cameron
#4. Don't say you were a bit confused and sort of tired and a little depressed and somewhat annoyed. Be tired. Be confused. Be depressed. Be annoyed. Don't hedge your prose with little timidities. Good writing is lean and confident.
William Zinsser
#5. Most good writing is clear, vigorous, honest, alive, sensuous, appropriate, unsentimental, rhythmic, without pretension, fresh, metaphorical, evocative in sound, economical, authoritative, surprising, memorable, and light.
Ken Macrorie
#6. I suppose with any good writing and interesting characters, you can have that awfully overused word: a journey.
Alan Rickman
#7. There are many rules of good writing, but the best way to find them is to be a good reader.
Stephen E. Ambrose
#8. In good writing, the contemplative and the exciting happen at the same time.
Dave Morris
#9. All good writing is built one good line at a time. You build a novel the same way you do a pyramid. One word, one stone at a time, underneath a full moon while the fingers bleed.
Kate Braverman
#10. So far as good writing goes, the use of the exclamation mark is a sign of failure. It is the literary equivalent of a man holding up a card reading LAUGHTER to a studio audience.
Miles Kington
#11. Perhaps that is nearly the perfection of good writing which is original, but whose truth alone prevents the reader from suspecting that it is so; and which effects that for knowledge which the lens effects for the sunbeam, when it condenses its brightness in order to increase its force.
Charles Caleb Colton
#12. Good writing is good writing no matter what genre you're writing in, and I believe that there are only a handful of fundamental craft tools that are essential for any genre-including nonfiction.
Georgia Heard
#13. Author' is just a fancy word for Schizophrenic people with good writing skills and cash.
Testy McTesterson
#14. My preference is for good writing. It doesn't matter if it's for film or TV. Whatever. It starts with the writing. Even though I've had problems with writers, it doesn't matter how great of an actor you are. If the writing is bad, you're going to struggle.
James Nesbitt
#15. There's not a conspiracy to prevent really good writing from being found You have to have the humility to fail over and over and over.
Ray McKinnon
#16. Good writers hate bad writing but hating bad writing doesn't make you good. Writing badly does.
Dan Harmon
#17. Good writing is where precision meets passion.
Nancy Rue
#19. Good writing is true writing. If a man is making a story up it will be true in proportion to the amount of knowledge of life that he has and how conscientious he is; so that when he makes something up it is as it would truly be.
Ernest Hemingway,
#20. Good sense is both the first principal and the parent source of good writing.
Horace
#21. Rewrite and revise. Do not be afraid to seize what you have and cut it to ribbons ... Good writing means good revising.
William Strunk Jr.
#22. Write about what you know and care deeply about. When one puts one's self on paper - that is what is called good writing.
Joel Chandler Harris
#23. I have a very healthy appetite for good writing and good characters. Having weak writing is my biggest fear.
Michael K. Williams
#25. Most of my work consisted of crossing out. Crossing out was the secret of all good writing.
Mark Haddon
#26. Good writing is often about letting go of fear and affectation.
Stephen King
#27. Agents and publishers only want one thing - good writing.
Jasper Fforde
#28. There is no royal path to good writing; and such paths as exist do not lead through neat critical gardens, various as they are, but through the jungles of self, the world, and of craft.
Jessamyn West
#29. Writing stopped being fun when I discovered the difference between good writing and bad and, even more terrifying, the difference between it and true art. And after that, the whip came down.
Truman Capote
#31. Good writing must stay open to the questions and not fall prey to the pull of a polemic, otherwise, words simply become predictable, sentimental, and stale.
Terry Tempest Williams
#32. 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
#33. Screenwriting is always about what people say or do, whereas good writing is about a thought process or an abstract image or an internal monologue, none of which works on screen.
David Nicholls
#35. It goes without saying that a good Catholic novel should be good craftsmanship, good writing skills. The creative person must always be engaged in the long labor of perfecting the tools of his art. Yet the work itself need not be explicitly evangelical in its themes and plots.
Michael O'Brien
#36. Good writing is remembering detail. Most people want to forget. Don't forget things that were painful or embarrassing or silly. Turn them into a story that tells the truth.
Paula Danziger
#37. The most important thing is to read as much as you can, like I did. It will give you an understanding of what makes good writing and it will enlarge your vocabulary.
J.K. Rowling
#38. For me, it's always about what's on the page. I have tremendous respect for writing. When you recognize good writing, and you're lucky enough to get it, like with 'Lost,' that's what I follow.
Nestor Carbonell
#39. Good writing takes advantage of a reader's expectations of where to go next. It accompanies the reader on a journey, or arranges the material in a logical sequence (general to specific, big to small, early to late), or tells a story with a narrative arc.
Steven Pinker
#40. By the time I am nearing the end of a story, the first part will have been reread and altered and corrected at least one hundred and fifty times. I am suspicious of both facility and speed. Good writing is essentially rewriting. I am positive of this.
Roald Dahl
#41. All I want is a modest place in Mr X's Good Reading, Miss Y's Good Writing, and that new edition of One Thousand Best Bits of Recent Prose.
James Agate
#42. If we marvel at the artist who has written a great book, we must marvel more at those people whose lives are works of art and who don't even know it, who wouldn't believe it if they were told. However hard work good writing may be, it is easier than good living.
Katherine Paterson
#43. All good writing is like swimming underwater and holding your breath.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#44. Good writing is formed partly through plan and partly through accident.
Ken Macrorie
#45. My only close-to-game-plan is to follow good writing. If the writing is in TV or if it's in theater or in film, that's it. It doesn't really matter what the medium is.
Adam Driver
#46. Avoid theatrical flourishes - the phrases that sound so damned good that they stand up and beg to be recognized as "good writing," and therefore must be struck from the text.
Donald Spoto
#47. Read. Read. Read. Read many genres. Read good writing. Read bad writing and figure out the difference. Learn the craft of writing.
Carol Berg
#48. There is more good writing and good acting in any ten minutes of Twister than in, say, all of Citizen Kane.
Orson Scott Card
#49. If we don't understand bad writing, we can't understand good writing. Bad writing is characterized by obfuscation, showboating, narcissism, lack of a moral core, and style over substance. Good writing is exactly the opposite. Bad writing draws attention to the writer himself.
Anis Shivani
#50. Good writing - good stories - are the imagination's firing pin, and the purpose of the imagination, I believe, is to offer us solace and shelter from situations and life-passages which would otherwise prove unendurable.
Stephen King
#51. I've hung out in the writer's room a few times, but the fact is we've got such a good writing staff, I don't want to get my peanut butter fingerprints on anything.
Patton Oswalt
#52. I think all good writing is a struggle. To write as well as you feel you can has to be a struggle, almost by definition, because you could always improve.
Jane Asher
#53. Like good reading skills, good writing skills require immersion and imaginative engagement.
Sara Sheridan
#54. I just hope that readers and publishers continue to appreciate good writing and good storytelling in all their various forms. And I hope that people continue to read books, even though we have so many other options for entertainment.
Karen Thompson Walker
#55. I'm more interested in the writing than in the content per se (good writing can be about wallpaper and I'll devour it).
Katy Lederer
#56. I don't think I will ever write about politics or foreign policy. I feel like there is so much good writing in those areas that I have little to add. I also like to steer clear of writing about people whom I do not personally like.
Malcolm Gladwell
#57. A young writer is easily tempted by the allusive and ethereal and ironic and reflective, but the declarative is at the bottom of most good writing.
Garrison Keillor
#58. Good writing happens when human beings follow particular steps to take control of their sentences-to make their words do what they want them to do.
Ralph Fletcher
#59. Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.
Anne Lamott
#60. If the communication is perfect, the words have life, and that is all there is to good writing, putting down on the paper words which dance and weep and make love and fight and kiss and perform miracles.
Gertrude Stein
#61. All good writing is persuasive writing; persuading the reader to buy what you're selling, to side with you, to believe the tales you tell.
Ramsey Isler
#62. Good storytelling appeals to me - good writing.
Sanaa Lathan
#63. The problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat
William Faulkner
#64. Good writing works from a simple premise: your experience is not yours alone, but in some sense a metaphor for everyone's.
Dorianne Laux
#65. I think that good writing is based on good reading. Maybe it's not about writing today, maybe it's about reading today. Maybe it's about finding the sort of book you would never read.
Saul Williams
#66. Love is the main generator of all good writing ... Love, passion, compassion, are all welded together.
Carson McCullers
#67. There's such good writing now on television and I don't see a lot of great writing on films sadly.
Scott Speedman
#68. Good writing is more about graft and craft than inspiration and aspiration.
Johnny Rich
#69. Then there were his education and his reading, the books he bought and borrowed, his knowledge of things that could not be eaten or worn or cohabited with, his interest in poetry and his respect for good writing.
John Steinbeck
#70. Good writing is made up of characters who are bigger than their circumstances.
Michael Knight
#71. I wish you good writing and good luck. Even if you've already done the good writing, you'll still need the good luck. It's a shark-filled lagoon out there. Cross your fingers and watch your back.
Margaret Atwood
#72. Write for yourself, not for a perceived audience. If you do, you'll mostly fall flat on your face, because it's impossible to judge what people want. And you have to read. That's how you learn what is good writing and what is bad. Then the main thing is application. It's hard work.
Wilbur Smith
#73. Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters.
Neil Gaiman
#74. Good writing should help us see the world in new ways, it should crack open our generosity towards each other. That's what I hope my work does anyway. I want someone to read it and know that they aren't alone in the universe. I want my words to act as connective tissue.
Patrick Hicks
#75. Good writing is clear thinking made visible.
Bill Wheeler
#76. Through an arbitrary problem, I had arrived at a tenet of good writing: brevity wins.
Michael Winter
#77. All the elements of good writing depend on the writer's skill in choosing one word instead of another.
Francine Prose
#78. You can have good writing, but a great actor will make it feel and sound like great writing. You can have great writing, and mediocre actors will make it feel mediocre. Without the actors, you have nothing.
Denis Leary
#79. The studios don't seem to foster good writing. They're not so interested in that, but they're more interested in what worked most recently. They're definitely very serious about making money, and that's not a wrong thing, but you don't have to make money the same way all the time.
Bill Murray
#80. I think what makes good writing is intimacy - putting the reader inside the character's head. Many books are bad because they're merely guidebooks for sightseers.
Raymond Bolton
#81. Good writing is good writing, whatever form it takes and whatever we call it.
William Zinsser
#82. I don't think you get to good writing unless you expose yourself and your feelings. Deep songs don't come from the surface; they come from the deep down. The poetry and the songs that you are suppose to write, I believe are in your heart.
Judy Collins
#83. If the project has good writing and is something I get excited about, then I'll do the role. And if it's for TV, I'll ask myself, 'Is it a show that I'd watch?' If it's a play or movie, I'll want to know if there's a good director attached.
Gbenga Akinnagbe
#84. Good writing does not come from verbiage but from words.
Jeff Lindsay
#85. There is no such thing as good writing, only good rewriting.
Robert Graves
#86. Good writing is like music. It has its distinctive rhythm, its pace, flow, cadence. It can be hummed. The great stylists seem to have an inner music...
Leonard Ray Teel
#87. I think that's one of the maybe under-discussed aspects of process - the difference between a good writing day and a bad one is the quality of the split-second decisions you made.
George Saunders
#88. Beauty and truth may be attributes of good writing, but if the writer deliberately aims at truth, he is likely to find that what he has hit is the didactic.
Northrop Frye
#89. As an actor you get categorized by other people, but it's not like I arrange myself into comedy mode or serious mode. If it's good writing you just have to play it true - if it's funny, it's funny. But obviously you don't want it to be amusing if you're playing Hedda Gabler!
Sophie Thompson
#90. There's a sureness to good writing even when what's being written about doesn't make all that much sense. It's the sureness of the so-called seat of an accomplished horseback rider or a sailor coming about in a strong wind. The words have both muscle and grace, familiarity and surprise.
Anne Bernays
#92. Good writing can be defined as having something to say and saying it well. When one has nothing to say, one should remain silent. Silence is always beautiful at such times.
Edward Abbey
#93. It takes a lot of bad writing to get to a little good writing.
Truman Capote
#94. If a man means his writing seriously, he must mean to write well. But how can he write well until he learns to see what he has written badly. His progress toward good writing and his recognition of bad writing are bound to unfold at something like the same rate.
John Ciardi
#95. I love a mask. It's why I've got a thing about good writing. When you're acting, you're going into someone else's work. You're behind his words; it's not you.
Felicity Kendal
#96. I always tell my writing students that every good piece of writing begins with both a mystery and a love story. And that every single sentence must be a poem. And that economy is the key to all good writing. And that every character has to have a secret.
Silas House
#97. Ready writing makes not good writing, but good writing brings on ready writing.
Ben Jonson
#98. Good writing is a mirror of the mind where readers can see themselves again and again.
Debasish Mridha
#100. All serious and good writing anticipates precisely this kind of reading-ruminative and leisurely, a dalliance with words in contrast to wolfing down information.
Eugene H. Peterson
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