Val McDermid Quotes

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

Minor writers think style is all.

I'm personally attracted to great writing - that's what turns me on the most.

A lot of times you get people writing wonderful sentences and paragraphs, and they fall in love with their prose style, but the stories really aren't that terrific.

Well, in features, and in writing especially, it's often the style of the writer comes in.

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

There is good and mediocre writing within every genre.

I figure anytime you put an adjective before 'writer,' it's a way of dismissing the writer.

Nobody writes like Nabokov; nobody ever will. What I would give to write one sentence like Vladimir!

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

I'm a language-oriented writer who proceeds sentence by sentence.

I just keep following the good writing. I'm not good enough to make bad writing look good. Some people can, and I admire them for it, but I cannot. I will go down with the ship.

For every Scott Fitzgerald concerned with the precise word and the selection of relevant incident, there are a hundred American writers, many well-regarded, who appear to believe that one word is just as good as another and that everything which occurs to them is worth putting down.

Robert Ludlum, all of them, write the absolute best they can. You can't tone it down. You just do what you do, and if it comes out literary, so be it.

The elegance and the quality - the talent is always in the literature. I start with the word and I base everything on that. It doesn't make any difference to me.

Anthony Powell taught me to write; he has such brilliant control of the mechanics of the novel.

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

What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.

The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live.

Of course, there are those critics - New York critics as a rule - who say, 'Well, Maya Angelou has a new book out and of course it's good but then she's a natural writer.' Those are the ones I want to grab by the throat and wrestle to the floor because it takes me forever to get it to sing. I work at the language.

I'm a pretty decent writer. It comes easy to me. I don't agonize over sentences. I write like I talk. I try to make them good books.

I would never write a sentence that didn't have a nice rhythm, or at least I wouldn't leave it to be published like that. It seems to me that prose mustn't be prosaic.

After all, it is style alone by which posterity will judge of a great work, for an author can have nothing truly his own but his style.

When I do my best work, the stories tend to be pretty emotionally-charged.

Essayists, like poets, are born and not made, and for one worth remembering, the world is confronted with a hundred not worth reading. Your true essayist is, in a literary sense, the friend of everybody.