Virginia Woolf Quotes

Many critics, when trying to praise a short-story collection, will say that it has the heft and scope of a good novel. But for me, one of the highest compliments you can pay a novel is to say that it has the rich texture and eloquent detail of a good story collection.

Good writing does not come from verbiage but from words.

If something is well-written, it has a chance to be good and if it's not well-written, it will not be good. It could even become popular, but it won't be good.

I think that whenever a book is not a challenge, I'm telling the wrong story.

A good editor understands what you're talking and writing about and doesn't meddle too much.

Easy reading is damn hard writing. But if it's right, it's easy. It's the other way round, too. If it's slovenly written, then it's hard to read. It doesn't give the reader what the careful writer can give the reader.

It's fun for me to try to write concise, compact things. It's a very good exercise for me. And I think it's important to try to do different things - change what I write about, and also the way I write. Otherwise, I'd just be repeating myself, which wouldn't be good for me or fair to my readers.

The first thing that attracts me to any script is the writing. If I find myself becoming lost in a good yarn, then I feel certain that others will, too.

Great writing is great writing. It's as simple as all that.

A lot of writers fall in love with their sentences or their construction of sentences, and sometimes that's great, but not everybody is Gabriel Garcia Marquez or James Joyce. A lot of people like to pretend that they are, and they wind up not giving people a good read or enlightening them.

Good writing gives energy, whatever it is about.

All good Literature rests primarily on insight.

Good writing is good writing, and I'm so happy when I read it.

Through an arbitrary problem, I had arrived at a tenet of good writing: brevity wins.

A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite.

You just can't make bad writing look good. But if you have good writing, you just say it, and it's almost done.

I follow only one rule in my writing, and that is to be interesting. If the story is interesting to you, the writer, then it will probably be interesting to somebody else.

Like with anything, good writing suggest itself pretty strongly.

My writing model is my mother, who is a writer as well. She always valued clarity and simplicity above all else. If someone doesn't understand what you're writing, then everything else you do is superfluous. Irrelevant. If any thoughtful, curious reader finds what I do impenetrable, I've failed.

My preference is for really good writing, and I just really don't care where it is.

VR should offer an experience that's more exciting than watching in 2D, and we're pretty good at 2D storytelling, so the bar's already pretty high.

I don't like books that play to the gallery, but I've become more concerned with telling a story as clearly and engagingly as I can.

For me, the bottom line is what's on the page.

People never read my books for the quality of the documentary value.

I don't like to write boring books.