The Good Writers Quotes

#1. Since Caesar, we know his historians are liars. The good writers get read. Bad history doesn't get read.

Peter Greenaway

#2. The good writers touch life. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her.

Ray Bradbury

#3. The good writers touch life often.

Ray Bradbury

#4. All the good writers of confessions, from Augustine onwards, are men who are still a little in love with their sins.

Anatole France

#5. Mice: But reading all the good writers might discourage you.
Y.C.: Then you ought to be discouraged.

Ernest Hemingway,

#6. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more 'literary' you are ... The good writers touch life often.

Ray Bradbury

#7. Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don't see any.

Orson Scott Card

#8. The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.

Ray Bradbury

#9. Generally speaking, writers who have been at it for a while, and who are any good at it, suffer from an acute kind of self-knowledge. The unexamined life is not a risk for them.

Mark Slouka

#10. Writers - we're much more comfortable at parties standing in the corner watching everybody else having a good time than we are mingling.

Neil Gaiman

#11. I don't think that writers have any responsibility to be good neighbors to the audience.

Jez Butterworth

#12. More and more I don't have any philosophy about writing, except that it is something we can do if God is good to us. Of course we are the ones who have to do the paperwork.

M.V. Carey

#13. Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for.

Alice Walker

#14. You do an awful lot of bad writing in order to do any good writing. Incredibly bad. I think it would be very interesting to make a collection of some of the worst writing by good writers.

William S. Burroughs

#15. And the writers are good in that it's easy to memorize, and good writing has an innate rhythm to it. And I've always felt that it's easier to get in your head than writing that has very kind of mind busting moments.

Glenn Close

#16. World War II is the greatest drama in human history, the biggest war ever and a true battle of good and evil. I imagine writers will continue to get stories from it, and readers will continue to love them, for many more years.

Ken Follett

#17. I think that, for physicians who want to become writers, they have the material, the smarts, they have the logic, they know the stories; it's just a matter of being able to connect with their emotional sides - that's the key to writing good fiction.

Tess Gerritsen

#18. I used to be opposed to collaboration, and that's probably why the music in the past wasn't as good. Writing with other people, especially the great writers that I've had the privilege to write with, it activates something in your mind that you wouldn't use alone.

Charlie Puth

#19. Not that the writers weren't good. I believe in those books and those writers very much. It's just that in the climate it's really hard to keep the lights on and the doors open when you're selling poetry and literature that appeals to a fringe audience.

Henry Rollins

#20. I read about writers' lives with the fascination of one slowing down to get a good look at an automobile accident.

Kaye Gibbons

#21. 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

#22. Do we have good writers, producers and actors in the U.K.? Yes we do.

Eric Fellner

#23. Writers would submit scripts to me, and if I liked one well enough to submit to magazine editors, I had the know-how whether the story was good or bad.

Julius Schwartz

#24. All good writers express the state of their souls, even (as occurs in some cases of very good writers) if it is a state of damnation.

G.K. Chesterton

#25. I think that writing should be honest and simple, and it should say something about what it means to be a person. When God is good to us, we write in such a way that the act of reading becomes a pleasure to those who buy our books.

M.V. Carey

#26. The only thing a closed book is good for is a table that wobbles. Be an open book.

A.D. Posey

#27. I think the press does, too; it's just the few crazies and paparazzi that give them a bad name. Real writers write good things. My daughter's a writer, and she's a quality writer.

Debbie Reynolds

#28. I'm a really good team player. That's what it takes to work in the theater. That's what it takes to work in a band with musicians and writers.

David Cassidy

#29. Writers are always envious, mean-minded, filled with rage and envyat other's good fortune. There is nothing like the failure of a close friend to cheer us up.

Peter Carey

#30. The only way to defend language is to attack it ... ' - Proust. Every good writer in history had, in order to ensure adequate expression, broken a range of rules laid down by previous writers.

Alain De Botton

#31. Most comic scriptwriters are very bad. The artists are good, but the writers are so bad.

Harry Harrison

#32. Some writers, no matter how good they are, can't speak to us. Something about the way they see the world, I think, string sentences together, alienates us as surely as the ramblings of a madman on a bus.

David Bowker

#33. The e-book revolution has made it very easy to pay writers a good deal less than what their work is worth. I do strongly believe that we writers ought to hold out for much better royalties.

Philip Pullman

#34. Theoretically speaking a good reader should also be a good learner, whatever the century and the place!

Carl William Brown

#35. Academic writers are bad writers for three reasons. First, they want to sound smart. "If the water is dark," goes a German aphorism, "the lake must be deep." Instead of using good words like smart, they choose sophisticated or erudite.

Paul J. Silvia

#36. The biggest trap that all performers and writers find is that when something really crazy, really bad happens, your mind immediately goes to, 'Can I write about this?' - which is good and bad.

Riki Lindhome

#37. Writers must be fair and remember even bad guys (most of them, anyway) see themselves as good - they are the heroes of their own lives. Giving them a fair chance as characters can create some interesting shades of gray - and shades of gray are also a part of life.

Stephen King

#38. In matters of good-lookingness, we writers are the ugliest of the bunch, and normally our appearance is akin to that of someone investigating a crime scene; though the women in American writing keep producing world-class beauty in droves, and there are many breathtaking writers among them.

Pat Conroy

#39. Out of the thousand writers huffing and puffing through movieland, there are scarcely fifty men and women of wit and talent ... Yet, in a curious way, there is not much difference between the product of a good writer and a bad one. They both have to toe the same mark.

Ben Hecht

#40. As writers go, I have a skin of average thickness. I am pleased by a good review, disappointed by a bad. None of it penetrates far enough to influence the thing I write next.

Rachel Cusk

#41. It's not the writer who determines how good she is anyway. Writers don't determine that. It's readers who determine that.

Lynne Tillman

#42. For among writers there are two kinds: there are the priests who take you by the hand and lead you straight up to the mystery; there are the laymen who imbed their doctrines in flesh and blood and make a complete model of the world without excluding the bad or laying stress upon the good.

Virginia Woolf

#43. One of the qualities essential to writing exciting stories, whether for page or screen, is an ability to abandon one's morality. We simply cannot be good writers and good people. One must be able to access one's darkest self, one's venality and pettiness and murderousness.

Russell Smith

#44. You may think that you don't want to read about the problems of being brought up Mennonite, but the great thing about books is that you'll read anything a good writer wants you to read.

Nick Hornby

#45. Some writers thrive on the contact with the commerce of success; others are corrupted by it. Perhaps, like losing one's virginity,it is not as bad (or as good) as one feared it was going to be.

V.S. Pritchett

#46. Writers, when they're good, open windows to worlds held precious and priceless by the soul. It is a sad day when they leave the earth, like having the windows shut for good. Where will the world be without good writers?

Psyche Roxas-Mendoza

#47. At one time if you were a black writer you had to be one of the best writers in the world to be published. You had to be great. Now you can be good. Mediocre. And that's good.

Walter Mosley

#48. All good writers speak in honest voices and tell the truth.

Eudora Welty

#49. Writers who don't produce copy - or leave it so long that they couldn't possibly produce something good - are giving themselves the perfect excuse for not succeeding.

Megan McArdle

#50. A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#51. A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor.

Ring Lardner

#52. The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.

William Styron

#53. If you're dating a writer and they don't write about you - whether it's good or bad - then they don't love you. They just don't. Writers fall in love with the people we find inspiring.

Jamie Anne Royce

#54. There are times over different projects when I've asked the writers why people are swearing for no good reason. I tell them that it would be funnier if there weren't these swear words.

John Ratzenberger

#55. I wouldn't encourage new writers to start off publishing through electronic media ... it still isn't wide enough for the readership they would need to get a good start.

Anne McCaffrey

#56. All writers are the same - they forget a thousand good reviews and remember one bad one.

Irwin Shaw

#57. Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear. It doesn't matter whether the good writer wants to be useful, or whether the good writer wants to be harm.

Ezra Pound

#58. That's what writers do - the good ones anyway - we watched and we learned the faux pas of human nature. The delicate ways people came undone, the tiny little frays in the tapestry.

Tarryn Fisher

#59. I base a deuteragonist on the best friend I never had. A lot of good ideas come from what I never had and cause my imagination to light up.

B.A. Gabrielle

#60. Nobody wanted me. I just kept writing books and learning my craft. Most writers aren't very good in the beginning.

Phyllis A. Whitney

#61. Every time I overcome it makes me stronger. So, yes I believe in the good things to come. I have total faith that my steps are divinely set before me and thou I walk through the valley now.....I know one day, I'll reach the mountain top.

Nakeesha Cluse

#62. I'll be blasted', he said, 'if I ever write another word, or try to write another word, to please Nick Greene or the Muse. Bad, good, or indifferent, I'll write, from this day forward, to please myself

Virginia Woolf

#63. I was a pretty good fighter. But it was the writers who made me great.

Jack Dempsey

#64. I don't think, generally speaking, people become writers because they were the really good, really cool, attractive kid in class. I'll be honest. This is our revenge for people who were much better looking and more popular than us. I was a bit like that, I suppose.

Steven Moffat

#65. Prison always has been a good place for writers, killing, as it does, the twin demons of mobility and diversion

Dan Simmons

#66. Most of the writers I like just intimidate and humble me but in that there's a good deal of inspiration to be had as well.

Henry Rollins

#67. My preference is for good writing. It doesn't matter if it's for film or TV. Whatever. It starts with the writing. Even though I've had problems with writers, it doesn't matter how great of an actor you are. If the writing is bad, you're going to struggle.

James Nesbitt

#68. The news business is simple but it's not easy to do well. You know the story, you have to cover it, you need pictures, you need good writers, you have to get it to the screen but it's obviously not easy to do well.

Jai Courtney

#69. It's very hard to get good songs because a lot of writers record their own; they keep the best for themselves.

Olivia Newton-John

#70. I was able to work out all sorts of attitudes to style and event and character, all of which affected the way I came to think about my own writing. I believe that all good writers are original.

Margaret Mahy

#71. When you work on big commercial movies, of course there's more money involved and you can still do some good work. But with an independent, you get films that are really close to the writers' and directors' heart. Somehow it becomes a little deeper. A little more meat and not as much flash.

Dennis Haysbert

#72. This is the first lesson for writers - or anyone - who conducts interviews: If you want someone to talk, you've got to know how to listen. And good listening is a surprisingly active process. The interviewee is your focus of attention; you are there to hear what he says and thinks, exclusively.

Lee Gutkind

#73. There's sort of a very symbiotic thing that happens on good TV shows with great writers, which is that they start to sort of embrace who the actors are and try to make the roles more specific to what they bring and what they can do.

Lucas Neff

#74. Over the years, I developed a theory about why writers are such procrastinators: We were too good in English class. This sounds crazy, but hear me out.

Megan McArdle

#75. Style and voice are different. Style is standard conventions of writing; voice is the distinct way an individual puts words together. All good writers have a near-uniform understanding of style, but a voice all their own.

Naveed Saleh

#76. Princess Rose should indeed be a TV movie, assuming something doesn't go wrong. I don't know how good a movie it will be, because the way movie folk think is different from the way writers think, and I distrust what isn't done my way. This is what I call a healthy paranoia.

Piers Anthony

#77. Well, the world has a million writers. One would think, then, that good thought would be as familiar as air and water, and the gifts of each new hour would exclude the last. Yet we can count all our good books; nay, I remember any beautiful verse for twenty years.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#78. As writers, we must keep throwing problems at our characters. Conflict is the heart of good storytelling. Hiking in nature along a twisting trail can remind us what a good story feels like. It's the opposite of a treadmill - or an interstate highway.

Kate Klise

#79. Some writers refuse to lay their heads peaceably on the pillow of literary history in order to give posterity good dreams.
review in London Review of Books, of the works of Knut Hamsun (26 nov 1998)

James Wood

#80. Anecdotes don't make good stories. Generally I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdotes were about.

Alice Munro

#81. My grandfather had been a newspaper reporter, as was my uncle. They were pretty good writers and so I thought maybe somewhere down the line I would do some writing.

Gene Hackman

#82. I find that with any good run on a show with good writers, they put something on paper, and you put something back on film, and that affects what they put on the paper the next time.

Dallas Roberts

#83. Fans write to us via our publisher and more than ever via the Internet, blogs and fan sites, and good writers should be actively seeking out that interaction. Gone are the days when writers are dead or hidden away in dusty attics; nowadays, you've got to get out there.

Chris Riddell

#84. One Bagatelle, and I'll raise you a novel," Megan had tweeted back.
"Writing for tea? Now that would have been a solution for the British empire," Laura returned.
"Writing for me," Megan had typed.
"I'll write you a tea fortune."
"No deal. I want a novel. September sounds good.

L.L. Barkat

#85. Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.

Flannery O'Connor

#86. We can all agree that tea is good for the body. However, tea is very good for our hair too.

Monica Millner

#87. I don't know about other writers, but for myself, to write I must be relatively quiet - it's very difficult to write with the telephone and the doorbell ringing and conversation going on; I'm not that good a writer to write through all that!

Ray Charles

#88. One must read all writers twice
the good as well as the bad. The one kind will be recognized; the other, unmasked.

Karl Kraus

#89. Young writers shouldn't be afraid of striving to emulate their favorites. It's a good way to learn, as long as you move on from it and don't publish too many of the results.

Poppy Z. Brite

#90. I always think the insecurity is going to go away, but it's always there. Only bad writers think they're good.

Harlan Coben

#91. You don't have to take it out on my typewrite ya' know. It's not the machine's fault that you can't write. It's a sin to do that to a good machine.

Sam Shepard

#92. Good writers are in the business of leaving signposts saying, Tour my world, see and feel it through my eyes; I am your guide.

Larry King

#93. Even the Sun shed tears once in a while

Sheeja Jose

#94. I never could figure out how those people like Bukowski could be both carousers and writers at the same time, because to me writing takes as much destructive energy as it takes to be a really good professional drunk.

Dan Chaon

#95. Try to see the world from the eyes of an old man! Old eyes are a good place to begin with for understanding the truths!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#96. A thrilling story can be dull if told badly, but even the most mundane event can be elevated into a tale of epic scale by a good storyteller.

Johnny Rich

#97. When they do bring on new people, it's good for the show. It's like getting a new toy. The writers enjoy it because it's a whole new character that they can write for, one that they aren't used to writing for. They can try different things.

Mark-Paul Gosselaar

#98. Some creative writing programs seem evil, but my experience at Irvine was totally the opposite, where I feel like they were really good at focusing in on each writers voice and setting. When I felt like I was obligated to write a story that was more typical, no one really liked it.

Aimee Bender

#99. Much to my surprise, there's a sense for people in the cable industry that fiction writers might actually be good at script writing. You can write dialogue!

Matthew Specktor

#100. Good writers borrow. The best writers steal.

Aaron Sorkin