Writing Standards Quotes

I think television scripts have become really intriguing and well-done. And writers have stopped drawing any actual line between film and television they used to never cross.

I wrote a piece for the school literary magazine that now makes me think: 'My God in Heaven, this is just the worst drivel.'

To call that writing, madam, is an insult to quills and ink across the world.

At the 'Times,' all journalists on every subject followed the same rules and were supposed to meet the same standards, so I never really thought about fashion writing as being in a bubble.

Nobody's strong enough to stand up under a flood of weak material.

It is important for poets and writers today to know their shortcomings, and be able to edit their own work as well as reject them if they are not up to their standards.

I will not write a lame follow-up. It could take me 20 years. But I will never turn in a book that I'm not happy with.

Which editor? I can't think of one editor I worked with as an editor. The various companies did have editors but we always acted as our own editor, so the question has no answer.

Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing prose... anything goes.

I'm pretty rigorous about the drafts I turn in. I don't turn in something that's so ungodly they go, 'What the hell is this?'

I remember when they started publishing Latino fiction years ago. You had to be really good to get published. Now you don't have to be that good.

There is no such thing as writer's block for writers whose standards are low enough.

When I was in law school I was taught that the great writers were people like [Oliver Wendell] Holmes Jr. and [Benjamin N.] Cardozo. But you go back and read their prose and it's sort of perfumed and very ornate and show-offy. And they're constantly striving for these abstractions that seem archaic nowadays.

If writers wrote as carelessly as some people talk, then adhasdh asdglaseuyt[bn[ pasdlgkhasdfasdf.

Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.

For while agents and editors often misunderstand their market and sometimes reject good or even great works, they do prevent a vast quantity of truly execrable writing from being published.

Out of the thousand writers huffing and puffing through movieland, there are scarcely fifty men and women of wit and talent... Yet, in a curious way, there is not much difference between the product of a good writer and a bad one. They both have to toe the same mark.

Long after Salinger sent me away, I continued to believe his standards and expectations were the best ones.

One must be ruthless with one's own writing or someone else will be.

I'm curious about writing in the age of online publishing. Because nobody cares about good writing online.

I had no idea how long books were supposed to be.

Of course newspaper sportswriting is mostly terrible - and of course it is usually the best writing in the paper.

I consider what I do on Deadspin to be based in the foundations of journalism, yes, based on the foundations of journalism that I have been trained and that I certainly use when I write for GQ and The New York Times and so on. Certainly, I think the language can be a little looser on the web, but I am held to the same standards and accuracy everyone else is.

You need to realize that most writing rules aren't laws, they're rules of thumb.

There is no left and right in writing. There is only good and bad writing.