Quotes About Poor Writing

#1. Because of my poor writing posture, I started walking in the forest every day, and I found it a potent place to be creatively. It changed me in that it was a new way of doing my creative process, and I realised how much I liked being among tall trees.

Morris Gleitzman

#2. I don't think actors are to blame for poor writing. The culture changes first, and the theater follows it. In the case of the movies, it's the same thing.

Christopher Reeve

#3. Poor reading, like poor writing, is imposing what you already know on texts. You should go into reading to discover, not to reaffirm what you know.

Azar Nafisi

#4. 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

#5. I wasn't afraid of being poor; I rather took it for granted. I was good at getting by with very little. I couldn't imagine sacrificing my writing to anything else.

Marge Piercy

#6. I think poor poetry writing skills are excused when you're simply trying to flush out emotions.

Katie Kiesler

#7. Don't be didactic - don't write about poverty. Write about poor people. When you dramatize their lives and let life and characters be your inspiration, you will express the 'idea' dynamically and without preaching.

Robert McKee

#8. To have a specific style is to be poor in speech.

Herbert Spencer

#9. Bottom line, when someone defensively says their way of writing is their style, then that usually means they're making an excuse for poor prose.

A.J. Flowers

#10. Here's one prophecy the writer can make - you'll never be rich and you'll probably be poor.

Chloe Thurlow

#11. If all the earth were paper white / And all the sea were ink / 'Twere not enough for me to write / As my poor heart doth think.

John Lyly

#12. I write in a hurry, because the little one, who has been sleeping a long time, begins to call for me. Poor thing! when I am sad, I lament that all my affections grow on me, till they become too strong for my peace, though they all afford me snatches of exquisite enjoyment.

Mary Wollstonecraft

#13. I'm proud that I've never stopped writing about being poor.

Eileen Myles

#14. Sometimes I dream that I'm working; that's awful. When you awaken after a big, surprising dream, you feel it's very interesting. When you sit and write it down, you realize it's a very poor script. But I may find ideas while dozing.

Michel Ocelot

#15. God help me, he thought. God help all us poor wretches who could create and find we must lose our hearts for it because we cannot afford to spend our time at it. ("Mad House")

Richard Matheson

#16. I don't spend money on books. I write them myself.

Ljupka Cvetanova

#17. When I was writing pretty poor poetry, this girl with midnight black hair told me to go on.

Carl Sandburg

#18. All the pride and pleasure of the world, mirrored in the dull consciousness of a fool, are poor indeed compared with the imagination of Cervantes writing his Don Quixote in a miserable prison.

Arthur Schopenhauer

#19. Better a good journalist than a poor assassin.

Jean-Paul Sartre

#20. A poor writer is one who names rather than represents.

Italo Calvino

#21. I found nothing really wrong with this autobiography except poor choice of subject.

Clifton Fadiman

#22. I'm a poor artist. Through brute force, I brought myself up to mediocre. I've never taken a writing class, but I can write okay.

Scott Adams

#23. In poor environment, I find great inspiration. Many of the men and women whom I admire as artists, the things they write, the songs they sing, the admission is filled with inspired moments to overcome oppression.

Harry Belafonte

#24. Poor Knight! he really had two periods, the firsta dull man writing broken English, the seconda broken man writing dull English.

Vladimir Nabokov

#25. And there was that poor sucker Flaubert rolling around on his floor for three days looking for the right word.

Dorothy Parker

#26. The only people who can be excused for letting a bad book loose on the world are the poor devils who have to write for a living.

Moliere

#27. Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.

Walter Benjamin

#28. Bad writing is bad not just because the language is humdrum, but the quality of the observation is so poor.

Christopher Isherwood

#29. Women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time ... Women, then, have not had a dog's chance of writing poetry. That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one's own.

Virginia Woolf

#30. Writing for adults, you have to keep reminding them of what is going on. The poor things have given up using their brains when they read. Children you only need to tell things to once.

Diana Wynne Jones

#31. When I was seven we moved to Orpington, and in my new school, I was kept in for extra lessons to learn 'joined-up' writing instead of playing football. I still think that my poor handwriting and lack of soccer skills date from that period.

Martin Evans

#32. You start wondering if you deserved those high reviews on your books or if people just pitied you and went "Poor sod. Here's a five star review so you don't hang yourself in the garage.

Ash Gray

#33. I can write, because writing - unlike choreography, architecture, or conquering kingdoms - is a thing you can do when you're lonely and poor, and have no infrastructure, i.e., a ballet troupe or some cannons.

Caitlin Moran

#34. Writer. Another word for poor.

Buffy Andrews

#35. Boileau said that Kings, Gods and Heroes only were fit subjects for literature. The writer can only write about what he admires. Present-day kings aren't very inspiring, the gods are on a vacation and about the only heroes left are the scientists and the poor.

John Steinbeck

#36. The thing that I hate is that Nicholas Kristof style of writing where it's like, "I saw the poor, they made me so sad. What can I do about sadness? I am so brave." It's just like, shut up, man, shut up.

Molly Crabapple

#37. Writing is not for poor minds.

Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

#38. And there was no entertainment for them at night. They were too poor to own a television set. But they seemed content. Truman with his sculpting and building the recreation center. Lynne writing poems occasionally, reading them to her friends, then tearing them up.

Alice Walker

#39. I need a sound-proof room to tie up the inner critic, gag her and nail the door shut. But she keeps escapping. Poor knots and short nails.

Judy L Mohr

#40. Tell me this
if you knew you would be poor as a church mouse all your life
if you knew you'd never have a line published
would you still go on writing
would you?'
'Of course I would,' said Emily disdainfully. 'Why, I have to write
I can't help it at times
I've just got to.

L.M. Montgomery

#41. 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

#42. Writing about sex is not as personally revealing as one might think, because like anything else you write about, the words are not the deed. I have not done those words, I have done and felt private things for which words such as "sex" and "lust" are only poor apologies.

Doreen Baingana

#43. The years rolled their brutal course down the hill of time. Still poor, my clothes still smelling of the horse barn, still writing those doubtful poems where too much emotion clashed with too many words.

Paul Engle

#44. Writers are writing in every corner of the globe.
Writers are writing, moreover, in rich countries and poor countries alike.

Minae Mizumura

#45. I wonder if Eve could write letters in Paradise! But, poor Eve, she had no one to write to - no one to whom to tell what Eden was, no beloved child to whom her love traveled through any or all space. Poor Eve!

Catharine Sedgwick

#46. My plan of instruction is extremely simple and limited. They learn, on week-days, such coarse works as may fit them for servants. I allow of no writing for the poor. My object is not to make fanatics, but to train up the lower classes in habits of industry and piety.

Hannah More

#47. A story that has nothing but action and plot is a pretty poor affair; and some great stories have neither.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#48. My background is really being a writer's actor - that seems to be the way I work best, bringing out the best of writing. There's a whole range of acting skills, and some people can be astonishing with very poor material. That's not me; my skill is essentially unlocking the writing.

Lindsay Duncan

#49. And there he would lie all day long on the lawn brooding presumably over his poetry, till he reminded one of a cat watching birds, when he had found the word, and her husband said, "Poor old Augustus--he's a true poet," which was high praise from her husband.

Virginia Woolf

#50. Poor Dimitri Shostakovich: In the Soviet Union, he was condemned as being too radical; in the West, for being too conservative. He could please no one but the musical public. He revenged himself on both by writing a short piece called 'March of the Soviet Police.'

Edward Abbey

#51. I have no credentials. I have no money. I literally come from a poor place. I was a servant. I dropped out of college. The next thing you know I'm writing for the 'New Yorker,' I have this sort of life, and it must seem annoying to people.

Jamaica Kincaid

#52. I have learned one lesson as a writer ... keep writing and never throw any notes away. Written parts that can't be used today ... may be used for other books tomorrow.

Timothy Pina

#53. The survival of poor opinions can make a thinker feel as though he is failing humanity.

Criss Jami

#54. There are so many ready to write (poor fools!) for the honor and glory of the thing, and there are so many ready to take advantage of this fact, and withhold from needy talent the moral right to a deserved remuneration.

Fanny Fern

#55. Buck up, suck up, and admit you fucked up.

Linda Hilton

#56. Apparently, my hopes, dreams and aspirations were no match against my poor spelling, punctuation and grammar.

Red Red Rover

#57. O, it ended in my having nothing to say, when I sat down to write. But sometimes, when I get hold of a book, I wonder why I let such a poor reason stop me. It does not others.

Elizabeth Gaskell

#58. The next thing I wrote was in a writing class at night school. It was about a poor woman who worked at a dime store and who was all alone for Christmas in Laurel, Mississippi.

Beth Henley

#59. Ultimately one has to pity these poor souls who know every secret about writing, directing, designing, producing, and acting but are stuck in those miserable day jobs writing reviews. Will somebody help them, please?

David Ives

#60. Carry a notebook and write down examples of good and poor design. After a week, you'll begin to realize that nearly everything is the product of a design decision.

Daniel H. Pink

#61. Selecting the paper for your letterhead has more variables than you might think. Normal writing or computer printing paper is too light and poor quality to be used for letterhead. Using too heavy of a paper comes off as being ridged and over spending on a basic supply.

Mitch Stephen

#62. A lot of writers come from Harvard and such, and are rich, and they write under the misapprehension that poor people are stupid. So when they do write them, they are hillbillies or rednecks or Christian idiots.

Norm MacDonald

#63. Poor, harmless paper, that might have gone to print a Shakespeare on, and was instead so clumsily defaced with nonsense.

Robert Louis Stevenson

#64. If a bloke gave you a hundred quid for a book you can bet your life it's his way, but if all the poor and suffering people raise their hats to you for writing it - that's different; it makes it worthwhile then.

Alan Marshall

#65. In five hundred years' time, to the historian writing the Decline and Fall of the British Empire, this little episode would not exist. There will be plenty of other causes. You and me and poor Jones will not even figure in a footnote. It will be all economics, politics, battles.

Graham Greene

#66. God pity the poor novelist.

Steven Millhauser

#67. I feel very rich when I have time to write and very poor when I get a regular paycheck and no time at my real work.

Natalie Goldberg

#68. I'm a successful novelist, and I've been a lucky one, so I don't want to cry the poor mouth. Writing has never been easy.

Richard Flanagan

#69. My poor Isabel. Here, take this and write. Unburden your heart; if you don't you are going to die of anguish.

Isabel Allende

#70. I usually have poor to absent relations with editors because they have a habit of desiring changes and I resist changes.

William H Gass

#71. Yes, writers are writing in all corners of the world. Yes they are writing in countries rich and poor. Yes, they are writing despite threats to their freedom of speech or even to their very lives. . . . everywhere on earth writers were writing in their own language.

Minae Mizumura