Literary Skills Quotes

My father was a TV scriptwriter. He would perform his dialogue out loud, while my mum transcribed it at the typewriter. So I grew up thinking that plucking characters out of the air was an extremely normal way to behave.

I write the occasional poem. I think my dabbling in poetry makes me better at screenplays. Poetry teaches the value of condensing, the importance of talking in a few words.

We all start out with the same alphabet. We are all unique. Talent is not the most important thing --- discipline and dedication are. Craft can be learned but desire and longing are innate. Despite the demands of school and just being young, try to write SOMETHING every day --- a description, a captured emotion, a simile, a metaphor. Read, for crying out loud! A writer must read the way a ball player must go to the ballfield every day to practice. Everything is possible in this world of ours--- and so's publication.

You don't have to be as good a writer to write a song; it's a very different process to writing straight prose. To learn how to write prose takes a lot of years of practice.

Creative writing and literacy go hand and hand.

Learning how to be a good reader is what makes you a writer.

The Six Golden Rules of Writing: Read, read, read, and write, write, write.

I'm terrible at story and structure, but I'm not so bad at writing dialogue.

I think writing and reading are completely synergistic; not necessarily in that one has to be a good reader to be a good writer or vice versa, but that they so inform each other.

Many poets, as you know, are not good readers.

You like to write. It's the single most important quality for someone who wants to be a writer. But not in itself enough.

The three things that help writing the most are living, writing, and reading. In that order.

The only thing of value I have in this life is my ability to tell a story, whether in print, orating, writing it down or having people acting it out. That's why I'm always hoping society never collapses because the first ones to go will be entertainers.

You can't learn to write that way - by writing directly for the screen. Wait until you're 30. But in the meantime write 200 short stories. You've got to learn how to write!

I always knew that I was tremendously creative. I recited love poems, I wrote stories and I got excellent grades in every subject, except for maths.

There are many more want-to-be writers out there than good editors.

I cannot understate the ability to handle classical texts such as Shakespeare.

A writer's business is minding other people's business ... all the vices of the village gossip are the virtues of the writer.

No, I'm not a great painter. Neither am I a great poet.

Of necessity, we made the discovery that it is easier to turn poets into business journalists than to turn bookkeepers into writers.

You apply the skills you use to produce your own book to make an anthology. Shaping. Rhythm.

I can usually find my own way out of whatever dicey literary or linguistic situations I wander into, but I have to work much harder at the science.

Listening to music and lyrics and watching movies, I think, uses a lot of the same muscles we use in reading and experiencing poetry - and yet we somehow forget that we have those when it comes to sitting down with a book of poems.

I knew the alphabet. Maybe I could be a writer.

A good writer must have more than vin rosé in his veins, use more than Chablis for ink.