Good Writers Quotes

Nowadays I'm not even sure if newspapers take into account whether a person is a good writer. ~ Bob Schieffer

Mice: But reading all the good writers might discourage you.
Y.C.: Then you ought to be discouraged. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

But most good writers are Don Quixote at heart, and unreasonableness is often a condition of art. ~ Ha Jin

In the hands of good writers, you have the opportunity to present both sides of an opinion equally and that you leave it to the audience to listen and then make up their own minds. ~ Mandy Patinkin

Five common traits of good writers: (1) They have something to say. (2) They read widely and have done so since childhood. (3) They possess what Isaac Asimov calls a "capacity for clear thought," able to go from point to point in an orderly sequence, an A to Z approach. (4) They're geniuses at putting their emotions into words. (5) They possess an insatiable curiosity, constantly asking Why and How. ~ James J. Kilpatrick

Do we have good writers, producers and actors in the U.K.? Yes we do. ~ Eric Fellner

All really good writers use fragments. ~ Priscilla Long

So many interviews, even ones that I consider really intelligent and good writers, will do the, like, 'Oh, you're not taking your clothes off like Miley Cyrus and all these girls' thing, which to me is just the weirdest thing to say to someone ... Now when people are like, 'Tell me what you think of Miley!' I'll say, 'What do you think of Miley?' and they'll flounder and say, 'Well, I think she's really talented ... ' and I'm like, there you go. ~ Lorde

I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter. ~ James A. Michener

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

It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. ~ E.B. White

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

Wilbur never forgot Charlotte. Although he loved her children and grandchildren dearly, none of the new spiders ever quite took her place in his heart. She was in a class by herself. It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both. ~ E.B. White

All good writers inspire me as I have never thought I was any good. As far as a writer who made me think I could do it, it was Henry Miller. Not because I thought he was so simple that I reckoned I could pull it off as well, but it was his freedom and guts that really moved me to want to write all the time. ~ Henry Rollins

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

A good writer gets better only by learning to cut, to remove the ornamental, the descriptive, the narrative, and especially the deeply felt and meaningful. What remains? The story remains. ~ David Mamet

But good writers have a reason for doing things the way they do them, and if you tinker with their work, taking it upon yourself to neutralize a slightly eccentric usage or zap a comma or sharpen the emphasis of something that the writer was deliberately keeping obscure, you are not helping. In my experience, the really great writers enjoy the editorial process. They weigh queries, and they accept or reject them for good reasons. They are not defensive. The whole point of having things read before publication is to test their effect on a general reader. You want to make sure when you go out there that the tag on the back of your collar isn't poking up - unless, of course, you are deliberately wearing your clothes inside out. ~ Mary Norris

Good writers may "tell" about almost anything in fiction except the characters' feelings. One may tell the reader that the character went to a private school (one need not show a scene at the private school if the scene has no importance for the rest of the narrative), or one may tell the reader that the character hates spaghetti; but with rare exceptions the characters' feelings must be demonstrated: fear, love, excitement, doubt, embarrassment, despair become real only when they take the form of events - action (or gesture), dialogue, or physical reaction to setting. Detail is the lifeblood of fiction. ~ John Gardner

A good writer cannot avoid having social consciousness. I don't mean this about small pieces of writing, but about a big book. If it's a big book, there has to be more than one undertow. ~ Marguerite Young

A good writer is one you can read without breaking a sweat. ~ Patricia T. O'Conner

When you combine something to say with the skill to say it properly, then you've got a good writer. ~ Theodore Sturgeon

What I always wanted to get seen as was as a good actor, when it was the acting I was doing. When I'm writing, I want to try to be seen as a good writer. Not as somebody with a particular idea to sell, or something like that. ~ Alan Alda

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

Heavy is the head that holds the pen of creation. We construct these characters from nothing, molding them from our imaginations. We give them hopes and dreams and unique personalities until they feel so real you're mind believes it must be so. We watch them grow by our hands, not always knowing the paths they will choose with the obstacles we throw at them. They take on a life of their own and often surprise even us by their actions we couldn't have imagined before it poured out of us onto the paper. We could change it if we really wanted to, but it would be forced and not be true to the characters. And when something tragic happens and one is lost, we feel that loss even though we know they were not a friend, a family member or even ourselves. It can be a hard thing to voice sometimes, to give tribute to the one's left behind with the real sadness over something not so real. But we find the words and press on to the next challenge, because that's what good writers do. ~ Jennifer A. Marsh

I have friends, some of whom are spectacularly good writers, who really want someone to edit them. I don't register that impulse. It's like the impulse for wanting a dog. ~ Fran Lebowitz

Most writers write to say something about other people - and it doesn't last. Good writers write to find out about themselves - and it lasts forever. ~ Gloria Steinem

I have never thought of myself as a good writer. Anyone who wants reassurance of that should read one of my first drafts. But I'm one of the world's great rewriters. ~ James A. Michener

The things that make you a functional citizen in society - manners, discretion, cordiality - don't necessarily make you a good writer. Writing needs raw truth, wants your suffering and darkness on the table, revels in a cutting mind that takes no prisoners ... ~ Natalie Goldberg

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

A good writer does not write as people write, but as he writes. ~ Baron De Montesquieu

Good writers borrow from other writers. Great writers steal from them outright. ~ Aaron Sorkin

There is this thing called the university, and everybody goes there now. And there are these things called teachers who make students read this book with good ideas or that book with good ideas until that's where we get our ideas. We don't think them; we read them in books.
I like Utopian talk, speculation about what our planet should be, anger about what our planet is.
I think writers are the most important members of society, not just potentially but actually. Good writers must have and stand by their own ideas. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

He who is afraid to use an "I" in his writing will never make a good writer. ~ Lin Yutang

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

When you start searching for 'pure elements' in literature you will find that literature has been created by the following classes of persons:

Inventors. Men who found a new process, or whose extant work gives us the first known example of a process.

The masters. Men who combined a number of such processes, and who used them as well as or better than the inventors.

The diluters. Men who came after the first two kinds of writer, and couldn't do the job quite as well.

Good writers without salient qualities. Men who are fortunate enough to be born when the literature of a given country is in good working order, or when some particular branch of writing is 'healthy'. For example, men who wrote sonnets in Dante's time, men who wrote short lyrics in Shakespeare's time or for several decades thereafter, or who wrote French novels and stories after Flaubert had shown them how.

Writers of belles-lettres. That is, men who didn't really invent anything, but who specialized in some particular part of writing, who couldn't be considered as 'great men' or as authors who were trying to give a complete presentation of life, or of their epoch.

The starters of crazes.
Until the reader knows the first two categories he will never be able 'to see the wood for the trees'. He may know what he 'likes'. He may be a 'compleat book-lover', with a large library of beautifully printed books, bound in the most luxurious bindings, ~ Ezra Pound

Evan Handler is not only a fine actor, he's a damn good writer. It's Only Temporary is wise and funny and as righteously indignant as it is endearingly self-effacing. In what may be a literary first, the book actually left me wanting more. ~ Meghan Daum

All good writing is like swimming underwater and holding your breath. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Good writers show rather than tell. Stories are told in action. Life stories are no different. ~ Donald Miller

I don't think that there are very many good writers who don't live without a sense of tension. If they haven't got one immediately available to them, then they usually manage to manufacture it in their private lives. ~ John Le Carre

I always think that good writers should be growing up on the brink of death - it really lets them see mortality very clearly. ~ Gary Shteyngart

She was in a class by herself. It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writers. Charlotte was both. ~ E.B. White

If you are a good writer - and I think I am - you are able to handle any kind of group and imagine their lives. ~ Earl Hamner, Jr.

To be a good writer ... read a lot and write every day. ~ Neil Gaiman

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

When you collaborate with someone else on something creative, you get to places that you would never get to on your own. The way an idea builds as it careens back and forth between good writers is so unpredictable. Sometimes it depends on people misunderstanding each other, and that's why I don't think there's any such thing as a mistake in the creative process. You never know where it might lead. ~ John Cleese

Good writers will, indeed, do well to imitate the ingenious traveller ... who always proportions his stay in any place. ~ Henry Fielding

None of this excuses anyone from mastering the basic ideas and terminology of economics. The intelligent layman must expect also to encounter good economists who are difficult writers even though some of the best have been very good writers. He should know, moreover, that at least for a few great men ambiguity of expression has been a positive asset. But with these exceptions he may safely conclude that what is wholly mysterious in economics is not likely to be important. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

Nobody objects to a woman being a good writer or sculptor or geneticist if at the same time she manages to be a good wife, a good mother, good-looking, good-tempered, well-dressed, well-groomed, and unaggressive. ~ Marya Mannes

Usually people who do bad things make good writers.I did a lot of bad things, which is why my novels are interesting. ~ Jakucho Setouchi

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

To be a good writer, you not only have to write a great deal but you have to care. You do not have to have a complicated moral philosophy. But a writer always tries, I think, to be a part of a solution, to understand a little about life and to pass this on. ~ Anne Lamott

Every good writer has much idiom; it is the life and spirit of language. ~ Walter Savage Landor

Good writers practice. They take time to write, crafting and editing a piece until it's just right. They spend hours and days just revising. Good writers take criticism on the chin and say "thank you" to helpful feedback; they listen to both the external and internal voices that drive them. And they use it all to make their writing better. They're resigned to the fact that first drafts suck and that the true mark of a champion is a commitment to the craft. It's not about writing in spurts of inspiration. It's about doing the work, day-in and day-out. Good writers push through because they believe in what they're doing. They understand this is more than a profession or hobby. It's a calling, a vocation. ~ Jeff Goins

There are very few good writers about art, and you either get art-fashion writing with trendy views or you get very traditional writing. Occasionally, you get people who can write in an interesting way. Really, I think in a sense art writing needs to be renewed as well. It's in a pretty bad condition. ~ Marc Quinn

A good writer wants from us - or has no right to ask more than - intelligence, good faith and time. ~ John Jeremiah Sullivan

Good writers don't moralize, nor do they preach, but they do create longing for the true and the beautiful, and that is why you must write with Christ at the center of your reason for writing. That does not mean that every book must be a retelling of Luke's gospel, however, every worthy book written by a Christian will direct readers away from self, and sin, and put them on a quest for God and his gospel. Create longing for these things. ~ Douglas Bond

Get up from your desk and wander outside occasionally. To be a good writer one needs to be a good observer, and there isn't a lot to be observed at desk level. ~ Jane Yolen

This branch of mathematics [Probability] is the only one, I believe, in which good writers frequently get results which are entirely erroneous. ~ Charles Sanders Peirce

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

Good writers are of necessity rare. ~ George Henry Lewes

A good writer is not someone who knows how to write- but how to rewrite ~ William Goldman

Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You'd find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion. 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. That's my definition anyway. Telling detail. Fresh detail. 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. So now you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life. ~ Ray Bradbury

If you need drugs to be a good writer, you are not a good writer. ~ Rod Serling

Indeed, I am repeatedly astonished by the number of really good writers who understand human beings so well on paper but don't know how to deal with them in real life. ~ Mark Haddon

I'd like to have money. And I'd like to be a good writer. These two can come together, and I hope they will, but if that's too adorable, I'd rather have money. ~ Dorothy Parker

I would like it to be said that I was a good writer of detective and thriller stories. ~ Agatha Christie

Good writers borrow. The best writers steal. ~ Aaron Sorkin

A good writer always works at the impossible. ~ John Steinbeck

I knew I would read all kinds of books and try to get at what it is that makes good writers good. But I made no promises that I would write books a lot of people would like to read. ~ Carl Sandburg

Plot is, I think, the good writer's last resort and the dullard's first choice. The story which results from it is apt to feel artificial and labored. I lean more heavily on intuition, and have been able to do that because my books tend to be based on situation rather than story. Some of the ideas which have produced those books are more complex than others, but the majority start out with the stark simplicity of a department store window display or a waxwork tableau. I want to put a group of characters (perhaps a pair; perhaps even just one) in some sort of predicament and then watch them try to work themselves free. My job isn't to help them work their way free, or manipulate them to safety - those are jobs which require the noisy jackhammer of plot - but to watch what happens and then write it down. ~ Stephen King

Good writers have two things in common: they prefer to be understood rather than admired; and they do not write for knowing and over-acute readers. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Sometimes I suspect that good readers are even blacker and rarer swans than good writers. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

Ian McEwan is a very good writer; the first half of Atonement alone would ensure him a lasting place in English letters. ~ John Banville

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

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

Philip Roth is a good writer, but I wouldn't want to shake hands with him. ~ Jacqueline Susann

Writing is physical work. It's sweaty work. You just can't will yourself to become a good writer. You really have to work at it. ~ Wil Haygood

A good reader is nearly as rare as a good writer. People bring their prejudices, whether friendly or adverse. They are lamp and spectacles, lighting and magnifying the page. ~ Robert Aris Willmott

Nothing can destroy the good writer. The only thing that can alter the good writer is death. Good ones don't have time to bother with success or getting rich. ~ William Faulkner

The good writers touch life. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. ~ Ray Bradbury

The good stories, of course, write themselves. And somebody wants to know who are the really good writers, and how many of them there are. There aren't any. Most of the writers are likeable frauds. Some are unlikable frauds. ~ R.A. Lafferty

I'm not famous for my back story investigations; I'm lucky that I work with good writers and it's usually in the script. ~ Bill Nighy

Stop to read good writers who are witty and are fun, 'cause that's the kind of fuel on which your Train of Thought will run. ~ Mister Lemur

Good writers hate bad writing but hating bad writing doesn't make you good. Writing badly does. ~ Dan Harmon

In order to be a good writer, you've got to be a bad boss. Self-discipline and stamina are the two major arms in a writer's arsenal. ~ Leon Uris

Good writers define reality
Bad ones merely restate it. ~ Edward Albee

Only bad writers think they're good. ~ Harlan Coben

When the fad changed from folk to rock, they didn't take along any good writers. ~ Mary Travers

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

Whether the vessel is a legal document or a rap song, language is often chosen ot exclude. To use a scholarly phrase, "discourse communities" are often gated,so it's the good writer's job to offer readers a set of keys. ~ Roy Peter Clark

A good writer must be like the birds of a dark forest; you can't see them, but you can hear their mysterious and wise voices! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Good art can come out of thieves, bootleggers, or horse swipes. People really are afraid to find out just how much hardship and poverty they can stand. They are afraid to find out how tough they are. Nothing can destroy the good writer. The only thing that can alter the good writer is death. Good ones don't have time to bother with success or getting rich. Success is feminine and like a woman; if you cringe before her, she will override you. So the way to treat her is to show her the back of your hand. Then maybe she will do the crawling. ~ William Faulkner

And the good writer chooses his words for their 'meaning', but that meaning is not a a set, cut-off thing like the move of knight or pawn on a chess-board. It comes up with roots, with associations, with how and where the word is familiarly used, or where it has been used brilliantly or memorably. ~ Ezra Pound

Good writers are avid readers. They have absorbed a vast inventory of words, idioms, constructions, tropes, and rhetorical tricks, and with them a sensitivity to how they mesh and how they clash. This is the elusive "ear" of a skilled writer-the tacit sense of style which every honest stylebook, echoing Wilde, confesses cannot be explicitly taught. Biographers of great authors always try to track down the books their subjects read when they were young, because they know these sources hold the key to their development as writers. ~ Steven Pinker

Copywriters, journalists, mainstream authors, ghostwriters, bloggers and advertising creatives have as much right to think of themselves as good writers as academics, poets, or literary novelists. ~ Sara Sheridan

Why has the South produced so many good writers? Because we got beat. ~ Walker Percy

A good writer is not, per se, a good book critic. No more so than a good drunk is automatically a good bartender. ~ Jim Bishop

Be wary of feeling as through there is not enough room at the table. Oftentimes a female Chinese-American might feel as through she is in competition with another Chinese-American woman writer of the same generation. A writer friend of mine calls it the "There Can Only Be One ... " syndrome. This isn't "Survivor." The more good writers, of all walks of life and all ethnicities and persuasions, the better. ~ ZZ Packer

That has to remain the principal reason for doing it, doesn't it? I know it's possible to write for money, and many very good writers have done so. But for me, it has to remain the principal thing that I actually want to do the writing. ~ Jonathan Kellerman

That's the trouble with good writers. Only the bad ones make you want to do the human thing and look away. ~ Nick Hornby