What Is Good Writing Quotes

#1. Write for yourself, not for a perceived audience. If you do, you'll mostly fall flat on your face, because it's impossible to judge what people want. And you have to read. That's how you learn what is good writing and what is bad. Then the main thing is application. It's hard work.

Wilbur Smith

#2. Good writing is difficult no matter what the reader's age-and children deserve the best.

Aaron Shepard

#3. We writers don't really think about whether what we write is good or not. It's too much to worry about. We just put the words down, trying to get them right, operating by some inner sense of pitch and proportion, and from time to time, we stick the stuff in an envelope and ship it to an editor.

Garrison Keillor

#4. 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

#5. I don't really care about how good a song is, I only want them to reflect what I felt when I was writing them

Lana Del Rey

#6. Writing good editorials is chiefly telling the people what they think, not what you think.

Arthur Brisbane

#7. Anuj Bahari has always been a really good literary agent for me. What a good agent does is that he manages many of your business aspects so you can keep your time free for writing.

Amish Tripathi

#8. Asking for advice about what you should write is a little like asking for help getting dressed. I can you tell you what I think looks good, but you have to wear it. And as every fashion victim knows, very few people look good in everything.

Betsy Lerner

#9. Don't hedge your prose with little timidities. Good writing is lean and confident ... Every little qualifier whittles away some fraction of the reader's trust. Readers want a writer who believes in himself and in what he is saying. Don't diminish that belief. Don't be kind of bold. Be bold.

William Zinsser

#10. 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

#11. What I enjoy most are those times when I get an idea and it just flows - the words coming so fast that I'm scribbling to keep up with my characters. I don't have any writing must-haves; this is a good thing, since I've done a lot of my writing in random places like the playground or the subway.

Leah Cypess

#12. When you have that first flash of what you think is going to be a great idea-from the mouth, from the hands-that's an amazing feeling. I don't think anything's quite as good as that.

Daryl Hall

#13. (Feedback) People become addicted to it. That's why journalism is so popular, because you want to hear, every day, what people think of what you just wrote. I think a little patience on that front can be good, too.

Zadie Smith

#14. Self-trust is so important. When you launch on a story, make your neck loose, feel free, good-natured. And be lazy. Feel that you are going to throw it away. Try writing utterly unplanned stories and see what comes out.

Brenda Ueland

#15. Two easy steps to be a good writer:
1. Don't write what everyone is writing.
2. Write what everyone is trying to write.

Himanshu Chhabra

#16. I never plan ahead, with the exception of the Amber books which had to proceed in sequence. But I don't really like to know what I'm going to be working on a year in advance. So I just sign blank contracts for books and whatever strikes me as a good idea is what I write about.

Roger Zelazny

#17. I cannot write as well as some people; my talent is in coming up with good stories about lawyers.That is what I am good at.

John Grisham

#18. What is good for you creatively is usually bad commercially. You thrive financially by sticking to a series and not fiddling about too much. You do yourself harm by moving away from the series and the genre. By trying things not based in that particular mode of writing, you will just lose readers.

John Connolly

#19. I reread? A lie! I don't dare reread. I can't reread. What good would it do me to reread? The person in the writing is someone else. I no longer understand a thing ...

Fernando Pessoa

#20. 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

#21. in the writing of good English is indispensable to any learned man who expects to make his learning count for what it ought to count in the effect on his fellow men.

Theodore Roosevelt

#22. What separates the professionally successful ... from all the rest is their ability to stay steady, to have stamina. It is one thing to write a good sentence, another to write a good book.

Katy Lederer

#23. 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

#24. Maybe it's a good idea," said Kathy.

"Why is that?"

"Well - you have a British sensibility."

"What does that mean?"

"I just mean people over there might like it." She gestured in the direction of England.

Charlie Close

#25. What do you do when your head - your imagination is filled with tales to last a hundred lifetimes?

You focus on the really good ones!

Storm Princeholm

#26. I think it's no coincidence that people who are good at writing far-out fiction are also good at meta-fiction. Think of all the best Phillip K. Dick stories, where you experience a sort of dislocation, and suddenly what you think you've been reading is, in fact, something else entirely.

Paul Park

#27. Probably writers should forget what it was like to write the last novel, and the one before that, and the one before that, or we should all be plumbers. It must be good to be a plumber. Everyone is happy to see you, and no one reviews your work.

Susan Fromberg Schaeffer

#28. What you feel when you're writing is the relief of thinking: if you write the sentence correctly, you're clarifying. If you write the right sentence, nothing feels as good.

Vivian Gornick

#29. What I can tell you is DO IT. Publish book one and get book two out as soon as possible. There are very few Harper Lee's. Most of us are going to have to write a few books to get good at it.

Dan Alatorre

#30. I also once heard that if you have enough good ideas for three or four great novels, then what you probably have is actually enough ideas for one good one. That has stayed with me.

Darren White

#31. What you need to remember is that there's a difference between lecturing about what you know and using it to enrich the story. The latter is good. The former is not.

Stephen King

#32. A cop told me, a long time ago, that there's no substitute for knowing what you're doing. Most of us scribblers do not. The ones that're any good are aware of this. The rest write silly stuff. The trouble is this: The readers know it.

George V. Higgins

#33. Good writing takes place at intersections, at what you might call knots, at places where the society is snarled or knotted up.

Margaret Atwood

#34. This is what I wanted to do from the very beginning: write songs and make records and tour them with a good live band.

Christopher Owens

#35. I think writers like to see how people bring their words to life, and it's always surprising. Always, no matter what, whether it's good or bad, it's always surprising because a whole human being is coming to that piece of writing.

Lisa Edelstein

#36. It doesn't matter if your lead character is good or bad. He just has to be interesting, and he has to be good at what he does.

David Chase

#37. Early on, it's good to develop the ability to write. Learning to write is a useful exercise, even if what you're writing about is not that relevant.

Walter Gilbert

#38. I don't tend to redraft, I will try to tidy it up, but basically I feel what I write down first has got the impetus, it may be clumsy, it may be repetitive, but a good editor can take that out. That first writing bit is the best thing you will do.

Gerald Seymour

#39. The good writer, the great writer, has what I have called the three S's: the power to see, to sense, and to say. That is, he is perceptive, he is feeling, and he has the power to express in language what he observes and reacts to.

Lawrence Clark Powell

#40. My writing is progressing slowly, but at least it's moving forward. I'm sure that's the case. The only problem is that I'm never absolutely certain that what I've written is any good.

Mikhail Bulgakov

#41. Your writing is still yours, no matter what the contract or your editor might say. Trust your gut. It knows when you're screwing up. Your brain will lie to you. It loves the paycheck, it loves positive feedback. Your gut is under no obligation to make you feel good.

Gail Simone

#42. The music industry is not what it used to be. Being in a good band is great, and I've been lucky to be in great bands. I've done solo stuff, and that's been great. I also produce rock bands and I do co-writes, where I write with different singers in bands and songwriters.

James Iha

#43. I think films are about having a good time, so I don't know that there's a message. The message of a film is always what a critic writes, and the fun of a film or the emotion of a film is what the audience feels.

Steve Martin

#44. If I write songs and I think they sound good, then that's it. That's what I do. I'm not a technical musician, which is fine for rock and roll.

Creed Bratton

#45. There is a whole industry in America of people who want to write, and those who teach it. Even if the students don't end up writing, what's good about them taking the courses is, they become great readers, learning to appreciate the writing.

Edmund White

#46. I don't know why he [Darren Star] is so good at writing for women. Maybe he just likes women. I'm not quite sure what the magic recipe is, other than he just knows how to entertain an audience, and he knows when to be gooey and sweet, and when to be provocative and naughty.

Sutton Foster

#47. I don't really have the gift of the sustained narrative that you need to write a book. I've tried a couple of times, and it just doesn't work. But I get some good passages, so what I'm going to do is just take sections out of them.

Robyn Hitchcock

#48. Write regularly, whether you feel like writing or not, and whether you think what you're writing is any good or not.

Anne Lamott

#49. You know how it is with writing. You just write what you want to write. There's no way to predict what is good or bad. You just do what you think is funny, and either it works or you're finished. It's impossible to predict anything.

Colin Quinn

#50. Make sure you're realistic about what you can do, but if you have a good lead with something, making the plunge into full-time writing is the only way to go.

Ben Clymer

#51. The key thing is, don't worry about if anyone is reading you or not. Figure out your voice and figure out what you want to write about, what you're good at, what you like doing.

Will Leitch

#52. I didn't write with a target audience in mind. What excited me was how much I would enjoy writing about Harry. I never thought about writing for children - children's books chose me. I think if it is a good book anyone will read it.

J.K. Rowling

#53. What it is is that comedy is underrepresented in every actor's life, because it's so bloody difficult to write. Anyone can write; and then you leave it to special effects to make it look good. But comedy, you've got to do some writing.

Michael Caine

#54. I'm not good at comparing and contrasting. I take what's in front of me for what it is, although I guess there's something about Paul's realistic writing that is like Cassavetes.

John Cassavetes

#55. I find dictating in the mass media particularly good because you're writing for voice anyway; you're writing for people to say a line and, consequently, saying a line through a machine is quite a valid test for the validity of what you're saying.

Rod Serling

#56. I think there's a joy to be had in taking readers where they just don't want to go. If you are writing a properly realist novel, then don't blink. Why not see something for what it is and render it truthfully? I find it a good way of going about writing - not to blink.

Neel Mukherjee

#57. Improvisation, it is a mystery. You can write a book about it, but by the end no one still knows what it is. When I improvise and I'm in good form, I'm like somebody half sleeping. I even forget there are people in front of me. Great improvisers are like priests; they are thinking only of their god.

Stephane Grappelli

#58. What makes a good writer of history is a guy who is suspicious. Suspicion marks the real difference between the man who wants to write honest history and the one who'd rather write a good story.

Jim Bishop

#59. Where do you think my new novel is? In the waste basket. I can see myself that it's no good on earth, and when a loving author realizes this, what would be the judgment of a critical public?

Jean Webster

#60. So much of what we read nowadays is there one moment and gone the next. When you read something good, cherish it.

Carla H. Krueger

#61. There's good movies and there's bad movies. The genres are never dead, it's just about how to apply them and articulate them and execute them - the story, the quality of the writing, the acting, the design elements, the directorial execution - all these things make it what it is.

Andy Garcia

#62. I stroked a big red A on top of his paper. Looked at it for a moment or two, then added a big red +. Because it was good, and because his pain had evoked an emotional reaction in me, his reader. And isn't that what A+ writing is supposed to do? Evoke a response?

Stephen King

#63. I'm not very good at praying, but what I experience when I'm writing a poem is close to prayer.

Denise Levertov

#64. Every day I must prove to myself I am a writer. The knowledge goes away in my sleep. What I wrote yesterday was paltry, meager, so flawed it is barely anything. Or, if it is good, I am no longer the person who could write it.

Bonnie Friedman

#65. My inspiration for writing is all the wonderful books that I read as a child and that I still read. I think that for those of us who write, when we find a wonderful book written by someone else, we don't really get jealous, we get inspired, and that's kind of the mark of what a good writer is.

Patricia MacLachlan

#66. I think whatever an artist does, it just has to be quality and good. I think the way Kanye's doing what he's doing with the Auto-Tune is actually creative because he just writes good melodies. He just writes good songs. He's just gifted.

Will Ferrell

#67. It may be observed of good writing, as of good blood, that it is much easier to say what it is composed of than to compose it.

Charles Caleb Colton

#68. Every good writer I know needs to go into some deep, quiet place to do work that is fully imagined. And what the Internet brings is lots of vulgar data. It is the antithesis of the imagination. It leaves nothing to the imagination.

Jonathan Franzen

#69. One of the things that I love about writing novels is that it really doesn't matter what next step you take as long as you're pursuing some intuition or instinct. Of course, then, intuitions or instincts don't make for great novels, but they often make for good first drafts.

Jonathan Safran Foer

#70. My mother is changing history. She is making her balalaika-smashing mother into a heroine. Does she want me to do the same for her? Is that what good children do for their parents? What about good writers?

Gary Shteyngart

#71. I'm glad you are feeling more deeply drawn into your book; as for your not being sure now what it is about, does anyone ever know completely what they are writing about - if they are any good?

Truman Capote

#72. Good writing , like gold , combines lustrous lucidity with high density. What this means is good writing is packed with hints.

Eric Hoffer

#73. I just write what I think is good and keep it at a thousand words.

Henry Rollins

#74. Rules such as "Write what you know," and "Show, don't tell," while doubtlessly grounded in good sense, can be ignored with impunity by any novelist nimble enough to get away with it. There is, in fact, only one rule in writing fiction: Whatever works, works.

Tom Robbins

#75. Remember that the basic rule of vocabulary is to use the first word that comes to your mind, if it is appropriate and colourful. If you hesitate, and cogitate, you will come up with another word...but it probably won't be as good as your first one, or as close to what you really mean.

Stephen King

#76. (W)hat I write when I force myself is generally just as good as what I write when I'm feeling inspired. It's mainly a matter of forcing yourself to write.

Tom Wolfe

#77. If I were you," Tom said, "I should stick to reading, writing and arithmetic." "But what good is it to teach a child to count, if you don't show him that he counts for something?" Tom held up his hands. "I'm sorry, you're losing me." Mary exhaled smoke. "Possibly I am.

Chris Cleave

#78. Write a page every single day, even if what you put on the page that day is no good - it's the only way to get better.

Emma Forrest

#79. I always appreciate people's opinions, but sometimes I have to take a step back and remember why I'm writing and what I want to do with it. Shutting out the voices is difficult but it's been good for me.

Veronica Roth

#80. And it's just anathema to being a writer. It's not healthy. But in another way, when I'm writing, what it's about for me is being good on the page. None of that noise could change the way I feel about my writing. Which is not always particularly positive.

Zadie Smith

#81. When you write a song it's sometimes in a desperate moment whn you can't really articulate it. What I love about lyrics is what T.S. Eliot said: 'Good poetry is felt before it is heard.' I'm a believer in that. It's those moments when you sit yourself down, and talk to yourself in the mirror.

Marcus Mumford

#82. Good writing is good writing no matter what genre you're writing in, and I believe that there are only a handful of fundamental craft tools that are essential for any genre-including nonfiction.

Georgia Heard

#83. What I expect from a good story is that it will tell me today what I can't know from any other source but that story, from its unique way of putting something into words, from the feeling that it implies.

Elena Ferrante

#84. I think it's good when people don't write good things about your work. I mean, what a great compliment it is to be called a charlatan.

Julian Schnabel

#85. I am profoundly uncertain how to write. I know what I love and what I like, because it's a direct passionate response. But when I write, I'm very uncertain whether it's good enough. That is, of course, the writer's agony.

Susan Sontag

#86. 'Skins' is about a group of teenagers in Bristol, and it's all about what they get up to and all the different things they do. I think it's a good show because it's come from a very real place, and there's a lot of young people involved in the writing.

Hannah Murray

#87. There is bad in all good authors: what a pity the converse isn't true!

Philip Larkin

#88. This is the life I live, and this is the stuff I experience. And like any good writer, I should just write about what goes in my life and what goes on around me. So that's what I chose to do.

Sune Rose Wagner

#89. Appealing to the five senses is the feature that will always set writing apart from the visual media. A good writer will tell us what the world smells like, what the textures are, what the sounds are, what the light looks like, what the weather is.

Janet Fitch

#90. When I was in college, I had the good fortune to have Joyce Carol Oates as my writing teacher. She told me that I could take an aspect of myself, and from that one bit of personality, I can create a character. This is what I have done, particularly in my novels.

Jonathan Ames

#91. Write about what you know and care deeply about. When one puts one's self on paper - that is what is called good writing.

Joel Chandler Harris

#92. Anecdotes don't make good stories. Dig down so far that what finally comes out is not even what you thought it was about.

Alice Munro

#93. A good ground rule for writing in any genre is, start with a form, then undermine its confidence in itself. Ask what it's afraid of, what it's trying to hide - then write that.

M. John Harrison

#94. A good story is [a] kind of irritant. You read it, then you cannot stop thinking about it. Eventually, your mind and heart encyst about it, and what occurs is a pearl of the soul.

Jane Yolen

#95. I've always claimed that success in writing - provided of course one had what it takes to make a writer - is like success in marriage, largely a question of good sportsmanship, of keeping on keeping on, of giving one's best and trying, everlastingly trying to make that best, better.

Emilie Loring

#96. You have to be an extremely good reader to appreciate what a good writer is. There are some people who are completely insensitive to good writing.

Robert Caro

#97. Screenwriting is always about what people say or do, whereas good writing is about a thought process or an abstract image or an internal monologue, none of which works on screen.

David Nicholls

#98. 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

#99. Other writers definitely influence my writing. What encourages me and inspires me is when I read a good book. It makes me want to be a better writer.

Kimberly Willis Holt

#100. The most important thing is to read as much as you can, like I did. It will give you an understanding of what makes good writing and it will enlarge your vocabulary.

J.K. Rowling