I never had a highfalutin' view of what I write.
Generals who can write always make me nervous.
But I think talent as a writer is hard-wired in, it's all there, at least the basic elements of it. You can't change it any more than you can choose whether to be right handed or left handed.
By writing quickly we are not brought to write well, but by writing well we are brought to write quickly.
Write quickly and you will never write well; write well, and you will soon write quickly.
Although there is no substitute for merit in writing, clarity comes closest to being one.
I can draw and write, and you'd be foolish not to hire me.
Eunice Parchman killed the Coverdale family because she could not read or write.
Writing is the only thing I am good for.
My dad is a great writer. Naturally talented, naturally charming. He embodies that back-in-the-day cool.
If you are a good writer - and I think I am - you are able to handle any kind of group and imagine their lives.
Even the most deft pen is a clumsy tool.
My whole life I've tried to find the thing I can do that other people can't do, and invest in that, and the one thing I can do is write narratives and build characters. I can do that.
I've figured out in the course of my life that the one thing I'm good at doing is writing books, and it would be crazy to trade that in for something else.
Writing is like a sport. If you don't practice, you don't get any better.
Knowledge is the foundation and source of good writing. [Lat., Scibendi recte sapere est et principium et fons.]
We like to think about how smart we are. But I think talent as a writer is hard-wired in, it's all there, at least the basic elements of it. You can't change it any more than you can choose whether to be right handed or left handed.
Writing talent is similar to the art of chatting up a girl. You can improve to a certain degree through practice, but basically you are either born with it or you aren't.
Reading maketh a full man; and writing an axact man. And, therefore, if a man write little, he need have a present wit; and if he read little, he need have much cunning to seem to know which he doth not.
Obviously, a writer can't know everything about what she writes. It's impossible.
There is nothing more important than writing well for the young, if literature is to have a continuance ... They will inherit the earth; and nothing that we value will endure in the world unless they can be persuaded to value it too.
If something is well-written, it has a chance to be good and if it's not well-written, it will not be good. It could even become popular, but it won't be good.
A.J. Liebling, one of my heroes, used to say that he could write better than anyone who wrote faster, and faster than anyone who could write better. I'm one nine-hundredth as good as Liebling, but that principle may slightly apply.
As a rule, one must write a great many words before one learns to write well.
Nothing leads so straight to futility as literary ambitions without systematic knowledge.
