How To Be A Better Writer Quotes & Sayings

Be a complex person. The more ways you define yourself, the less vulnerable you are to setbacks in any area. If you're only a writer, and your book doesn't sell, you're sunk. But if you're a writer and researcher and a teacher and a wife and mother and gardener and volunteer EMT and singer in the choir, it's easier to bounce back from disappointments. The more sources of joy and pleasure in your life, the better. — Anonymous

Experiencing life makes you a better writer, and writing enhances your experience of life. — K. M. Bozarth

Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn't. Here the tendency of which I spoke at the end of the last chapter comes into play. When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don't want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit 'tasty'. There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you. — George Orwell

I guess I was always looking for something. What it was, I didn't know. I wanted help from the VA, but didn't want to go back, didn't want to be subjected to that second-rate treatment any longer. I wanted to find peace within myself, but didn't know how or where to locate it. I wanted to be a sergeant again, a writer, less angry, a better husband, and to ward off the constant bombardment of war-related thoughts. Most of all, I didn't want any more Americans coming home from Iraq in boxes or with jingle-jangled minds. — Clint Van Winkle

With 'Suffragette,' I felt that a female writer would be good, and considering the subject matter, who would be better to write the script than Abi Morgan? She was the first choice, and she happens to be a woman. — Alison Owen

Before I sat down and became a writer, before I began to do it habitually and for my living, there was a decades-long stretch when I was terrified that it would suck, so I didn't write. I think that marks a lot of people, a real terror at being bad at something, and unfortunately, you are always bad before you can get a little better. — David Rakoff

For most writers, reading is also a very intense experience; they don't read so much as compete. The writer measure's himself against every text he encounters, imagining he could do it better or wishing he had thought of it first. The natural writer would almost always rather be reading, writing, or alone, except of course when he needs to come up for air (that is, for subject matter, food, sex, love, attention). He may be a selfish son of a bitch, he may seem to care more about his work than about the people in his life, he may be a social misfit, a freak, or a smooth operator, but every person who does serious time with a keyboard is attempting to translate his version of the world into words so that he might be understood. Indeed, the great paradox of the writer's life is how much time he spends alone trying to connect with other people. — Betsy Lerner

I loved Cookie [Mueller]. She was a much better writer than actress. She shouldn't have stuck with me in the beginning; she should have immediately become a writer. She would have had more of a chance. — John Waters

One thing that is true in TV is that you do hire the directors. As the writer, it's very different than in features, where you feel like, "If I want this to be this way, I better direct it." — Zak Penn

They're done by guys who have talked a good game and then have scrambled together the simulacrum of a drama, so actors are habituated to sometimes having to save a picture on the floor because it's usually part of their job, but they'd rather have a writer doing his job, so that they can do theirs. But I like nothing better than working with actors. — William Monahan

Evan Connell said once that he knew he was finished with a short story when he found himself going through it and taking out commas and then going through the story again and putting the commas back in the same places. I like that way of working on something. I respect that kind of care for what is being done. That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones, with the punctuation in the right places so that they an best say what they are meant to say. If the words are heavy with the writer's own unbridled emotions, or if they are imprecise and inaccurate for some other reason
if the worlds are in any way blurred
the reader's eyes will slide right over them and nothing will be achieved. Henry James called this sort of hapless writing 'weak specification'. — Raymond Carver

Much advice on writing has the tone of moral counsel, as if being a good writer will make you a better person. Unfortunately for cosmic justice, many gifted writers are scoundrels, and many inept ones are the salt of the earth. But the imperative to overcome the curse of knowledge may be the bit of writerly advice that comes closest to being sound moral advice: always try to lift yourself out of your parochial mindset and find out how other people think and feel. It may not make you a better person in all spheres of life, but it will be a source of continuing kindness to your readers. — Steven Pinker

When I left 'Being Human,' that was painful because the show was going on without me. But with 'Him & Her,' we finished on such a high together that if it is the end, it couldn't have stopped at a better time. But I hope with 'Him & Her' that we'll get another crack of the whip: that the writer might change his mind and write some more. — Russell Tovey

For me the poem and the poetry open mic isn't about competition and it never will be. Honestly? It's wrong. The open mic is about 1 poet, one fellow human being up on a stage or behind a podium sharing their work regardless of what form or style they bring to it. In other words? The guy with the low slam score is more than likely a far better poet-writer than the guy who actually won. But who are you? I ? Or really anyone else to judge them? The Poetry Slam has become an overgrown, over used monopoly on American literature and poetry and is now over utilized by the academic & public school establishments. And over the years has sadly become the "McDonalds Of Poetry". We can only hope that the same old stale atmosphere of it all eventually becomes or evolves into something new that translates to and from the written page and that gives new poets with different styles & authentic voices a chance to share their work too. — R.M. Engelhardt

I've decided to take the day off. From myself. Today, I will not feel behind. I will not worry about being a better wife, mother, daughter, housekeeper, or writer. I'm not making a fancy dinner. I'll be having quite an ordinary day, but I'll be thinking and thanking-instead of fretting and fixing. We all need one day a year when we meet our own expectations and allow the world to be as it is instead of exactly how we would like it to be. — Elizabeth Bard

There's an enormous difference between being a story writer and being a regular person. As a person, it's your duty to stay on a straight and even keel, not to break down blubbering in the streets, not to pull rude drivers from their cars, not to swing from the branches of trees. But as a writer it's your duty to lie and to view everything in life, however outrageous, as an interesting possibility. You may need to be ruthless or amoral in your writing to be original. Telling a story straight from real life is only being a reporter, not a creator. You have to make your story bigger, better, more magical, more meaningful than life is, no matter how special or wonderful in real life the moment may have been. — Rick Bass

We singer-songwriter people, we're used to getting up and doing our own thing in front of people, and we're it. We're the band, artist, writer, producer, front man. We're the whole thing. You develop, it's not smugness, but this self-reliance, that can limit your creativity. When you're willing and able to invite others into it, you wind up getting a piece of work that's bigger and better than anything you ever imagined it could be. — Andy Wilkinson

I had discovered that being a writer gave you a lot of license to fiddle with the truth, but I'd better not get into the habit of it. — Robert McCammon

The less conscious one is of being a writer, the better the writing. — Pico Iyer

The truth about any artist, however terrible, is better than the silence ... I know many writers fight fanatically to keep their published self separate from their private reality ... But I've always thought of that as something out of our social, time-serving side; not our true artistic ones. I don't see how the "lies" we write and the "lies" we live can or should be divided. They are seamless, one canvas, for me. While we live we can keep them apart, but not command the future to do the same. The outrage some Thomas Hardy fans have shown over all the revelations about the private man seems to me hypocritical in the extreme. They hugely enrich our understanding of him ... I have had to convince a number of friends and relatives that the kindest act to the [writer] is remembering them - and that all art comes from a human being, not out of mysterious thin air.
(Letter to Jo Jones, September 15, 1980, arguing for the preservation of John Collier's personal papers) — John Fowles

For the first thing a writer should be is - excited. He should be a thing of fevers and enthusiasms. Without such vigor, he might as well be out picking peaches or digging ditches; God knows it would be better for his health. — Ray Bradbury

In keeping with my family's affection for doomed product lines and hexed formats, we purchased a Betamax. The year before, we'd bought a TRS-80 instead of an Apple II, and in due course we'd unbox Mattel's Intellivision, instead of Atari's legendary gizmo. This was good training for a writer, for the sooner you accept the fact that you are a deluded idiot who is always out of step with reality the better off you will be. — Colson Whitehead

Since I became a knitting humor writer, I seem to be understood a little better - at least for the purposes of social discourse. — Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

Nothing will train you to write better as a writer, than working on your next book. — Brandon Sanderson

In the writing process, the more the story cooks, the better. The brain works for you even when you are at rest. I find dreams particularly useful ... You can only learn to be a better writer by actually writing. — Doris Lessing

Every writer should know their target. Aim for the heart ~ hit that and all which follows is sheer ecstasy. — Muse

Everything you study, everything you learn, makes you a better writer, because you have more understanding of how things work. — Marge Piercy

I think writing is such a great talent, and if I was better, I would love to be a writer. — Shiloh Fernandez

Heather resented it that this woman was his daughter. How does a writer of the most subtle, serious fiction end up with a daughter who watches Oprah? I'd be a better daughter for him than she is. — Brian Morton

Baseball was an art, but to excel at it you had to become a machine. It didn't matter how beautifully you performed _sometimes_, what you did on your best day, how many spectacular plays you made. You weren't a painter or a writer
you didn't work in private and discard your mistakes, and it wasn't just your masterpieces that counted. What mattered, as for any machine, was repeatability. Moments of inspiration were nothing compared to elimination of error. The scouts cared little for Henry's superhuman grace; insofar as they cared they were suckered-in aesthetes and shitty scouts. Can you perform on demand, like a car, a furnace, a gun? Can you make that throw one hundred times out of a hundred? If it can't be a hundred, it had better be ninety-nine. — Chad Harbach

That was when Angel Wells became a fiction writer, whether he knew it or not. That's when he learned how to make the make-believe matter to him more than real life mattered to him; that's when he learned how to paint a picture that was not real and never would be real, but in order to be believed at all- even on a sunny Indian summer day- it had to be better made and seem more real than real; it had to sound at least possible. — John Irving

The writer's job is to arouse emotions. The stronger the emotions the better. — Johan Fundin

The other day Father Prior was telling me about a French writer, Jean-Paul Sartre. An existentialist. ... One phrase of his particularly struck me: 'L'enfer c'est les autres.' Do you think he meant that as a joke?"

"I don't think humor's a strong point with existentialists."

"I think it's p-p-poppycock. How can Hell be others? God is manifested in others. God is the Other. That's why the self must lose itself in love for the other. It's the self we must leave behind. Better to say Hell is the Self. L'enfer c'est moi. — Tony Hendra

I want to be a Kid Reporter because I would like to meet interesting people, and I also love being in front of the camera! As a Kid Reporter, I would love to learn how to be a better writer and interview people. — Charlotte Arnold

Isn't there a flaw in the logic of that phrase - speak truth to power? It assumes that power doesn't know the truth. But power knows the truth just as well, if not better, than the powerless know the truth. Enron knows what it's doing. We don't have to tell it what it's doing. We have to tell other people what Enron is doing. Similarly, the people who are building the dams know what they're doing. The contractors know how much they're stealing. The bureaucrats know how much they're getting in bribes.
Power knows the truth. There isn't any doubt about that. It is really about telling the story. Good fiction is the truest thing that ever there was. Facts are not necessarily the only truths. Facts can be fiddled with by economists and bankers. There are other kinds of truth. It's about telling the story. As a writer, that's the best thing I can do. It's not just about digging up facts. — Arundhati Roy

I was afraid to become a writer. I didn't think I had the ability - it was too big a thing. Who was I to say I am a writer? Every day men are squelching their instincts, their desires, their impulses, their intuitions. One has to get out of the fucking machine he is trapped in and do what he wants to do. But we say no, I have a wife and children. I better not think of it. That is how we commit suicide every day. It would be better if a man did what he liked to do and failed then to become a successful nobody. Isn't that so? — Henry Miller

I used to believe, when I was 'just' a reader, that writers, because they wrote books where truth was found, because they described the world, because they saw into the human heart, because they grasped both the particular and the general and were able to re-create both in free yet structured forms, because they understood, must therefore be more sensitive- also less vain, less selfish- than other people. Then I became a writer, and started meeting other writers, and studied them, and concluded that the only difference between them and other people, the only, single way in which they were better, was that they were better writers. They might indeed be sensitive, perceptive, wise, generalizing and particularizing- but only at their desks and in their books. When they venture out into the world, they regularly behave as if they have left all their comprehension of human behaviour stuck in their typescripts. It's not just writers either. How wise are philosophers in their private lives? — Julian Barnes

As for the zone, I always find the zone immediately after I am sure I will never ever find the zone again because it has left me for some other, better writer. — Sarah MacLean

All of my books are about researching. I do all the research and I give it to a writer who can put it in the written word better than I could. — Bill Wyman

What I will say is that you have to exercise your writing muscle. Write every day. Get better at it. Read a lot of good books. As a professional writer, I force myself to write when I don't feel like it. I don't wait to feel inspired. It takes discipline and grit and sacrifice to be able to bring a book out to the world. It's so much work, and it's very difficult, but it is also the most fun I've ever had. I love making things up. I love amusing myself. — Melissa De La Cruz

Tips can make someone a better writer but not necessarily a good writer. That's a larger package - a matter of character. Golfing is more than keeping the left arm straight. Every good golfer is a complex engine that runs on ability, ego, determination, discipline, patience, confidence, and other qualities that are self-taught. So it is with writers and all creative artists. If their values are solid their work is likely to be solid. — William Zinsser

Editing should be, especially in the case of old writers, a counselling rather than a collaborating task. The tendency of the writer-editor to collaborate is natural, but he should say to himself, 'How can I help this writer to say it better in his own style?' and avoid 'How can I show him how I would write it, if it were my piece?' — James Thurber

I'm probably better known in the US as a YA writer, I have a huge body of adult horror and fantasy behind me. — Michael Scott

Whether you do stand-up comedy or write a story, you have a duty to deliver. As a comedian, you walk out on stage, and you have a minute to hook them, or they'll start booing. As a writer, it's very similar. A reader doesn't have time to say, 'I'll give him 50 pages, as it's not very good yet, but I hope it'll get better.' — Mark Billingham

Writer's block isn't always a problem. It can be a process of writing that helps us write better. — Jennifer Hudson Taylor

Fiction and screenwriting blend for me. I feel like being a TV writer/screenwriter has definitely made my fiction writing better, although I have less time to do it. — Nick Antosca

In order to be a better writer, one must always write. — Safa Shaqsy

What a writer has to do is write what hasn't been written before or beat dead men at what they have done. — Ernest Hemingway,

I don't believe a poet has a better hold on truth or morality than a fiction writer has. And I don't think a fiction writer has anything over a journalist. It's all about the good word, properly inserted. — Colum McCann

To act: that is what the writer would like to be able to do, above all. To act, rather than to bear witness. To write, imagine, and dream in such a way that his words and inventions and dreams will have an impact upon reality, will change people's minds and hearts, will prepare the way for a better world. — J.M.G. Le Clezio

Unless you sell millions, I think it's very hard as a writer not to feel anxious about what you put out. I always feel I could do better. — Jojo Moyes

And you find as a writer there are certain spots on the planet where you write better than others, and I believe in that. And New Orleans is one of them. — Jimmy Buffett

A good writer is one that can see the goodness in others and helps them to be better. — Debasish Mridha

He wrote Helen that a young writer needs desperately to live with someone and he had decided that he wanted to live with her; even marry her, he offered, because sex was simply necessary but it took too much of one's time if one had to be constantly planning how one was going to get it. Therefore, Garp reasoned, it is better to live with it!
Helen revised several letters before she finally sent him one that said he could, so to speak, go stick it in his ear. Did he think she was going through college so rigorously so that she could provide him with sex that was not even necessary to plan? — John Irving

Received a gift - it was the first decent piece of instruction about marriage I had ever been given in my twenty-five years of life. "Does your husband make you a better person?" Edra asked. There I was in that sky-blue pool beneath a bright blue sky, my fingers breaking apart the light on the water, and I had no idea what she was talking about. "Are you smarter, kinder, more generous, more compassionate, a better writer?" she said, running down her list. "Does he make you better?" "That's not the question," I said. "It's so much more complicated than that." "It's not more complicated than that, — Ann Patchett

As for work, without it, without painstaking work, any writer or artist definitely remains a dilettante; there's no point in waiting for so-called blissful moments, for inspiration; if it comes, so much the better
but you keep working anyway. — Ivan Turgenev

As to whether a poem has been written by a great poet or not, this is important only to historians of literature. Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that I have written a beautiful line; let us take this as a working hypothesis. Once I have written it, that line
does me no good, because, as I've already said, that line came to me from the Holy Ghost, from the subliminal self, or perhaps from some other writer. I often find I am merely quoting something I read some time ago, and then that becomes a rediscovering. Perhaps it is better that a poet should be nameless. — Jorge Luis Borges

The more you live, the better writer you are. — Meg Rosoff

The more you read, the more you write, and the more you free yourself to do so, the better writer you will become. — A.D. Posey

My greatest strength as a writer is that I'm a storyteller. But, it was a long, hard struggle for me to make the transition from verbally telling stories to writing them. You'll note I don't dwell on descriptions in my writing, because I'm far more interested in telling the story. There are many better writers in this world, but you'd be hard pressed to find anyone more passionate about stories than I am. — Debbie Macomber

Tell your story. Don't try and tell the stories that other people can tell. Any starting writer starts out with other people's voices. But as quickly as you can start telling the stories that only you can tell, because there will always be better writers than you and there will always be smarter writers than you, but you are the only you. — Neil Gaiman

I always try to give good ratings to books I have read unless it is really bad. Being a writer I know how a bad rating feels. Sometimes it is better to encourage a writer rather than discourage them. After all the next book they write could be a World Renown novel like Harry Potter. — William Roach

A writer who can't write in a grammerly manner better shut up shop. — Artemas Ward

I probably am a cranky writer, but I am actually a fairly nice, normal person. Since I'm a grouchy writer, of course I have friends whose books are doing way better than mine. — Sarah Vowell

How much better life seemed to me now that it seemed susceptible of being illuminated, taken out of the shadows, restored from our ceaseless falsification of it to the truth of what it was, in short, realized in a book! How happy the writer of a book like that would be, I thought, what a labour awaited him! — Marcel Proust

What the young writer is looking for is not a critic who will slap him on the back and say, 'Greatest thing since O. Henry,' but rather the one who will toss the manuscript down in disgust, with 'You know better than that! It's rotten! Do it all over again!' — Henry Sydnor Harrison