Quotes About Writing

I was a writer. I just wasn't a very good one. I was lucky enough to have a playwriting teacher who told me that I'd be a better actor than I would a playwright.

Writing stopped being fun when I discovered the difference between good writing and bad and, even more terrifying, the difference between it and true art. And after that, the whip came down.

It's probably true that everyone has a book in them, although it may not be a very good one.

The secret of good writing is to say an old thing in a new way or to say a new thing in an old way.

If writers were good businessmen, they'd have too much sense to be writers.

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.

You can't be a good writer without being a good thinker.

One can't write without having read - you have to read before beginning to write - and universities offer a very good opportunity to read.

No blur of inexactness, no cloud of vagueness, is allowable in good writing; from the first seeing to the last putting down, there must be steady lucidity and uncompromise of purpose.

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

Good writing comes from good talent.

The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from.

Good writing is good writing, and I'm so happy when I read it.

On a good day I write, all day.

the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat

Because good writing in a TV cartoon is so rare, I think the animation on The Simpsons is often overlooked.

Late night writing is also good, too, but in New York, you've got neighbors. I try to be a good neighbor.

I am not a good enough writer to have an agenda or come up with a message and try to put it into a song. It's more like you write what comes to you... You try to reflect the mood of the songs.

So far as good writing goes, the use of the exclamation mark is a sign of failure. It is the literary equivalent of a man holding up a card reading LAUGHTER to a studio audience.

Writing is good, thinking is better. Cleverness is good, patience is better.

There is only one way to defeat the enemy, and that is to write as well as one can. The best argument is an undeniably good book.

Punctuation has its own philosophy, just as style does, although not as language does. Style is a good understanding of language, punctuation is a good understanding of style.

Good writing is like a windowpane.

Nothing you write, if you hope to be good, will ever come out as you first hoped.