Quotes About Writing Technique

#1. I don't believe in condescending to children. I don't change any writing technique.

Stephen Schwartz

#2. I'm here to get the story on to the page. It would be good to catch your attention, and I have to make you want to read on, and I suppose I prefer you don't actually think about the 'how' at all - the writing technique, the 'style', or even who it is that's putting this together.

Ronald Frame

#3. I have acting technique; I have singing technique; I don't have a writing technique to fall back on.

Jane Lynch

#4. Writing about craft has forced me to think more about my own writing technique, and to break down my process in ways that have been enormously helpful to me.

David B. Coe

#5. Every writer has his writing technique - what he can and can't do to describe something like war or history. I'm not good at writing about those things, but I try because I feel it is necessary to write that kind of thing.

Haruki Murakami

#6. Be daring, take on anything. Don't labor over little cameo works in which every word is to be perfect. Technique holds a reader from sentence to sentence, but only content will stay in his mind.

Joyce Carol Oates

#7. It's often about the simple things, isn't it? Painting and photography are first about seeing, they say. Writing is about observing. Technique is secondary. Sometimes the simple is the most difficult.

Linda Olsson

#8. My weakness has always been to prefer the large intention of an unskilful artist to the trivial intention of an accomplished one: in other words, I am more interested in the high ideas of a feeble executant than in the high execution of a feeble thinker.

Thomas Hardy

#9. Academic writing was actually about hiding what you didn't know. There was a language, a technique, and I had mastered it. In everything there were gaps which language could cover over as long as you had acquired the know-how.

Karl Ove Knausgard

#10. Yet technique matters, even so. God uses it, for a buffalo is not a leopard.

James Dickey

#11. The most difficult thing in music is still to write a melody of several bars which can be self-sufficient. That is the secret of music. While the technique should be as perfected as possible, that is a lesser essential Anybody can acquire a brilliant technique Melody alone permits a work to survive.

Darius Milhaud

#12. I have also led you astray by talking of technique as if it were something that could be separated from the rest of the story. Technique can't operate at all, of course, except on believable material.

Flannery O'Connor

#13. What one gains in technique can lead to deforestation in the writing that is both good and bad. Keep the energy and the willingness to proceed stupidly.

Nancy Zafris

#14. Technical Expertise is composed of all the little and large bits of technique known to the skilled painter, musician, actor, any artist. He adds these things together in his basic presentation. He knows what he is doing. And how to do it. And then to his he adds his message.

L. Ron Hubbard

#15. It was Noel Coward whose technique I envied and tried to emulate. I collected all his records and writing.

Kenneth Williams

#16. You should always be trying to write a poem you are unable to write, a poem you lack the technique, the language, the courage to achieve. Otherwise you're merely imitating yourself, going nowhere, because that's always easiest.

John Berryman

#17. G.K. Chesterton once said: If something is worth doing, it is worth doing badly. I live by this philosophy when I teach writing. It seems to me vastly more important that a student try a new technique in her writing, and use it imperfectly, than never try the technique at all.

Ralph Fletcher

#18. After all these years of cooking and writing recipes, I am still amazed every time I notice how even the minutest of variation in technique can make a spectacular difference.

Yotam Ottolenghi

#19. Technique in the minds of many is something rigid, something like a formula that you impose on the material; but in the best stories it is something organic, something that grows out of the material, and this being the case, it is different for every story of any account that has ever been written.

Flannery O'Connor

#20. 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

#21. I'm a total ho for any writing workshop, any technique from anyone.

Travis Morrison

#22. It's the technique, I think, of writing a novel that is difficult for a nonfiction writer.

E. O. Wilson

#23. The novel is perhaps the highest art form because it so closely resembles life: it is about human relationships. It's technique, page by page, resembles our technique of living day by day
a way of relating.

Joyce Carol Oates

#24. I'm not a chef. I haven't created any new technique in the kitchen. I'm not a rocket scientist. I think I'm good at writing accessible, fun, and affordable meals for the average American family. That's what I think I'm good at.

Rachael Ray

#25. I knew nothing about the technique of story writing, and now, after eighteen years of writing, I still know nothing about the technique, although with the publication of my new novel, "Tarzan and the Lost Empire", there are 31 books on my list.

Edgar Rice Burroughs

#26. I knew that I had to find out more about van Gogh. Even though I was far too young, and felt I did not have sufficient technique to write a book about Vincent van Gogh, I knew I had to try. If I didn't I would never write anything else.

Irving Stone

#27. Jonathan Kreisberg is a great musician whose playing and writing always tell a story. His formidable technique and intellect never get in the way, but only serve the agenda of the heart.

Joe Locke

#28. When seriously explored, the short story seems to me the most difficult and disciplining form of prose writing extant. Whatever control and technique I may have I owe entirely to my training in this medium.

Truman Capote

#29. Put your manuscript down, I'd recommend at least two months. Six would be ideal. You really need to get away from it long enough to change your mindset. Unless you have a photographic memory, this technique will work. You'll transform into the one thing you crave feedback from: a reader.

A.J. Flowers

#30. Before I start a project, I always ask myself the following question. Why is this book worth a year of my life? There needs to be something about the theme, the technique, or the research that makes the time spent on it worthwhile.

David Morrell

#31. i.e., TestNG". This technique helps a beginner learn how to read the code before writing the code. The following are steps to install Selenium IDE: Steps

Rex Allen Jones II

#32. To be shockingly original with your first novel, you don't have to discover a new technique: Simply write about people as they are and not as the predominantly liberal and humanist literary establishment believes that they ought to be.

John Braine

#33. I think technique can be taught but I think the only way to learn to write is to read, and I see writing and reading as completely related. One almost couldn't exist without the other.

John McGahern

#34. Write it down and remember that we never gave in, the mind of a child is where the revolution begins, so if the solution has never been to look in yourself, how is it that you expect to find it anywhere else

Immortal Technique

#35. The solution, once revealed, must seem to have been inevitable. At least half of all the mystery novels published violate this law.
(Casual Notes on the Mystery Novel, 1949)

Raymond Chandler

#36. If a man comes to the door of poetry untouched by the madness of the Muses, believing that technique alone will make him a good poet, he and his sane compositions never reach perfection, but are utterly eclipsed by the performances of the inspired madman.

Socrates

#37. Forget ideas, Mr. Author.
What kind of pen do you use?

Stephen Fry