Quality Writing Quotes

For me, the most important thing is the writing - and certainly the director. But if the writing isn't there, it doesn't matter who the director is!

Whether it's TV shows or the films that I've done, it's always a priority for me that the entire script should be good.

Mainly I love working on good writing.

By writing quickly we are not brought to write well, but by writing well we are brought to write quickly.

Nothin'g sa'ys q'uality fantas'y l'ike misuse'd apos'tro'phes.

I think if the writing comes too easily, it shows - it's usually hard to read.

For sure, without question, the writing is better on TV pound for pound than movies because the businesses have changed so much. So all the great writers would rather work for TV, and they do.

To me, a book is a book. A novel is a novel, and you have hundreds of possibilities, options, and they may all be fine. Charles Dickens or Ingeborg Bachmann, Claude Simon or later writers. The one and only condition is that it has to be good: it has to have quality, substance, atmosphere.

Great journalism will always attract readers. The words, pictures and graphics that are the stuff of journalism have to be brilliantly packaged; they must feed the mind and move the heart.

Good books are irrefutable, and bad books refute themselves.

The writing is so great on TV now; it's such a pleasure to watch.

Writing is getting killed by too many chefs. Back in the Bogart days, it started with great scripts. You had a writer, and he wrote a script, and that was your movie. I think that's been watered down a bit lately.

Contrary to popular belief, editors and agents are gagging for good books.

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

Easy reading is damn hard writing. But if it's right, it's easy. It's the other way round, too. If it's slovenly written, then it's hard to read. It doesn't give the reader what the careful writer can give the reader.

I take a certain pride in having maintained a reputation for fast copy throughout my newspaper career. Fast-breaking stories left my typewriter in a hurry. Not great literature, perhaps, but fast, and usually accurate.

The heart and soul of good writing is research; you should write not what you know but what you can find out about.

I read a lot of books to my children, and they all seem really good. I think people have gotten really good at children's books.

It's very difficult to find good scripts in Hollywood any more.

People know accuracy when they read it; they can feel it.

A good script is like a work of art in itself. I've read hundreds of scripts, and good ones are very rare. If the writer has something to say, and a voice, and a plot that matches character, and an emotional trajectory that works, then I'd be an idiot to fool around with it. It's just that few scripts ever are like that.

Nathaniel Hawthorne once said that easy reading is damn hard writing.

Anybody can direct, but there are only eleven good writers.

I want people to read good work. If I see someone reading a book by Lorrie Moore or Jennifer Egan, I'm psyched. If I see them reading X Latin American Writer Who Sucks, I'm not psyched. But in terms of news, I do think that's important.

I've written for 'The Times' because they have valued what I do enough to pay me. The 'New Statesman' magazine also asked me to write an article, but they didn't want to pay me anything. To me, that shows how much they value quality journalism.