Quotes & Sayings About Improvement In Writing

Remember William Blake who said: "Improvement makes straight, straight roads, but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius."
The truth is, life itself, is always startling, strange, unexpected. But when the truth is told about it everybody knows at once that it is life itself and not made up.
But in ordinary fiction, movies, etc, everything is smoothed out to seem plausible
villains made bad, heroes splendid, heroines glamorous, and so on, so that no one believes a word — Brenda Ueland

If You Can Stand It, Play the Long Game ...
What I mean here is that you have to remain committed to the ultimate goal, which isn't to win the immediate approval of the online world, or dazzle a workshop, but to improve your storytelling day by day.
Finding the right balance of feedback - encouragement versus vigorous criticism - will help immeasurably.
But your own commitment has to be to the process of improvement, not to the anticipated reward.
If it's any consolation, I'm still working on this final lesson. — Steve Almond

Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility, or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can't remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, the law, or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.
You see? If all you remember in years to come is the 'gay wizard' joke, I've come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step to self-improvement. — J.K. Rowling

English teachers, workshops, and myths try to make writers slow down. We are the ONLY ART on the planet that tells young artists to not practice and do less to get better. Head-shaking in its stupidity. And new writers buy into that. — Dean Wesley Smith

... Writing is something that you can never do as well as it can be done. It is a perpetual challenge and it is more difficult than anything else that I have ever done - so I do it. And it makes me happy when I do it well. — Ernest Hemingway,

You dive deeper, you strip away the cleverness and the words become more important than your ego and that's when you know it's real, when it's good. — Kamal Ravikant

I like writing, but I write for self-improvement more than I do for money. — Thomas Steinbeck

The passion for self improvement is the love for reading, learning and writing. — Lailah Gifty Akita

The ultimate goal of writing is forgiveness. — Katerina Stoykova Klemer

The stories I read gives strength to my spirit. — Lailah Gifty Akita

The ancient commission of the writer has not changed. He is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement.
[Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech] — John Steinbeck

I admired what my students were writing, but I think their improvement doesn't directly result from me but from being in a class, being with each other. — Thom Gunn

[I]n the long run it's worthwhile to see the manuscript as a text capable of improvement. — Barbara Sjoholm

You are the author of your success, daily writing a new page to the book of your life. Everyday you live, you write another page of success for your life. Practice at becoming an excellent person step-by-step, at what you want. Rome wasn't build in day, so have patience as you build your life of confidence and success. — Mark LaMoure

Everybody has somebody. It could be a friend, a lover, a spouse, a writing partner, or even That One Person You See At The Coffee Shop each day. Sometimes they exist to comfort you. Sometimes they exist to drive you absolutely mad. Be open to either as a form of self-improvement. — Terry Pratchett

To get change, you must first pay for it. — Timothy Joshua

An unpublished writer should doubt themselves. They should constantly wonder whether what they're creating has merit. And then, having doubted, they should take up their pen and see if they can't make it better. — Johnny Rich

Reading, writing, and personal introspection will not protect us from hardship and suffering, but they might introduce us to critical thinking and expose us to what is good in humankind and beautiful in the world that we share with all of nature. Contemplative thought, especially that supplemented with reading literature and attempting to write our own replies to the echoing voices of writers whom preceded us provide us with the potentiality for change, the possibility of personal illumination that enables us to experience a heighted quality of life. — Kilroy J. Oldster

It has been demonstrated through years of workshops that the Artist Within tends to make the same mistakes as the artist within everybody else. — Howard Mittelmark

Never put off writing until you are better at it. — Gary Henderson

Education is neither writing on a blank slate nor allowing the child's nobility to come into flower. Rather, education is a technology that tries to make up for what the human mind is innately bad at. Children don't have to go to school to learn to walk, talk, recognize objects, or remember the personalities of their friends, even though these tasks are much harder than reading, adding, or remembering dates in history. They do have to go to school to learn written language, arithmetic, and science, because those bodies of knowledge and skill were invented too recently for any species-wide knack for them to have evolved. — Steven Pinker

There are books showing men how to succeed in everything; they are written by men who cannot even succeed in writing books. — G.K. Chesterton

I love to write. But it has never gotten any easier to do and you can't expect it to if you keep trying for something better than you can do. — Ernest Hemingway,

We can help the next generation, with the stories we write today. — Lailah Gifty Akita

I should have mentioned before, that, in the autumn of the preceding year, I had form'd most of my ingenious acquaintance into a club of mutual improvement, which we called the JUNTO; we met on Friday evenings. The rules that I drew up required that every member, in his turn, should produce one or more queries on any point of Morals, Politics, or Natural Philosophy, to be discuss'd by the company; and once in three months produce and read an essay of his own writing, on any subject he pleased. Our debates were to be under the direction of a president, and to be conducted in the sincere spirit of inquiry after truth, without fondness for dispute, or desire of victory; and, to prevent warmth, all expressions of positiveness in opinions, or direct contradiction, were after some time made contraband, and prohibited under small pecuniary penalties. — Benjamin Franklin

Nothing makes a person desire improvement like failure — Christopher Stocking

Rejection isn't a sign of failure. Rejection is a reminder that there's always room for improvement. — Ana Hart

...And there really are men who believe in this, who spend their time in promoting Leagues of Peace, in delivering addresses, and in writing books; and of course the governments sympathize with it all, pretending that they approve of it; just as they pretend to support temperance, while they actually derive the larger part of their income from intemperance; just as they pretend to maintain liberty of the constitution, when it is the absence of liberty to which they owe their power; just as they pretend to care for the improvement of the laboring classes, while on oppression of the workman rest the very foundations of the State; just as they pretend to uphold Christianity, when Christianity is subversive of every government. — Leo Tolstoy

I beg to differ on Charles Bukowski, who says nothing can save you, except writing. Sometimes, absolutely nothing will save you, not the nights you end up wasting waiting for something grand to happen, not the mornings where coffee has no taste and you wake up knowing the day will not be a blast, not the plans and schemes you write down on your imaginary flipchart to make the world go round. You end up stuck, alone and in the disparate points of chaos that drag you down, you have to come up with something to save yourself. Then you make six impossible wishes before breakfast, start walking and working and learn to seize what you call paranormal activity when it comes true. — Ioana-Cristina Casapu

I want to become the favorite song of my own uprising. I want to see the most forgotten, unused part of my soul the one which for years I kept closed out of spite, find the courage to go up to my mind and start writing liberation slogans across its highest fences. — Angelos Michalopoulos