Top 100 The Best Writing Quotes
#1. The best writing has no lace on its sleeves.
Walt Whitman
#2. The best writing really does come from the deepest, most private part of you.
Michael Arndt
#3. To Grandma,
for being my first editor and giving me the best writing advice I've ever received: Christopher, I think you should wait until you're done with elementary school before worrying about being a failed writer.
Chris Colfer
#4. Since I'm a fan of collections and anthologies, believe that the best writing often shines in shards and galloping stretches, I never find myself lobbying for a writer I enjoy reading regularly to hole up in Heidegger's hut for four or five years to bring forth a mountain.
James Wolcott
#5. There are times when the best writing you can do is to go for a walk or drive, a long drive is ideal.
Terry Pratchett
#6. The best writing is not about the writer, the best writing is absolutely not about the writer, it's about us, it's about the reader.
Ben Okri
#7. The best writing is embarrassing; that's all there is to it.
A.D. Posey
#8. The best writing advice I ever got was "Keep moving forward, don't retreat into rewrites." The worst came from a book that said "Writing fiction is like telling lies," which just seems stupid to me.
David B. Coe
#9. The best writing takes you places you don't want to go. It drags you by the hair against your will and leaves you drained, shaky, spent. Sometimes with a bad taste in your mouth.
Penfist
#10. This quiet place exists as we exist, here on the earth. It just is. That is where the best writing comes from and what we must connect with in order to write well.
Natalie Goldberg
#11. I've always been drawn to the best writing that I can find. I don't care if it's in movies or theater or whatever - if you want to be in front of an audience, you have to do writing you believe in.
Ethan Hawke
#12. Cinema, which is influenced by every single part of life, is direct and reaches you immediately. And writing - the best writing is complex ideas communicated concisely. And music - if it's a good tune, make sure people can bloody hear it.
Alex Kapranos
#13. Television is what we're all very attracted to because that's where the best writing and the best characters are.
Ioan Gruffudd
#14. I like to be surprised. The best writing is when it defies me, when it starts going a different way than I had planned.
Wally Lamb
#15. If you are willing to take the trip through 'Analogue,' you'll be rewarded with some of the best writing in gaming today and a look into the future of what kind of meaningful stories video games are capable of telling.
Rob Manuel
#16. Everything I've written has been personal and touched on things that I needed to deal with in my personal life. So I just feel that writing is great therapy, and the best writing comes from truth, and so I mine my life constantly for that.
Gina Prince-Bythewood
#17. 'Police Story' had some of the best writing on television, and one reason for that is because most of the scripts were based on real cases.
Michael Mann
#18. I just personally feel like the best writing for actors exists in cable television.
Donal Logue
#19. The best writing comes out when you find yourself broken. Your heart is ripped open and all the feelings spill out into a beautiful mess on paper.
Shannen Wrass
#20. I don't write books because I have answers. I write books because I have questions. What we are is the questions that we ask, not the answers that we provide. It's all about the process of self-examination. I think that's what the best writing always contains.
John Edgar Wideman
#21. You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or, rather, you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love.
Ernest Hemingway,
#22. I'm of the school 'Write what you know.' You can educate yourself, but the best writing usually comes from the heart.
Terrence McNally
#23. The best writing reflects the author's ideas and communicates them clearly to the reader.
Steve Dunham
#24. Some of the best writing I've done, whether I'm shooting a story or thinking of a script, I write it in my head as I'm running. Running literally jogs my brain.
Natalie Morales
#25. Of course newspaper sportswriting is mostly terrible - and of course it is usually the best writing in the paper.
Donald Hall
#28. Somewhere In Time is the story of a love which transcends time , What Dreams May Come is the story of a love which transcends death ... I feel that they represent the best writing I have done in the novel form.
Richard Matheson
#30. The best of fiction, as we know, of course, doesn't tell the truth; it tales the truth.
Criss Jami
#31. He would stab his best friend for the sake of writing an epigraph on his tombstone.
Oscar Wilde
#32. "Best in the world," "lowest price in existence, " etc are at best claiming the expected. But superlative of that sort are usually damaging. They suggestion looseness of expression, a tendency to exaggerate, a careless truth. They lead readers to discount all the statements that you make
Claude C. Hopkins
#33. Nothing teaches great writing like the very best books do. Yet, good teachers often help students cross that bridge, and I have to say that I had a few extraordinary English teachers in high school whom I still credit for their guidance.
Julia Glass
#34. Then Snowball (for it was Snowball who was best at writing) took a brush between the two knuckles of his trotter, painted out MANOR FARM from the top bar of the gate and in its place painted ANIMAL FARM. This was to be the name of the farm from now onwards.
George Orwell
#35. In recent years, I've been writing because I'm fortunate enough to work in the world of food television, to travel and taste and learn about cooking from the best chefs in the business.
Ted Allen
#36. I think the book you always like best is the one you're about to write.
Margaret Atwood
#37. Your best authorial self is always one about to ruin the story.
Chuck Wendig
#38. Writing it was the best part, but clicking the enter button was the most difficult.
Ali Shams
#39. 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
#40. I owe what is best in my own development to the impression made by Kant's works, the sacred writings of the Hindus, and Plato.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#41. Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.
Jonathan Franzen
#42. I think the only person a writer has an obligation to is himself. If what I write doesn't fulfill something in me, if I don't honestly feel it's the best I can do, then I'm miserable.
Truman Capote
#43. It's the best thing to happen to a sport, that you have a superstar. In football there is always something to write about the Beckhams, same as people want to write about Rooney or Hooney or whatever his bloody name is.
Bernie Ecclestone
#44. My guitar is like my best friend. My guitar can get me through anything. If I can sit down and write an amazing song with my guitar about what's going on in life, then that's the greatest therapy for me.
Miley Cyrus
#45. When I write I try as far as possible to forget I'm writing it at all. I tell it down onto the page, as if I'm telling it to one person only, my best friend.
Michael Morpurgo
#46. I'm fundamentally, I think, an outsider. I do my best work and feel most braced with my back to the wall. It's an odd feeling though, writing aginst the current: difficult entirely to disregard the current. Yet of course I shall.
Virginia Woolf
#47. There are three good things in this world. One is to read poetry, another is to write poetry, and the best of all is to live poetry.
Rupert Brooke
#48. I'm not a real good musician, but I can write [a song] pretty well. I experiment once in a while to see what I can do. I find out the best I can do is stay with ballads.
Marty Robbins
#49. A Tibetan Lama said to me, "The best place to stand, Ram Dass, is halfway between hope and hopelessness." So I can write a scenario for the 21st century in either direction. One is that it all goes to hell and that it's truly the dark age.
Ram Dass
#50. I think one of the best things you can do is write really sad songs that touch some semblance of ... I guess 'hope' is the right word?
Eric Bachmann
#51. I think one artist to another artist, the best compliment you can pay one another, because the part of you that is inspired or creates something, to write a joke or a song, that's like the God-like part of a person.
Dave Chappelle
#52. Jazz is very important. It's not something I can put my finger on. When I'm writing at my favorite time, I like to have the gentle side of Coltrane or Brubeck on the CD player. It creates sort of a spiritual space in which I write best.
Miller Williams
#53. A song is no song unless the circumstance is free and fine. If a singer sing from a sense of duty or from seeing no way to escape,I had rather have none. Those only can sleep who do not care to sleep; and those only write or speak best who do not too much respect the writing or the speaking.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#54. The best memories on tour are always of kids who tell me they are going to run back to their classrooms and start writing!
Doreen Cronin
#55. Always compare yourself to the best. Even if you never measure up, it can't help but make you better.
Tom Robbins
#56. You need to understand that a skilled professional songwriter can accelerate your success as an already talented musician. These people are writing every single day, so their craft is really sharp, and it's the best songwriters who consistently get on the radio.
Kara DioGuardi
#57. I hereby grant you permission to write crap. The more the better. Remember, crap makes the best fertilizer.
Pat Pattison
#58. The best person to write for is yourself - and what better place to start than in a journal.
E.L. James
#59. The best thing about writing programs is that it rationalized the apprenticeship of a writer.
Russell Banks
#60. Never be afraid to make a fool of yourself. The furthest out you can go is the best place to be.
Tom Robbins
#61. I think some of the best modern writing comes now from travellers.
Michael Palin
#62. I'm astounded by people who take eighteen years to write something. That's how long it took that guy to write Madame Bovary, and was that ever on the best-seller list?
Sylvester Stallone
#63. Just writing a lot doesn't necessarily make you a better writer. You have to hear yourself as a writer, and the best way to do that is to read your writing out loud.
Christopher Paolini
#64. There's life for you. Spend the best years of your life studying penmanship and rhetoric and syntax and Beowulf and George Eliot, and then somebody steals your pencil.
Dorothy Parker
#65. All the best writers take risks, offend people often and say fuck you to the critics.
Carla H. Krueger
#66. Some of the best stories start out with a person who absolutely does not want anything to do with an adventure.
Josh Rose
#67. The best time for planning a book is while you're doing the dishes.
Agatha Christie
#69. Doing interesting things and then writing about them is the best way to become a good writer.
Jean Craighead George
#70. Brevity in writing is the best insurance for its perusal.
Rudolf Virchow
#71. We live in the best of worlds. But still, it's like we've lost something on the way to here: a sense of life. I can't know for sure, I might be the only one who's lost it. Maybe everybody else is living the now, thinking they're having it well. Anyhow, that motivated me to write the books.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#72. The books we enjoy as children stay with us forever
they have a special impact. Paragraph after paragraph and page after page, the author must deliver his or her best work.
Sid Fleischman
#73. I decided that adventure was the best way to learn about writing.
Lloyd Alexander
#74. Screw the beaten path! Do your thing. Write the best story you can. the rest will fall into place.
Darynda Jones
#75. I started writing and photographing for different publications and finally ended up being the correspondent in South Asia, for the Geneva-based Journal de Geneve, which at one time used to be one of the best international newspapers in Europe.
Francois Gautier
#76. The best way to know the Truth or Beauty is to try to express it. And what is the purpose of existence Here or Yonder but to discover truth and beauty and express it, i.e., share it with others?
Brenda Ueland
#77. We each have a little imagination in all of us, and a book is the best absorbent there is.
S.A. Tawks
#78. I'm an improviser at heart, when I'm writing, I'm improvising in my head. When you're an improviser on stage, you can never be precious about anything, you can't control what anyone else is going to do. The best stuff comes out of moments of inspiration that spontaneously happen.
Scot Armstrong
#79. I think pain is the best feeling for song writing. You can write good happy songs, but I think the kind of bruiting, depressing ones are more effective. They are easier to write when I am impassioned and angry. It is a good way to channel that negative energy.
Adam Levine
#80. When we are in pre-production, this is the best job in the world. Working 10 to 7, sitting around and brainstorming with the other writers, making things funnier and writing and rewriting scenes - that's as fun as it gets.
Paul Lieberstein
#81. The best and easiest lesson for me was to learn that writing is mostly hard work.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
#82. Mort moved my ending to the beginning, took out all the adjectives, cut the whole thing in half, and made it one hundred percent better.
'That's how it's done,' he said. Best writing lesson I ever had.
Anita Diamant
#83. When you are writing the kind of criticism you hope you're writing, everything depends on keeping your calm or your cool. You're trying to tell someone about something that they may know nothing about. They depend on you to read or interpret as best as you can.
Darryl Pinckney
#84. Whom do I write for? I write for the story. Each story, it seems to me, knows best how it should be told. As I once put my ear to the railroad track, I listen now for the voice of my story.
Jerry Spinelli
#85. The best book of the year, Grobel's writing is quite marvelous. The Hustons reads vividly, just like one of John Huston's great films.
J.P. Donleavy
#86. Write regularly, day in and day out, at whatever times of day you find that you write best. Don't wait till you feel that you are in the mood. Write, whether you are feeling inclined to write or not.
Arnold J. Toynbee
#87. Writing is a profession that has no real career structure and your best advice when you hit a difficulty is probably going to come from another writer one or two rungs on the career ladder ahead of you.
Sara Sheridan
#88. The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always.
Arthur Miller
#89. There is the great creative part of it. The writing is the best part.
Cynthia Weil
#90. I write to withdraw as a nominee to serve as an Associate Justice on the Supreme Court of the United States ... I am concerned that the confirmation process presents a burden for the White House and our staff that is not in the best interest of the country.
Harriet Miers
#91. I continue to enjoy looking for stories, and trying to do the best job I can reporting and writing them.
Bob Greene
#92. If our goal is to write poetry, the only way we are likely to be any good is to try to be as great as the best.
Donald Hall
#93. When I'm working, on stage, entertaining people, or watching someone do something amazing, it inspires me to be the best artist that I can be. I enjoy being around art - whether it be a museum, a Broadway show - or even writing a poem. Those are things that make me feel alive and inspire me.
Naturi Naughton
#94. I've always been drawn to writing historical characters. The best stories are the ones you find in history.
Tony Kushner
#95. The best thing about writing is the reader
Girish Kohli
#96. Most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned traditions and expectations when they seemed to immutable.
Azar Nafisi
#98. Overuse at best is needless clutter; at worst, it creates the impression that the characters are overacting, emoting like silent film stars. Still, an adverb can be exactly what a sentence needs. They can add important intonation to dialogue, or subtly convey information.
Howard Mittelmark
#99. That was how the heroine of a book would play it and Diana was still writing her own story the best heroines she'd always believed took their fate into their own hands.
Anna Godbersen
#100. The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all.
Annie Dillard
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