[Critiquing the Gettysburg Address:] We did not conceive it possible that even Mr. Lincoln would produce a paper so slipshod, so loose-joined, so puerile, not alone in literary construction, but in its ideas, its sentiments, its grasp.
To call that writing, madam, is an insult to quills and ink across the world.
The fact remains that I am a very artless and incompetent writer.
If a scene isn't well written they'll drop your neckline to fill the void.
I just am so tired of really badly written women. It's so boring.
It's not hard to write poorly. But to write something good, it has to be revised.
Modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy.
They screwed up 'Raise the Titanic!' so badly, I stay away from Hollywood. I won't cheat my readers with another piece of crap.
Bad writing, it is easily verified, has never kept scholarship from being published.
Bad writers are those who try to express their own feeble ideas in the language of good ones.
I think it's the people who have no doubt that every word they put down is gold that probably don't write very well.
Most rock journalism is people who can't write, interviewing people who can't talk, for people who can't read.
When I get real big volumes of hate mail, it's usually because I wrote something poorly. But it's also because some group told people to e-mail me and those people didn't read the article, they read the post about what I wrote about. And they all e-mail me. And they all come around at the same time.
I have died and gone to the land of bad novels.
The vast majority of free verse is ghastly. Utterly ghastly. No one reads it. No one listens to it.
It's much harder to act poorly written material. It's much harder to memorize poorly written material.
Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good.
Give a civil servant a good case and he'll wreck it with clichés, bad punctuation, double negatives, and convoluted apology.
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.
I wrote the worst novel ever.
I thought Erica Jong's Fear of Flying was one of the biggest pieces of crap that I've ever read in my life.
I think my mistakes were kind of common - leaning on cliches and adjectives in the place of clear, vivid writing. But at least I knew how to spell, which seems to be a rarity these days.
the Real-World was a sprawling mess of a book in need of a good editor.
It was easier to do Shakespeare than a lot of modern movie scripts that are so poorly written.
There are very few solid family films. A lot of the writing is awful.
