Top 100 Quotes About Writing Well
#1. I may be writing well, I may be writing poorly, but I enjoy the act of writing and sometimes when it turns out okay, I feel an elation that is incomparable.
James Lipton
#2. You can't teach people to write well. Writing well is something God lets you do or declines to let you do.
Kurt Vonnegut
#3. Sometimes what I'm writing is more important to me than the rest of my life. It's more important to me that I'm writing well than anything else.
Randy Newman
#4. I don't read a lot of inspirational books for life. But for writing, I think the two best books are The War of Art and William Zinsser's On Writing Well. I read a lot of classics;
Donald Miller
#5. Eliot admitted later on that science-fiction writers couldn't write for sour apples, but he declared that it didn't matter. He said they were poets just the same, since they were more sensitive to important changes than anybody who was writing well.
Kurt Vonnegut
#6. [On book promotion:] The reward for writing well appears to be not to be able to do it for a long time.
Rosellen Brown
#7. When I'm writing well, I feel happy. And when I go too long without writing, I begin to implode.
Mohsin Hamid
#8. I don't consider myself an artist necessarily, but craftsmen or people in the arts, their spiritualism is sort of when you're writing well or performing well or doing whatever you do well, there's an element of that that's either God-given, a talent that you're not necessarily responsible for.
Al Franken
#10. Nobody told all the new computer writers that the essence of writing is rewriting. Just because they're writing fluently doesn't mean they're writing well.
William Zinsser
#11. It's easy to write something average or even something good. But writing well is quite challenging.
Nicholas Sparks
#12. One of the strangest things about writing well is that it requires two different zones in the brain
rigor and recklessness
simultaneously.
Carole Maso
#13. I've probably put my 10,000 hours into writing, but I believe writing well is also greatly influenced by certain intangibles like mood and inspiration.
Bill Loguidice
#14. Writers say two things that strike me as nonsense. One is that you must follow an absolute schedule everyday. If you're not writing well, why continue it? I just don't think this grinding away is useful.
Edmund White
#15. Let's say that he should go out and hang himself because he finds that writing well is impossibly difficult. Then he should be cut down without mercy and forced by his own self to write as well as he can for the rest of his life. At least he will have the story of the hanging to commence with.
Ernest Hemingway,
#16. I was getting rewarded for writing well, from about the age of five or six. A teacher would say, "Look what Andrew has written," and I thought, "Maybe I could be a writer."
Andrew Davies
#17. By writing quickly we are not brought to write well, but by writing well we are brought to write quickly.
Quintilian
#18. Writing isn't difficult. Writing well is difficult. What is most difficult is being with the interior experience that manifests as resistance to writing.
H. Raven Rose
#19. Rewriting is the essence of writing well - where the game is won or lost.
William Zinsser
#20. And when I'm writing well and when I'm inside the feeling, then I can do fairly complicated things with some fluency.
Edward Hirsch
#21. I think writing well takes a little bit of talent and an awful lot of work.
Kristan Higgins
#22. Of all those arts in which the wise excel, Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.
Andre Breton
#23. All the youth now in England of free men, who are rich enough to be able to devote themselves to it, be set to learn as long as they are not fit for any other occupation, until they are able to read English writing well.
Alfred The Great
#24. Of writing well the source and fountainhead is wise thinking.
Horace
#25. I think it's a short story writer's duty, as well as writing well about emotions and characters, to write story.
Eric Brown
#26. Nobody told all the new e-mail writers that the essence of writing is rewriting. Just because they are writing with ease and enjoyment doesn't mean they are writing well.
William Zinsser
#27. You know you're writing well when you're throwing good stuff into the wastebasket.
Ernest Hemingway,
#28. I don't believe in writer's block, writing well is very easy; it's writing horribly, the horrible work necessary to do to get to writing well, that is so difficult one may just not be willing to do it.
Dean Young
#29. Of writing well, be sure, the secret lies
In wisdom :therefore study to be wise.
Horace
#30. If I'm not writing well, I'm not happy. If I'm not spending enough time with my family, I'm not happy. If I'm not connecting to friends or if I don't work out enough ... You get the point. Everything has to be balanced. Nothing should be an extreme.
Harlan Coben
#31. Writing is easy. Writing well is hard work.
Amy Joy
#32. Everything can be going well, but if I'm not writing, I'm not happy. When I'm writing well, I'm like a different person.
Aaron Sorkin
#33. I love it, I hate it, it's ecstasy when I'm writing well, it's despair when I'm not. I wouldn't wish this life on anyone, nor would I, could I, ever give it up.
Jillian Medoff
#34. I write every day. Even if I'm not writing well, I write through it. I can fix a bad page. I can't fix a blank one.
Nora Roberts
#36. There is no way of writing well and also of writing easily.
Anthony Trollope
#37. With a television series, there's a hard deadline, and so you have to write even when you're not writing well.
Aaron Sorkin
#38. They say living well is the best revenge but sometimes writing well is even better.
James Franco
#39. Who's to say what a 'literary life' is? As long as you are writing often, and writing well, you don't need to be hanging-out in libraries all the time.
Nightclubs are great literary research centers. So is Ibiza!
Roman Payne
#40. From writing rapidly it does not result that one writes well, but from writing well it results that one writes rapidly.
Quintilian
#41. In the broadest possible sense, writing well means to communicate clearly and interestingly and in a way that feels alive to the reader. Where there's some kind of relationship between the writer and the reader - even though it's mediated by a kind of text - there's an electricity about it.
David Foster Wallace
#42. I would love to see writing taught online because at university like Yale, there are not enough teachers who are able to teach writing well, or in some cases, there are none.
David Gelernter
#43. The primary requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite. Without this, it is impossible to accumulate, within the allotted span, enough experience of eating to have anything worth setting down.
A.J. Liebling
#44. There is no pleasure in the world like writing well and going fast. It's like nothing else. It's like a love affair, it goes on and on, and doesn't end in marriage. It's all courtship.
Tennessee Williams
#45. Too indolent to bear the toil of writing; I mean of writing well; I say nothing about quantity.
[Lat., Piger scribendi ferre laborem;
Scribendi recte, nam ut multum nil moror.]
Horace
#46. I do labor - it's part of the process. Writing is no easier today than it was in the beginning: writing well is very hard to do. Always.
Nicholas Sparks
#47. I've always had standards about writing well. There is art in this business. There is potentially great art.
Gay Talese
#48. If the first requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite, the second is to put in your apprenticeship as a feeder when you have enough money to pay the check but not enough to produce indifference of the total.
A.J. Liebling
#49. I used to think that if I had a choice between writing well and living well, I would choose the former. But now I think that's sheer lunacy. Writing weighs so much less, in the great cosmic equation, than living.
Nicole Krauss
#50. It's not the fear of writing that blocks people, it's fear of not writing well; something quite different.
Scott Berkun
#51. There's no such thing as a writer's block. If you're having trouble writing, well, pick up the pen and write. No matter what, keep that hand moving. Writing is really a physical activity.
Natalie Goldberg
#53. There is a great quote from a female writer. She said, 'If you don't break out in a sweat of fear when you write, you are not writing well enough. I tend to agree. I think my best pictures come when I push myself.
Sally Mann
#54. Writing well means never having to say, I guess you had to be there.
Jef Mallett
#55. Writing well has everything to do with being able to read one's own work with an eye toward the unmet possibilities that are there.
Lucy Calkins
#56. I always write with my .357 magnum handy. Why? Well, you never know when God may try to interfere.
Edward Abbey
#57. Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realize that literature depends on doing several things well at the same time.
Julian Barnes
#58. I bet there are a lot of women out there who want to sleep with a guy who reads. And being the head of the reading foundation, I'm very well endowed.
Bauvard
#59. The danger in writing about a world you don't know very well is that you can get lost in it, and sometimes I'll end up with a hundred pages I don't know what to do with.
Dan Chaon
#60. Well I've been writing books. So that, by its nature, is kind of a solitary occupation. And from time to time I have research help, but mostly I've done those completely on my own.
Caroline Kennedy
#61. I think my writing was certainly shaped from having lived in a place like Niverville as well as by the family that I came from, the religion that I had, that type of thing.
David Bergen
#62. Poets have to keep pushing, pushing, against the darkness, and write their way out of it as well.
Anne Waldman
#63. If I come across an issue, or something I feel strongly about, and I happen to think of a song that would go in that direction, then I do it. But that's not what I start out, necessarily, to do. Sometimes I may have an idea for a song - Well, I'm going to write about a thing.
Charlie Daniels
#64. If we don't risk it all, we may as well not write at all.
Anne Stuart
#65. Well, I started writing songs about three years ago when I learned to play the guitar, but I've been singing since I was eleven.
Colbie Caillat
#67. Well, this whole question of how you work out the narrative is very mysterious. It's a good deal more arbitrary than most people who don't do it would ever believe.
Joan Didion
#68. I use improvisation as a writing tool to help produce material that goes into a script, but a well-crafted script shouldn't sound scripted, and oftentimes people confuse something that looks like improvisation for what is actually a very well-written script that is well-acted.
Steve Coogan
#69. In writing I found something I could do at least as well as my peers, if not better.
Brian P. Cleary
#70. Well, language seems to be something that obsesses me. I'm always writing about it.
Lisel Mueller
#71. Dude, writing, acting and directing are such easy jobs. But to do them all as awesomely as Zach Braff does, well that ... that's something.
Zach Braff
#72. Talent, and genius as well, is like a grain of pearl sand shifting about in the creative mind. A valued tormentor.
Truman Capote
#73. Silk Road to Ruin has all the analysis and it's structured very well. I rely on my notes more and I use direct quotes. But there's nothing like writing about it right away.
Ted Rall
#74. As was the case in 'Darth Plagueis' - even going back as far as 'Cloak of Deception' - I was well aware that I was writing what used to be called 'men's adventure' fiction.
James Luceno
#75. I was a Navy officer writing about Navy problems and I simply stole this lovely Army nurse and popped her into a Navy uniform, where she has done very well for herself.
James A. Michener
#76. Writers do well to carefully attend to those moments of inspiration, because chances are that they're writing from a very deep place. The subsequent search that ensues to continually attend to that voice that you hear is what is going to give the story drive.
Adam Ross
#77. I'm not a writer. I marvel at writing. I am sometimes absolutely astounded when I read something and I think how in the world did that man or that woman sit down at a typewriter, a computer or a pen and an ink well, and seemingly have nothing come between their heart and that pen.
Kevin Spacey
#78. I'm the least confident person in so many ways. But I believed that if somebody gave me the chance to tell a story, I would tell a story [well enough] that the person who gave me the chance would get their money back.
Joss Whedon
#79. Your poems are of interest to mankind; your liver isn't. Drink till you write well and feel sick. Bless your poems and be damned to you.
Fernando Pessoa
#80. My wife and I always comment that our lives are relatively mundane. She's a writer as well, I'm a writer, we spend most of our time writing, and kind of going to yoga in Brooklyn.
Mike Birbiglia
#81. I think finally good writing gets out there, and people like it, and bad writing doesn't. Well, no. Bad writing does get out there 'cause some people like it.
Robert B. Parker
#82. I definitely write about a lot of dreamy, surreal stuff. I do end up going to a surreal world with my music, but I also like the idea of there being really real stuff as well.
Ellie Goulding
#83. Well, I hear things," she began. "And ... well, writing things down? I suppose that's a suitable job for a lady, isn't it? It's practically cultural.
Terry Pratchett
#84. Well, when you write about people of a certain age ... we are in a postsexual situation. If I write about younger people then I write sexually, because their drive is sexual. It depends upon the circumstances.
Edward Albee
#85. All writing is ultimately a question of solving a problem.
William Zinsser
#86. In my case, if I start out by thinking about the plot, things don't go well. Small points, such as my impression of what is likely to occur, do come to mind, but I let the rest of the story take its own course. I don't want to spend as long as two years writing a story whose plot I already know.
Haruki Murakami
#87. Well, when I was a young writer the people we read were Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Sartre, Camus, Celine, Malraux. And to begin with, I was a bit of a copycat writer and very derivative and tried to write a novel using their voices, really ... I keep it out of print.
Mordecai Richler
#88. If you want to be a singer, you've got to concentrate on it twenty-four hours a day. You can't be a well driller, too. You've got to concentrate on the business of entertaining and writing songs. Always think different from the next person. Don't ever do a song as you heard somebody else do it.
Otis Redding
#89. Work and thou canst escape the reward; whether the work be fine or course, planting corn or writing epics, so only it be honest work, done to thine own approbation, it shall earn a reward to the senses as well as to the thought.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#90. Write your own music and write frequently. Go to as many live shows as you can as well (of bands you enjoy of course). You can learn a lot watching other performers.
Dia Frampton
#91. If the character is really well-rounded, and it's a really strong character, and if the writing is just fantastic, that's the thing that will hook me in, certainly.
Amanda Abbington
#92. My hands are already full writing and directing, because that's a full time job. Actually, that's why I don't produce as well, as there's already enough producers.
David Twohy
#93. I like to get ten pages a day, which amounts to 2,000 words. That's 180,000 words over a three-month span, a goodish length for a book - something in which the reader can get happily lost, if the tale is done well and stays fresh.
Stephen King
#94. Never pump the well dry; always leave a bucket there.
Truman Capote
#95. Well I've been locking myself up in my house for some time now Reading and writing and reading and thinking and searching for reasons and missing the seasons The Autumn, the Spring, the Summer, the snow
Colleen Hoover
#96. I really, truly believe that writing comes out of the body; of course, the mind is working as well, but it's a double thing and that doubleness is united. I mean, you can't separate persona from psyche; you just can't do it.
Paul Auster
#97. How would you start to write a poem? How would you put together a series of words for its first line - how would you know which words to choose? When you read a poem, every word seemed so perfect that it had to have been predestined - well, a good poem.
Ashley Hay
#98. You may very well ask what the goddess of love is doing in St. Andrews, writing trashy romances. Adapting.
Kelly Link
#99. What if this young woman, who writes such bad poems, in competition with her husband, whose poems are equally bad, should stretch her remarkably long and well-made legs out before you, so that her skirt slips up to the tops of her stockings?
Gilbert Sorrentino
#100. Write what's in you. Write readily and well. Then edit. Then share or send. Not before.
Rodney Richards
