Duff McKagan Quotes

A person who can write a long letter with ease, cannot write ill.

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

I don't know what makes a writer's voice. It's dozens of things. There are people who write who don't have it. They're tone-deaf, even though they're very fluent. It's an ability, like anything else, being a doctor or a veterinarian, or a musician.

I can still put down some pretty nasty stuff on paper, which is what I enjoy doing.

I write fast, I write beautifully, I write convincingly.

There are probably many, many people who are better writers than me.

I ain't no author, man... my writing skills are not of 'New York Times' best-seller quality, trust and believe it ain't. My vocabulary ain't.

I'm no lyrical stylist; you wouldn't pick me for a perfect sentence, and I certainly wouldn't describe my novels as intellectual.

As soon as I began, it seemed impossible to write fast enough - I wrote faster than I would write a letter - two thousand to three thousand words in a morning, and I cannot help it.

All this is rather pretentious and fey to even talk about, but Flannery O'Connor sat down to write stories. The rest of us, some of us, don't have that kind of wit and genius. We don't do that. We sit down and have some accidents.

I have always thought that writers come with any variety of attributes. Some are capable and some aren't.

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

Well see, I'm a good enough writer that not everybody in my books talks exactly like I do.

Early on, it's good to develop the ability to write. Learning to write is a useful exercise, even if what you're writing about is not that relevant.

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

I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.

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.

Just because someone has stylistic limitations doesn't necessarily make them a worse writer.

I'm quite good at not writing.

While I wasn't very good at much else in school, in my creative-writing classes or when we had to do some writing in my English classes, I tended to do better at it.

I'm a big admirer of Daniel Woodrell for his beautiful, precise, sparse prose - I don't do succinct well, so I'm in awe of writers who do.

I want to write so well that a person is 30 or 40 pages in a book of mine... before she realizes she's reading.

When you write, it's just a much more crystalline, compressed version of the voice you think with - though not the one you speak with. I think your writing voice is your laser-guided missile. It's the poetry part of you.

I never had a highfalutin' view of what I write.

I've always been able to write. I've always been able to put a good essay in or say whatever I wanted to say through the pen. That was a gift of mine. I feel like it was what I was meant to do.