Christian Nestell Bovee Quotes

I wrote a piece for the school literary magazine that now makes me think: 'My God in Heaven, this is just the worst drivel.'

It doesn't matter what kind of book you write - you ought to write it well and with some kind of style and elegance.

No one writes a great book every time out, or even a good book.

All writing is by the grace of God. People do not deserve to have good writing, they are so pleased with bad. In these sentences that you show me, I can find no beauty, for I see death in every clause and every word. There is a fossil or a mummy character which pervades this book. The best sepulchers, the vastest catacombs, Thebes and Cairo, Pyramids, are sepulchers to me. I like gardens and nurseries. Give me initiative, spermatic, prophesying, man-making words.

There is no left and right in writing. There is only good and bad writing.

Writing a book makes you an expert in the field. At the very least, when you hand someone a book you wrote, it's more impressive than handing a business card.

Great books write themselves, only bad books have to be written.

I think writing a book with film in mind is a way to write a really bad books. You can usually tell those books that are packaged to become films.

you want to write a book for so many reasons ... The main reason ... is because it will make you well-known and beloved and popular and successful and famous and respected. You also write ... to make money, but that motivation is not first on the list.

She thought a writer should work harder writing a book than she did reading it.

People do not deserve to have good writing, they are so pleased with bad.

Only bad writers think that their work is really good.

If a man means his writing seriously, he must mean to write well. But how can he write well until he learns to see what he has written badly. His progress toward good writing and his recognition of bad writing are bound to unfold at something like the same rate.

My belief of book writing is much the same as my belief as to shoemaking. The man who will work the hardest at it, and will work with the most honest purpose, will work the best.

It doesn't really matter what "genre" your book is. What matters is that it's a good book of its kind. Whatever that kind may be.

Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.

The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can.

One wouldn't want to say that what makes a good writer is the number of books that the writer wrote because you could write a whole number of bad books. Books that don't work, mediocre books, or there's a whole bunch of people in the pulp tradition who have done that. They just wrote... and actually they didn't write a whole bunch of books, they just wrote one book many times.

Good writers hate bad writing but hating bad writing doesn’t make you good. Writing badly does.

Can you write a book and have children at the same time? Yes, if you're content to do it very very slowly.

Every reader of the Dreiser novels must cherish astounding specimens--of awkward, platitudinous marginalia, of whole scenes spoiled by bad writing, of phrases as brackish as so many lumps of sodium hyposulphite.

Writing a book is the most difficult, anxiety-prone aspect of my life because the words that I put on paper are very serious to me.

I have long discovered that geologists never read each other's works, and that the only object in writing a book is a proof of earnestness.

The two things I enjoy the most about writing are the first page of a book and the last. What's in between is very hard work.

I remember Stephen King did a fundraiser one time with J.K. Rowling and he was very impressed with her. But we talk a lot about publishing, bookselling, and book writing. He's been around for ten years longer than me and was a bestseller right off the bat. And he's seen and done everything. It's rare to be with somebody who has been through all of that.