Writing Excellence Quotes & Sayings

The main thing God gets out of your life is not the achievements you accomplish. It's the person you become. — Dallas Willard

The gap (between intellectuals and politicians) divides writing hands, talking heads and thinking minds of this country into two sections. One section flaunts academic achievements to make up for shortfalls in intelligence. The other asserts intelligence to camouflage deficiencies in academic excellence. In short, our intellectuals are torn by the dilemma whether they ought to carry their brains in their mouths, or mouths in their brains. — Mohammad Badrul Ahsan

It's not nuclear physics. You always remember that. But if you write about sports long enough, you're constantly coming back to the point that something buoys people; something makes you feel better for having been there. Something of value is at work there ... Something is hallowed here. I think that something is excellence. — Tom Callahan

The basic rule [of writing] given us was simple and heartbreaking. A story to be effective had to convey something from the writer to the reader, and the power of its offering was the measure of its excellence. Outside of that, there were no rules. — John Steinbeck

I want to explore and do things with excellence. I want to write songs that resonate with me and will resonate with a live audience. I'm exploring fresh sounds. — Anthony Evans

Before the gates of excellence the high gods have placed sweat; long is the road thereto and rough and steep at first; but when the heights are reached, then there is ease, though grievously hard in the winning. — Hesiod

In writing, as in life, faults are endured without disgust when they are associated with transcendent merit, and may be sometimes recommended to weak judgments by the lustre which they obtain from their union with excellence; but it is the business of those who presume to superintend the taste or morals of mankind to separate delusive combinations, and distinguish that which may be praised from that which can only be excused. — Samuel Johnson

One of the effects of indoctrination, of passing into the anglo-centrism of British West Indian culture, is that you believe absolutely in the hegemony of the King's English and in the proper forms of expression. Or else your writing is not literature; it is folklore, or worse. And folklore can never be art. Read some poetry by West Indian writers
some, not all
and you will see what I mean. The reader has to dissect anglican stanza after anglican stanza for Caribbean truth, and may never find it. The anglican ideal
Milton, Wordsworth, Keats
was held before us with an assurance that we were unable, and would never be able, to achieve such excellence. We crouched outside the cave. — Michelle Cliff

Art is a journey of excellence not a goal of perfection. — Jacqueline Patricks

I spent many years writing and directing in radio drama, so I am comfortable with an audience or a microphone, but I do worry about the blurring of an author's public persona with the work itself. A good 'performer' can make a mediocre book sound strong, and a shy author can leave listeners missing the excellence of his or her writing. — Guy Gavriel Kay

It is as well that the world knows only a fine piece of work and not also its origins, the conditions under which it came into being; for knowledge of the sources of an artist's inspiration would often confuse readers and shock them, and the excellence of the writing would be of no avail. — Thomas Mann

The young women of today, free to study, to speak, to write, to choose their occupation, should remember that every inch of this freedom was bought for them at a great price. It is for them to show their gratitude by helping onward the reforms of their own times, by spreading the light of freedom and of truth still wider. The debt that each generation owes to the past it must pay to the future. — Abigail Scott Duniway

Learn the rules before you break them. — Steven Taylor Goldsberry

Why is autobiography the most popular form of fiction for modern readers? — Jill Ker Conway

Every once in a bestseller list, you come across a truly exceptional craftsman, a wordsmith so adept at cutting, shaping, and honing strings of words that you find yourself holding your breath while those words pass from page to eye to brain. You know the feeling: you inhale, hold it, then slowly let it out, like one about to take down a bull moose with a Winchester .30-06. You force your mind to the task, scope out the area, take penetrating aim, and ... read.
But instead of dropping the quarry, you find you've become the hunted, the target. The projectile has somehow boomeranged and with its heat-sensing abilities (you have raised a sweat) darts straight towards you. Duck! And turn the page lest it drill between your eyes. — Chila Woychik

The rewrites are a struggle right now. Sometimes I wish writing a book could just be easy for me at last. But when I think about it practically, I am glad it's a struggle. I am (as usual) attempting to write a book that's too hard for me. I'm telling a story I'm not smart enough to tell. The risk of failure is huge. But I prefer it this way. I'm forced to learn, forced to smarten myself up, forced to wrestle. And if it works, then I'll have written something that is better than I am. — Shannon Hale

As if you can measure literary excellence with precise instruments; as if there were a science of writing, governed by equations that reveal immutable truths. — Justine Picardie

Not that length and weight alone indicate excellence; many epic tales are pretty much epic crap. — Stephen King

I will never accept life for what it is. I don't need an easy life. My road was meant to be hard because anything worth having in this world will take me to the very edge of myself. I will overcome everything I have ever gone through and will make my future the one God intended me to have. I will pick up the pieces of this pain and sculpt it into art. I am not ordinary and never was. I walk into my birthright as a queen with her head held high. I was born to do this! — Shannon L. Alder

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

I associated excellence in writing with New York City. — Garth Risk Hallberg

For excellence, the presence of others is always required. — Hannah Arendt

I am what I am. I have not deliberately built an image for myself. — Rahul Dravid

I want to say something about bad writing. I'm proud of my bad writing. Everyone is so intelligent lately, and stylish. Fucking great. I am proud of Philip Guston's bad painting, I am proud of Baudelaire's mamma's boy goo goo misery. Sometimes the lurid or shitty means having a heart, which's something you have to try to have. Excellence nowadays is too general and available to be worth prizing: I am interested in people who have to find strange and horrible ways to just get from point a to point b. — Ariana Reines

If you're a writer, write. And always strive for excellence. — Linda W. Yezak

In writing, they deem it irreverent to express the Supreme Being by any special name. He is symbolized by what may be termed the heiroglyphic of a pyramid, /. In prayer they address Him by a name which they deem too sacred to confide to a stranger, and I know it not. In conversation they generally use a periphrastic epithet, such as the All-Good. The letter V, symbolical of the inverted pyramid, where it is an initial, nearly always denotes excellence of power; as Vril, of which I have said so much; Veed, an immortal spirit; Veed-ya, immortality; — Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Magic came from within, from turning a secret key that lurked inside, waiting for the words to set it free. The — A.J. Hartley

I have always taken as the standard of the mode of teaching and writing, not the abstract, particular, professional philosopher, but universal man, that I have regarded man as the criterion of truth, and not this or that founder of a system, and have from the first placed the highest excellence of the philosopher in this, that he abstains, both as a man and as an author, from the ostentation of philosophy, i. e., that he is a philosopher only in reality, not formally, that he is a quiet philosopher, not a loud and still less a brawling one. — Ludwig Feuerbach

Some people may be more gifted than others, but excellence in writing, as in any art form or craft, involves discipline and practice. — James B. Stewart

Purists behave as if there was a vintage year when language achieved a measure of excellence which we should all strive to maintain. In fact, there was never such a year. The language of Chaucer's or Shakespeare's time was no better and no worse than that of our own - just different. — Jean Aitchison

Only the mediocre artist is always at his best. — Victor J. Banis

No matter how we suffer, we have an obligation to others. We have to be unselfish enough to try to live in the right way, so others can get through their own lives without us fouling them up. — Charlaine Harris

I have nothing and I am everything. — Paulo Coelho

I wanted to be with the kind of people I'd grown up with, but you can't go back to them and be one of them again, no matter how hard you try. — Ethel Waters

To this end, nothing is to be more carefully consulted than plainness. In a lady's attire this is the single excellence; for to be what some people call fine, is the same vice, in that case, as to be florid is in writing or speaking. — Joseph Addison

The faults of great authors are generally excellences carried to an excess. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge