Good Writers Quotes

• Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader - not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.

  E. L. Doctorow

  Nature, Rain, Writing

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• 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

  Writing, Past, Ideas

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• Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.

  Samuel Johnson

  Science, Belief, Favourite

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• All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Writing, Swimming, History

  Letter to Frances Scott Fitzgerald (undated)

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• Writing is the flip side of sex - it's good only when it's over.

  Hunter S. Thompson

  Sex, Writing, Flip

  FaceBook post by Hunter S. Thompson from Aug 18, 2014

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• The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.

  Sylvia Plath

  Inspirational, Life, Beautiful

  Sylvia Plath (2007). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.545, Anchor

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• Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters.

  Neil Gaiman

  Writing, May, Matter

  "Somewhat Less Sinister Ducks". Personal Website, journal.neilgaiman.com. April 23, 2004.

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• Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.

  William Faulkner

  Writing, Epic, Study

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• A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Book, Reading, Hero

  1905 Heretics, ch.15.

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• The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

  Samuel Johnson

  Wisdom, Writing, Procrastination

  Statement on April 14, 1775. "Life of Samuel Johnson". Book by James Boswell. Volume II, 1791.

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• To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.

  Herman Melville

  Book, Writing, Fleas

  Moby Dick ch. 104 (1851)

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• Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.

  Anne Lamott

  Writing, Effort, Needs

  Anne Lamott (2007). “Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life”, p.25, Anchor

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• And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.

  Sylvia Plath

  Life, Sad, Writing

  Sylvia Plath (2013). “The Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.85, Anchor

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• There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good stories seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky.

  Stephen King

  Encouraging, Islands, Sky

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• Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but that's the only way you can do anything really good.

  William Faulkner

  Inspiring, Writing, May

  "A Faulkner perspective: a companion-guide to the limited first edition of the Selected letters of William Faulkner".

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• Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

  T. S. Eliot

  Art, Writing, Reading Poetry

  The Sacred Wood "Philip Massinger" (1920)

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• The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis.

  William Styron

  Writing, Age, Neurosis

  William Styron, James L. W. West (1985). “Conversations with William Styron”, p.19, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.

  Ernest Hemingway

  Truth, Book, Reading

  Esquire, Dec. 1934

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• The test of any good fiction is that you should care something for the characters; the good to succeed, the bad to fail. The trouble with most fiction is that you want them all to land in hell, together, as quickly as possible.

  Mark Twain

  Writing, Character, Land

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• Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle 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

  Education, Teacher, Women

  Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose "The Nature and Aims of Fiction" (1969)

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• If you have other things in your life-family, friends, good productive day work-these can interact with your writing and the sum will be all the richer.

  David Brin

  Writing, Family Friends, Family Life

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• If you read good books, when you write, good books will come out of you.

  Natalie Goldberg

  Book, Writing, Ifs

  Natalie Goldberg (2016). “Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within”, p.67, Shambhala Publications

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• What I like in a good author is not what he says but what he whispers.

  Logan Pearsall Smith

  Inspirational, Book, Writing

  All Trivia (1933) "Afterthoughts" pt. 5

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• Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.

  Mark Twain

  Writing, Confusing, Easy

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  Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

  Honesty, Integrity, Writing

  1847; quoted by propagandist and language maven William Safire, New York Times Magazine, 13 December 1998.

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