The Best Writing Quotes

#1. The best of fiction, as we know, of course, doesn't tell the truth; it tales the truth.

Criss Jami

#2. He would stab his best friend for the sake of writing an epigraph on his tombstone.

Oscar Wilde

#3. "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

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. I think the book you always like best is the one you're about to write.

Margaret Atwood

#8. Your best authorial self is always one about to ruin the story.

Chuck Wendig

#9. Writing it was the best part, but clicking the enter button was the most difficult.

Ali Shams

#10. The best writing has no lace on its sleeves.

Walt Whitman

#11. 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

#12. The best writing really does come from the deepest, most private part of you.

Michael Arndt

#13. 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

#14. Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.

Jonathan Franzen

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. Always compare yourself to the best. Even if you never measure up, it can't help but make you better.

Tom Robbins

#29. 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

#30. I hereby grant you permission to write crap. The more the better. Remember, crap makes the best fertilizer.

Pat Pattison

#31. The best person to write for is yourself - and what better place to start than in a journal.

E.L. James

#32. The best thing about writing programs is that it rationalized the apprenticeship of a writer.

Russell Banks

#33. Never be afraid to make a fool of yourself. The furthest out you can go is the best place to be.

Tom Robbins

#34. I think some of the best modern writing comes now from travellers.

Michael Palin

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. All the best writers take risks, offend people often and say fuck you to the critics.

Carla H. Krueger

#39. Some of the best stories start out with a person who absolutely does not want anything to do with an adventure.

Josh Rose

#40. The best time for planning a book is while you're doing the dishes.

Agatha Christie

#41. Be the best you.

A.D. Posey

#42. Doing interesting things and then writing about them is the best way to become a good writer.

Jean Craighead George

#43. Brevity in writing is the best insurance for its perusal.

Rudolf Virchow

#44. 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

#45. 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

#46. I decided that adventure was the best way to learn about writing.

Lloyd Alexander

#47. Screw the beaten path! Do your thing. Write the best story you can. the rest will fall into place.

Darynda Jones

#48. 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

#49. 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

#50. We each have a little imagination in all of us, and a book is the best absorbent there is.

S.A. Tawks

#51. 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

#52. 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

#53. 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

#54. 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

#55. The best and easiest lesson for me was to learn that writing is mostly hard work.

Bonnie Jo Campbell

#56. 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

#57. 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

#58. 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

#59. 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

#60. 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

#61. 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

#62. The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always.

Arthur Miller

#63. There is the great creative part of it. The writing is the best part.

Cynthia Weil

#64. 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

#65. I continue to enjoy looking for stories, and trying to do the best job I can reporting and writing them.

Bob Greene

#66. 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

#67. 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

#68. I've always been drawn to writing historical characters. The best stories are the ones you find in history.

Tony Kushner

#69. The best thing about writing is the reader

Girish Kohli

#70. 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

#71. I am a writer because writing is the thing I do best.

Flannery O'Connor

#72. '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

#73. 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

#74. 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

#75. The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all.

Annie Dillard

#76. I just personally feel like the best writing for actors exists in cable television.

Donal Logue

#77. Shakespeare was a man who wrote poetry. I'm a man who writes poetry. Why not compare yourself to the best?

Jay-Z

#78. The best way of writing sex scenes is to do the first draft, orgasm, and then start editing. You can be objective post-orgasm.

Christos Tsiolkas

#79. Remember, it is no sign of weakness or defeat that your manuscript ends up in need of major surgery. This is a common occurrence in all writing, and among the best writers.

William Strunk Jr.

#80. I have a great book. It's called Stantasyland. Except I don't have the money to buy a million copies to put it on the bestsellers list.

Stanley Victor Paskavich

#81. The mind of an artist never sleeps, because dreaming is when they do their best work.

Mark W. Boyer

#82. Read everything. Read fiction and non-fiction, read hot best sellers and the classics you never got around to in college.

Jennifer Weiner

#83. When you don't have the pressure of pleasing someone else and do something because you love doing it, that's when the best works are born.

Vishwas Mudagal

#84. The best way to learn to write is to study the work of the men and women who are doing the kind of writing you want to do.

William Zinsser

#85. They wanted to come in after the pounds", explained Pooh, "so I let them. It's the best way to write poetry, letting things come.

A.A. Milne

#86. Writing is a intensely personal activity. I can pen down my best thoughts when I'm alone. But when one is elevated into the stature of an author, you have to think about your books in terms of their business angle.

Ashwin Sanghi

#87. The poet's first rule must be never to bore his readers; and his best way of keeping this rule is never to bore himself-which, of course, means to write only when he has something urgent to say.

Robert Graves

#88. The best songs that I write usually come in, like, two minutes, and I think a lot of songwriters would probably say those kind of songs that come just like that are the good ones.

Lauren Hart

#89. If you want to write fiction, the best thing you can do is take two aspirins, lie down in a dark room, and wait for the feeling to pass.

Lawrence Block

#90. Good taste cannot supply the place of genius in literature, for the best proof of taste, when there is no genius, would be, not to write at all.

Madame De Stael

#91. No matter where I find myself, this is the time of day I love best. The time that's mine alone. It'll be dawn soon, and I'm sitting here writing. Like Buddha, born from his mother's side (the right or the left, I can't recall), the new sun will lumber up and peek over the edge of the hills.

Haruki Murakami

#92. You may be wonderful with words, but your best writing comprises of the words that had been said to you by somebody else and had engraved on your memory forever...

Gaurav Sharma

#93. Always write as if you will never have the blessed chance to write again, so this has to be the best thing you've ever done. Do that, and it will be.

Joe Gores

#94. The best writing reflects the author's ideas and communicates them clearly to the reader.

Steve Dunham

#95. When you are writing, you must treat it as the most important thing in the world, even when you know it is not. This helps you take the job seriously and do your best on everything you write.

John Steinbeck

#96. I'm not writing novels, the screenplays are my novels, so I'm gonna write it the best that I can. If the movie never gets made, it'd almost be okay because I did it. It's there on the page.

Quentin Tarantino

#97. Tom [Collins] was a great influence on me. He really pushed me ... constantly demanded rewrites. And, as much as I despised them, it was the best thing that could have happened because he just wouldn't settle for less. It had to be right, and it had to be good.

Dean Dillon

#98. I write my stories for my children, the best fan club a writer could ever have. They keep me writing and make it fun.

Alan W. Harris

#99. You generally know when someone asks you to do something- am I more writing, or am I more editing? The editor is the best metaphor for your job.

Keith Rabois

#100. Writing was what I did best, better than being a daughter or girlfriend or sister. Writing was me. But now writing is one of the things I can't do.

Jennifer Niven