Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

The true painter must be able, with the most usual things, to have the most unusual ideas.

I try to write in a way where you care deeply what the next paragraph will be. I hear the rhythm of prose and that, to me, distinguishes great writing from ordinary writing. By the way, I don't even claim that I'm good. I claim that I value it.

Ultimately, it's about the quality of the writing whatever style you are writing.

The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from.

The secret of good writing is to say an old thing in a new way or to say a new thing in an old way.

Write for yourself, not for a perceived audience. If you do, you'll mostly fall flat on your face, because it's impossible to judge what people want. And you have to read. That's how you learn what is good writing and what is bad. Then the main thing is application. It's hard work.

If you have a craftsman's command of the language and basic writing techniques you'll be able to write - as long as you know what you want to say.

I thought I was clever enough to write as well as these people and I didn't realize that there is something called originality and your own voice.

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

You know that something is really well written when you have to think so little about the words that are coming out of your mouth, and you're able to dwell in your own headspace to get there.

Style matters, but the real force of writing is ideas, not style.

A baby writer should take inspiration from her predecessors but also find ways to tell her own stories in her own way.

Bland writing - timid, antiseptic, vanilla writing - is nearly as unhealthy as the brutal and dark. Instead of sipping, say, elixir, nectar, tequila, or champagne, the reader is invited to slurp lumpy milk or choke on the author's dust bunnies.

Like with anything, good writing suggest itself pretty strongly.

You can write about anything, and if you write well enough, even the reader with no intrinsic interest in the subject will become involved.

It's hard to build community around mediocre and mundane writing.

When I write a page that reads badly I know that it is myself who has written it. When it reads well it has come through from somewhere else.

Nothing is more satisfying than to write a good sentence.

Good style happens in one of two ways: the writer either has an inborn talent or is willing to work herself to death to get it.

Writing well is at one and the same time good thinking, good feeling, and good expression; it is having wit, soul, and taste, all together.

The difficulty in the way of writing a children's play is that Barrie was born too soon. Many people must have felt the same about Shakespeare. We who came later have no chance. What fun to have been Adam, and to have had the whole world of plots and jokes and stories at one's disposal.

I have known writers who paid no damned attention whatever to the rules of grammar and rhetoric and somehow made the language behave for them.

It's easy to write something average or even something good. But writing well is quite challenging.

I don't look at scripts. I just write them.

I knew naturally as a child not to forfeit my creativity to a world that's all laid out for me. I'll look at everything around me and vow to keep in mind that alla this is just someone's idea. It could have just as well been mine.