Writing Off Bad Quotes & Sayings

Kools and Newports were for black people and lower-class whites. Camels were for procrastinators, those who wrote bad poetry, and those who put off writing bad poetry. Merits were for sex addicts, Salems were for alcoholics, and Mores were for people who considered themselves to be outrageous but really weren't. — David Sedaris

Singling out "women's fiction" for genre derision never fails to piss me off. Somehow worse when women do it. Case in pt: Editor says crowd-sourcing editorial for romance & erotica not bad idea b/c "no great artistry at stake" Yes, genre fiction not high art. But it's a craft we take seriously, writing for love of storytelling, not writing whatever sells. — Kelley Armstrong

Novelty. Security. Novelty wouldn't be a bad title. It had the grandness of abstraction, alerting the reader that large and thoughtful things were to be bodied forth. As yet he had no inkling of any incidents or characters that might occupy his theme; perhaps he never would. He could see though the book itself, he could feel its closed heft and see it opened, white pages comfortably large and shadowed gray by print; dense, numbered, full of meat. He sensed a narrative voice, speaking calmly and precisely, with immense assurance building, building; a voice too far off for him to hear, but speaking. ("Novelty") — John Crowley

There is probably some long-standing "rule" among writers, journalists, and other word-mongers that says: "When you start stealing from your own work you're in bad trouble." And it may be true. — Hunter S. Thompson

I think the writer is initially set going by literature more than by life. When there are many writers all employing the same idiom, all looking out on more or less the same social scene, the individual writer will have to be more than ever careful that he isn't just doing badly what has already been done to completion. The presence alone of Faulkner in our midst makes a great difference in what the writer can and cannot permit himself to do. Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down. — Flannery O'Connor

Marjan. I have told him tales of good women and bad women, strong women and weak women, shy women and bold women, clever women and stupid women, honest women and women who betray. I'm hoping that, by living inside their skins while he hears their stories, he'll understand over time that women are not all this way or that way. I'm hoping he'll look at women as he does at men
that you must judge each of us on her own merits, and not condemn us or exalt us only because we belong to a particular sex. — Susan Fletcher

Bad writing is not easier than good writing. It's just as hard to make a toilet seat as it is a castle window. Only the view is different. — Ben Hecht

Protect your voice and your vision. If going on the Internet and reading Internet reviews is bad for you, don't do it. ... Do what gets you to write and not what blocks you. ... Don't take any guff off anybody. — Anne Rice

Write at a pace that doesn't surpass your creative flow. Don't be hasty; don't be sloppy. Don't forfeit impressive writing for an impressive word count. Because eventually it will all have to be edited, and you'll find that it is harder to make bad writing good than to make good writing better. — Richelle E. Goodrich

This man, who for twenty-five years has been reading and writing about art, and in all that time has never understood anything about art, has for twenty-five years been hashing over other people's ideas about realism, naturalism and all that nonsense; for twenty-five years he has been reading and writing about what intelligent people already know and about what stupid people don't want to know
which means that for twenty-five years he's been taking nothing and making nothing out of it. And with it all, what conceit! What pretension! — Anton Chekhov

When reading a book, one hopes it doesn't turn into a painful process. Predictable is bad enough. Laborious is acceptable if the labor produces fruit. But with painfully bad writing, all one can do is grab a hatchet, slice off its head, and bury it. — Chila Woychik

That famous writer's block is a myth as far as I'm concerned. I think bad writers must have a great difficulty writing. They don't want to do it. They have become writers out of reasons of ambition. It must be a great strain to them to make marks on a page when they really have nothing much to say, and don't enjoy doing it. I'm not so sure what I have to say but I certainly enjoy making sentences. — Gore Vidal

The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader. I know people who read without hearing the sentence sounds and they were the fastest readers. Eye readers we call them. They get the meaning by glances. But they are bad readers because they miss the best part of what a good writer puts into his work. — Robert Frost

His importance to the century just past, and therefore his status as a figure in history as well as in literature, derives from the extraordinary salience of the subjects he 'took on,' and stayed with, and never abandoned. As a consequence, we commonly use the term 'Orwellian' in one of two ways. To describe a state of affairs as 'Orwellian' is to imply crushing tyranny and fear and conformism. To describe a piece of writing as 'Orwellian' is to recognize that human resistance to these terrors is unquenchable. Not bad for one short lifetime. — Christopher Hitchens

No.'
It's not a bad word.
And it is very important to use at times.
Practice saying it in the mirror.
It's empowering. — Christy Hall

Don't write your books for people who won't like them. Give yourself wholly to the kind of book you want to write and don't try to please readers who like something different. Otherwise, you'll end up with the worst of both worlds. I write lyrical, introspective, experiential books concerned with consciousness and perception. If a reader wants to know what my protagonist's insurance policies are, he'll be better off curling up with a nice cup of chamomile tea and an actuarial table. Similarly, don't write your books for bad readers. Your books will suffer from bad readers no matter what, so write them for brilliant, big-brained and big-hearted people who will love you for feeding their minds with feasts of beauty. — Paul Harding

It is an admonition to myself when I am reading other people's books. Writing a book is very difficult to do, even a bad one. I try to remember that when reading someone else's work. — Thomas L. Dumm

Later, the talk turned to all the other guys/girls who were currently hot for the two of them. 'There's this total dweeb named Robert who's always calling me, and I feel bad because he's really nice, but I'm totally not interested,' Phoebe told Pablo.

'Believe me, I know what that's like,' Pablo told Phoebe. 'There's this girl at Hunter who's, like, obsessed with me. She's, like, this big fat girl. Ass like a truck. She's always writing me these love letters. Maybe I should fuck her. You know, just to be nice.' (Smile, smile.)

'You're so bad.' (Phoebe shaking her head; Pablo loving it; Phoebe loving it, too. What was more ego-enhancing than making dumb jokes at the expense of ugly women? Phoebe could never decide whom she hated more--other people or herself.) — Lucinda Rosenfeld

Jokes that are gratuitously offensive are synonymous with bad writing to me. I'm offended as a writer first and as a person second. — Rachel Bloom

I believe the way to write a good play is to convince yourself it is easy to do
then go ahead and do it with ease. Don't maul, don't suffer, don't groan till the first draft is finished. A play is a pheonix and it dies a thousand deaths. Usually at night. In the morning it springs up again from its ashes and crows like a happy rooster. It is never as bad as you think, it is never as good. It is somewhere in between, and success or failure depends on which end of your emotional gamut concerning its value it approaches more closely. But it is much more likely to be good if you think it is wonderful while you are writing the first draft. An artist must believe in himself. Your belief is contagious. Others may say he is vain, but they are affected. — Tennessee Williams

You can't improv off of bad writing. Then you have to actually create your objective, which is really hard to do in an element without the skeleton to go off of. — Eliza Coupe

What is good for you creatively is usually bad commercially. You thrive financially by sticking to a series and not fiddling about too much. You do yourself harm by moving away from the series and the genre. By trying things not based in that particular mode of writing, you will just lose readers. — John Connolly

Now I am a diviner, though not a very good one, but I have enough religion for my own use, as you might say of a bad writer - his writing is good enough for him; and — Plato

A mind can be overthrown by words; that's the point. What is happening to the brain of a person who uses the passive, who writes, 'Delay should not be allowed to take place' instead of 'Hurry'? The user of the passive verb doesn't want a universe in which responsible agents do their acts. You see? Bad language ultimately is IMMORAL. — Richard Mitchell

What was toughest for me in writing "Trust," was reliving it, turning and facing this. We move on and we don't move on, you know? She's still there - and by "she" I mean me - caught in that windowless room, that bad bargain and that violation. No one can touch me, sexually, without activating that memory. But I had walled, I thought, that time off. I say that and then want to say "and I got off lightly"! — Laura Mullen

Men have external genitalia, while women have internal genitalia. This simple difference makes a lot of difference in how they write about themselves - and how you might write about your characters. Male writers don't often address internal sensation in a character, because they don't experience it (and probably often don't realize consciously that it's there). This accounts for a lot of Really Terrible sex scenes written by men (if you look at the "Bad Sex-Scene Awards" in any given year, you'll see that the vast majority are done by male writers). — Diana Gabaldon

Remember that 'plumber in space' is not such a bad setup for a story. — Stephen King

Too many Americans have twisted the sensible right to pursue happiness into the delusion that we are entitled to a guarantee of happiness. If we don't get exactly what we want, we assume someone must be violating our rights. We're no longer willing to write off some of life's disappointments to simple bad luck. — Susan Jacoby

Don't be afraid to write bad songs and then start over and re-evaluate. Songs are like plants, in that you grow them. Some grow really fast, and others need pruning and care ... And, finally, a song needs to move you. If it doesn't move you, it will never move anybody else. — Corey Harris

[When asked if he had ever learned anything about his work from film criticism]
No. To see a film once and write a review is an absurdity. Yet very few critics ever see a film twice or write about films from a leisurely, thoughtful perspective. The reviews that distinguish most critics, unfortunately, are those slambang pans which are easy to write and fun to write and absolutely useless. There's not much in a critic showing off how clever he is at writing silly, supercilious gags about something he hates. — Stanley Kubrick

The Jeep was parked at the beginning of the causeway when Denny got off the bus. She ignored it and started toward the island.
"Denise . . ."
Denny ignored Mr. Jones's call and kept on walking.
She heard the engine start, and soon the Jeep was rolling along beside her.
"Picked up your mail," said Mr. Jones. He handed some envelopes out the window. Denny grabbed them without a word.
"There's a letter there from some old coot named Jones," Mr. Jones said. "Looks like an apology."
Denny looked down and ruffled through the envelopes. "There is not," she said.
"No?" said Mr. Jones sheepishly. "Well, there should be. Guess he didn't get around to writing it. He feels real bad though. I know that for a fact."
Denny stopped and put her hand on her hip and stared at Mr. Jones. — Jackie French Koller

It's more like you write what comes to you ... You try to reflect the mood of the songs. Take 'Rearviewmirror', we start off with the music and it kinds of propels the lyrics. It made me feel like I was in a car, leaving something, a bad situation. There's an emotion there. I remembered all the times I wanted to leave ... — Eddie Vedder

There's a saying - "Write what you know." It's bad advice if you take it as an unbreakable rule, but good advice if you use it as a foundation. — Stephen King

It was called 'We Wear the Mask', by Paul Laurence Dunbar. I transcribed the first stanza and then started jotting down my reaction to it.

We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes, -
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.

I used to wear masks so subtle I barely noticed them. A compliment to my mother after a dismal meal, a smile at my best friend when she sang out of tune, a forced laugh at my uncle's bad jokes. I wore small masks that came and went, like fleeting expressions.

I am stuck inside the mask I wear now. I want to rip it off. I want to show my scars to the world, to unveil the ugliness that breathes inside me. I want to be unashamed. I want to be unafraid. But every day the mask gets tighter, and I suffocate a little more.

I stopped writing. — Catherine Doyle

As a songwriter, I try not to be sloppy; same with the music. You can be very lean, very efficient, so you're not wasting a lot of time getting' to the point. You're saying it with as pure a word or phrase as you can. That's the part that was craft. You refine and refine and refine. Maybe that's why the songs still hang on, because they're very pure. For one thing, they're very short. "Bad Moon Rising" is like 2 minutes and 12 seconds. I would try to do everything as quickly and with as little extra as possible. It was a challenge. — John Fogerty

As a piece of writing, The Elementary Particles feels like a bad, self-conscious pastiche of Camus, Foucault and Bret Easton Ellis. And as a philosophical tract, it evinces a fiercely nihilistic, anti-humanistic vision built upon gross generalizations and ridiculously phony logic. It is a deeply repugnant read. — Michiko Kakutani

What one gains in technique can lead to deforestation in the writing that is both good and bad. Keep the energy and the willingness to proceed stupidly. — Nancy Zafris

The difference between you and I Dre is that i can take a bad experience and make money off it, You just have to live with yours until time blurs your memory of the details.
Most writers i know aren't beautiful by society's standard. Writing is not modelling but Writer's do have beautiful souls. — Crystal Evans

It's really a lovely feeling to write knowing that failure is taken off the table because if it's bad you just never show it to anyone. — Peter Morgan

To invent out of knowledge means to produce inventions that are true. Every man should have a built-in automatic crap detector operating inside him. It also should have a manual drill and a crank handle in case the machine breaks down. If you're going to write, you have to find out what's bad for you. Part of that you learn fast, and then you learn what's good for you. — Ernest Hemingway,

How many words a day do I write? Between six and seven thousand. And how many hours does that take? Three on a good day, as high as thirteen on a bad one — John Creasey

But when you get down to it, it's all a lie. You sit here writing and writing, but no one can see it - that's arrogant, I told you so before. And you aren't even honest enough to let yourself be what you are - everything's divided off and split up. So what's the use of patronising me and saying: You're in a bad phase. If you're not in a bad phase, then it's because you can't be in a phase, you take care to divide yourself into compartments. If things are a chaos, then that's what they are. I don't think there's a pattern anywhere - you are just making patterns, out of cowardice. I think people aren't good at all, they are cannibals, and when you get down to it no one cares about anyone else. All the best people can be good to one other person or their families. But that's egotism, it isn't being good. We aren't any better than the animals, we just pretend to be. — Doris Lessing

You can forgive if the shot is not right, or the lighting is a bit off, but not if the writing is bad. — Moran Atias

This poem is the poem I'm writing because
we aren't speaking, and it is making my heart hurt
so bad that sometimes I can't make it up off the floor. — Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz

You can only write regularly if you're willing to write badly. You can't write regularly and well. One should accept bad writing as a way of priming the pump, a warm-up exercise that allows you to write well. — Jennifer Egan

A good day - a bad day - so it goes on. Few people can be so tortured by writing as I am. Only Flaubert I think. Yet I see it now, as a whole. I think I can bring it off, if I only have courage and patience: take each scene quietly: compose: I think it may be a good book. And then - oh when it's finished! — Virginia Woolf

If I'm still wistful about On the Road, I look on the rest of the Kerouac oeuvre
the poems, the poems!
in horror. Read Satori in Paris lately? But if I had never read Jack Kerouac's horrendous poems, I never would have had the guts to write horrendous poems myself. I never would have signed up for Mrs. Safford's poetry class the spring of junior year, which led me to poetry readings, which introduced me to bad red wine, and after that it's all just one big blurry condemned path to journalism and San Francisco. — Sarah Vowell

I do not remember where I read that there are two kinds of poets: the good poets, who at a certain point destroy their bad poems and go off to run guns in Africa, and the bad poets, who publish theirs and keep writing more until they die. — Umberto Eco

We may know that the work we continue to put off doing will be bad. Worse, however, is the work we never do. A work that's finished is at least finished. It may be poor, but it exists, like the miserable plant in the lone flowerpot of my neighbour who's crippled. That plant is her happiness, and sometimes it's even mine. What I write, bad as it is, may provide some hurt or sad soul a few moments of distraction from something worse. That's enough for me, or it isn't enough, but it serves some purpose, and so it is with all of life. — Fernando Pessoa

The image of my father's ashes drifting down into the clear water among the spawning salmon played across the screen of my mind. I counted off all the deaths I had seen, the tally of which remarked upon the fate of all living things, which is to be eaten, whether by whales, eagles, bears, or the microbes of the grave. But this is part and parcel of the continuation of life...the translation of bidies into more bodies, and life into life. The litter of shattered crab shell at my feet gave brilliant red testimony to how death becomes life, is necessary for life, and this being so, is beyond being labeled as good or bad. — Lynn Schooler

I would say plotting is the most difficult thing for me. Characterization is only hard because sometimes I feel I get so interested in it that I want to talk too much about the characters and that slows the story down. So I say, "Hey, people want to find out what's going to happen next, they don't want to listen to you spout off about this or that person." But I think even the bad guy deserves to tell his side of the story. — Stephen King

Now, instead of treating bad writing days as random, unavoidable disasters to be weathered, like thunderstorms, I started treating them as red flags. — Rachel Aaron

Writers: read books. Read good books. Read bad books. Learn what does and does not work. — Kira Hawke

Eventually the bad stuff I'm writing turns into better stuff. Other times, I've just walked away from what I was working on, and figured I'd have a better perspective when I came back to it. — Margaret Haddix

Great books write themselves, only bad books have to be written. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Most critics write critiques which are by the authors they write critiques about. That would not be so bad, but then most authorswrite works which are by the critics who write critiques about them. — Karl Kraus

As a poet there is something about joy I find hard to express, whereas every other emotion is rather simple. For instance, you never feel so bad that you can't describe how bad you feel, but joy on the other hand is far too divine for human language. — Criss Jami

I enjoy the writing process and producing; I enjoy seeing an idea come to fruition. I'm driven by very complex characters. You look at the pilot of 'Breaking Bad,' where there's so much depth to the character, you can't help but be invested when you watch. — Sasha Roiz

For every good song, I write 20 bad ones I have to chuck away. — Ian Dury

My advice to would-be young authors is to read a lot, write a lot, and not worry about creating a finished product. Keeping a journal is not a bad idea either. — Kevin Henkes

Would you like me to write Mrs. Ames about inviting you to Yaddo? Get Miss Moore to write too. You can't invite yourself, though, of course, almost all the invitations are planned. It would be marvelous to have you there. I know the solitude that gets too much. It doesn't drug me, but I get fantastic and uncivilized.
At last my divorce [from Jean Stafford] is over. It's funny at my age to have one's life so much in and on one's hands. All the rawness of learning, what I used to think should be done with by twenty-five. Sometimes nothing is so solid to me as writing - I suppose that's what vocation means - at times a torment, a bad conscience, but all in all, purpose and direction, so I'm thankful, and call it good, as Eliot would say. — Robert Lowell

I started a novel back in high school. It wasn't very good. It was the opposite of good. The writing itself wasn't too bad, and the characters were interesting. But the story was a mess, and it was full of fantasy cliches. Dwarf with an axe. Barbarian warrior. I don't ever think I'd bother finishing that. It's just not worth my time. — Patrick Rothfuss

Times are really bad. Everyone is writing a book and quoting themselves. — Omar Kiam

So often survivors have had their experiences denied, trivialized, or distorted. Writing is an important avenue for healing because it gives you the opportunity to define your own reality. You can say: This did happen to me. It was that bad. It was the fault & responsibility of the adult. I was - and am - innocent. The Courage to Heal by Ellen Bass & Laura Davis — Ellen Bass

I have experienced bad dating and ineptitude with women all across the globe, from Vietnam to Paris. When I was 21, women were an enigma; they were this code that had to be cracked. They were 'The Other.' I have often thought writing this stuff into stand-up and shows would be an exorcism, but it hasn't been; it makes no difference. — Stephen Merchant

Whenever I felt tempted to, I don't know, watch cat videos or bad Netflix TV instead of writing this [Louis] Brandeis biography, I thought of his stern but kindly visage and buckled down and wrote the damn thing, because there's so much information out there, and these are such anxious times in democracy, such unreasonable times. — Jeffrey Rosen

If you're a songwriter, you want to write a song like "Oh Yeah" that radically shifts everything. You can definitely retire on that song. You want to have something you can put in your songbook that everybody can recognize, whether it's a good or bad thing. — Margaret Cho

What do you know about me, given that I believe in secrecy? ... If I stick where I am, if I don't travel around, like anyone else I make my inner journeys that I can only measure by my emotions, and express very obliquely and circuitously in what I write ... Arguments from one's own privileged experience are bad and reactionary arguments. — Gilles Deleuze

When you are writing a song for something else, if you are doing something for money, I always think that's bad luck. — Chad Kroeger

Good writers hate bad writing but hating bad writing doesn't make you good. Writing badly does. — Dan Harmon

The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to taking life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists, whose real though unacknowledged motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writing of the younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States ... — George Orwell

Remember: Bad timing equals great plot twists. — A.L. Mabry

Writing a good movie brings a writer about as much fame as steering a bicycle. It gets him, however, more jobs. If his movie is bad it will attract only critical tut-tut for him. The producer, director and stars are the geniuses who get the hosannas when it's a hit. Theirs are also the heads that are mounted on spears when it's a flop. — Ben Hecht

Like all his attempts at fiction it would be as personal as a letter - painful to those who knew him, of no interest to those who didn't; precious or self-pitying in spots, in others too clever for its own good; so packed with Shakespeare that it looked as if he worked with a concordance in his lap; so narcissistic that its final effect would be that of the mirrored room which gives back the same image times without count, or the old Post Toastie box of his boyhood with the fascinating picture of a woman and child holding a Post Toastie box with a picture of a woman and child holding a Post Toastie box with a picture of a woman and child holding - - — Charles Jackson

It's a big thing to call yourself a poet. All I can say is that I have always written poems. I don't think I'm interested in any discussion about whether I'm a good poet, a bad poet or a great poet. But I am sure, I want to write great poems. I think every poet should want that. — Clive James

You can always edit a bad page. You can't edit a blank page. — Jodi Picoult