Be A Better Writer Quotes

“If you are serious, and you want to make a living as an author, then you need to hustle. Period. If you can't make that quality, then you need to concentrate on your craft and practice more.
One other thing, quality comes with practice. If you are prolific, then you become a better writer because you are writing. The more you do anything the better at it you will become. So in a way, quantity does add to quality.”

— Larry Correia

“[Thoreau] is a nimble skater who cuts elegant and complicated figures on a surface of frozen platitudes. Perhaps he would have been a better writer if he had not been quite so good a man.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

“If you want to become a better writer, you have to write. But you also have to read.”

— Kami Garcia

“I want to have new challenges and write new crazy books because I think it makes me a better writer to be insecure and try new things.”

— David Lagercrantz

“There's a half-conscious state you enter when you're actually generating prose, and you are simply a better writer in that place. In fact it's the only place where you even are a writer.”

— John Jeremiah Sullivan

“I think I began to like writing a lot more, and to be a better writer, when I did it for a while alone. It made me a little more confident about my style.”

— Patricia Marx

“If I'd had more time or been a better writer, I would have tried to put the same ideas and experiences into a novel. But I didn't so I slapped it up on the Web.”

— Philip Greenspun

“Being an editor doesn't make you a better writer - or vice versa. The worst thing any editor can do is be in competition with his writer.”

— Joseph Kanon

“I have this desire to have this immaculate form of love that really doesn't exist, so my obsession goes on through life and I never find it and I end up miserable. But it makes me a better writer.”

— Angel Haze

“I think self-doubt, as grim as it can be, makes me a better writer. Stasis and hubris would probably be the death knell for my career.”

— Kristan Higgins

“Reading while I'm writing ideally inspires my competitive side. When I read great writers, I want to be a better writer.”

— Amity Gaige

“I was a better writer when I was teaching. I was constantly going over the basics and constantly reminding myself, as I reminded my students, what made a good story, a good poem.”

— Gil Scott-Heron

“Received a gift-it was the first decent piece of instruction about marriage I had ever been given in my twenty-five years of life. "Does your husband make you a better person?" Edra asked. There I was in that sky-blue pool beneath a bright blue sky, my fingers breaking apart the light on the water, and I had no idea what she was talking about. "Are you smarter, kinder, more generous, more compassionate, a better writer?" she said, running down her list. "Does he make you better?" "That's not the question," I said. "It's so much more complicated than that." "It's not more complicated than that,”

— Ann Patchett

“(Interested in being a better writer? Go buy yourself a copy of The Collected Stories by Grace Paley.) The”

— Ann Patchett

“To be a better cook, cook more. To be a better writer, read more.”

— Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“I believe I'm a better writer now than I was when I started. I'm grateful that I had good guidance because you don't make it in this business without good editors and a lot of support from your publishers.”

— Sharon Draper

“You become a better writer by writing. You become a better travel writer by writing about travel.”

— Tim Cahill

“Just writing a lot doesn't necessarily make you a better writer. You have to hear yourself as a writer, and the best way to do that is to read your writing out loud.”

— Christopher Paolini

“Read obsessively. It will make you a better human and a better writer.”

— Pittacus Lore

“What one's goal should be is just to become a better writer and to tell different kinds of stories.”

— Diane Mott Davidson

“She sat down about two yards away from him, near a large wandering jew. "I first heard about it at the faculty wives' tea." "Everything is discussed there. I'm aware of that." "Of course I would be the last to know. Wives always are." "Come, come, Clara, my patience and my time are running out." Without warning he lifted up one of her hand-painted china cake plates and threw it against the wall. The outrage snapped the tension in the room, and she could weep now with some mild comfort, but without, he could see, any shock or concern for the priceless plate. (Aunt Clayburn) "You admit then you have a lover," she said, examining the broken pieces of china, from her chair. "I don't admit any such god damned thing," he scoffed. "The ladies were certainly sold on the truth of it." "I wish I had the nerve to have a lover. I might have been a better writer.”

— James Purdy

“John D. MacDonald is by any standards a better writer than Saul Bellow, only MacDonald writes thrillers and Bellow is a human-heart chap, so guess who wears the top-grade laurels?”

— Kingsley Amis

“One of the things you get to do as a writer is that you get to learn new stuff all the time, and I hope that I'm a better writer when I'm 70 than I was when I was 30. That's one of the great things about a literary career.”

— Justin Cronin

“I directed my first music video for Sara Bareilles. I like writing and directing. I co-wrote '21 Jump Street' and I'm in that. To me, they all inform the other one. I think writing makes you a better actor, acting makes you a better writer, directing makes you better at both. To me, I'm just trying to learn as much as possible.”

— Jonah Hill

“I am just getting into Zora Neale Hurston, who is possibly a much better writer than the critics and rivals who tried to erase her from history, resulting in a life in which she worked as a maid and died in a welfare nursing home. She's clever. She does something modern to the sentence.”

— Rachel Kushner

“I think being an actor makes me a better writer and vice versa. I know the kinds of roles I would kill to play, and I try to create them for others.”

— Katori Hall

“As for the zone, I always find the zone immediately after I am sure I will never ever find the zone again because it has left me for some other, better writer.”

— Sarah MacLean

“The more you live, the better writer you are.”

— Meg Rosoff

“People keep asking me ... How to instantly become a better writer? It's simple: Use "power words" and see for yourself.”

— Ziad K. Abdelnour

“I think I have become a better writer since having children. It improves creativity, particularly because once you have children it makes you realise the story isn't about you.”

— Louise Doughty

“I have learned, as has many another better writer, to summon inspiration to my call as soon as I begin my day's stint, and not to hang around waiting for it. Inspiration is merely a pretty phrase for the zest to work. And it can be cultivated by anyone who has the patience to try. Inspiration that will not come at its possessor's summons is like a dog that cannot be trained to obey. The sooner both are gotten rid of, the better.”

— Albert Payson Terhune

“Whether you're an unpublished novelist or a sixteen-time New York Times bestselling author, you can always improve your craft. You can always become a better writer.”

— Robert Dugoni

“Memorizing the work of others definitely made me a better writer.”

— James Arthur

“I was a much better writer than I was an athlete. My college coach told me flat out, he said, "Deford, you write basketball better than you play it."”

— Frank Deford

“How I became a better writer was that I kept writing.”

— Sallie Tisdale

“Sometimes the way comes later, when I'm not working or thinking about it at all. When stories don't work, you try to convince yourself that all of that time and energy wasn't wasted, that it will make you a better writer, if nothing else.”

— Mary J. Miller

“I'm a better writer now because I've worked very hard at getting better. My long-range goal will always be to write better books.”

— George Pelecanos

“I write a lot and I will have some originals on the record. I think it is a mistake for an artist like me to think I am a better writer than Cole Porter. I think it is important to realize what my strengths are. I do like to write and I'm not shabby but I don't think I'm the most brilliant writer. I think it would be a shame and sort so egotistical to say I don't need these wonderful writers. These men created works of art and wrote hundreds of beautiful songs. It would be a mistake for me to say at this point in my career that I am so good.”

— Michael Buble

“I do increasingly feel like becoming a better writer is about trying to find new ways to solve the same problems over and over again, and I'll maybe be a good writer after I have solved the same problem ten million times.”

— Mike Young

“The only way to become a better writer is to become a better person.”

— Brenda Ueland

“I love working with actors. If you cast the right person in the right part at the right time, they make you look like a better writer and director than you really are.”

— Todd Solondz

“I went back into the older stories and reworked them, because I became a better writer over the years and could spot flaws. I loved having another chance to make them stronger, and to bring them closer to me, made them less like a greatest hits compilation, and more like something written in the same extended burst.”

— Tom Barbash

“Purely the idea of writing a lot of books doesn't make you a great writer, but it might be that the process of doing a lot of writing will make you a much better writer.”

— Walter Mosley

“I think I became a better writer after I started writing for the New Yorker. Well, I know I did. And part of it was having my New Yorker editor and part of it is that was when I started really going on tour and reading things in front of an audience 30 times and then going back in the room and rewriting it and reading it and rewriting it. So you really get the rhythm of the sentences down and you really get the flow down and you get rid of stuff that's not important.”

— David Sedaris

“I wish I could be a better writer, but writing is so difficult. I get seduced by visual aesthetics. Because I just like making beautiful pictures, sometimes I wander away from making a clear statement.”

— Sally Mann

“I loved Cookie [Mueller]. She was a much better writer than actress. She shouldn't have stuck with me in the beginning; she should have immediately become a writer. She would have had more of a chance.”

— John Waters

“An editor is like a professional reader, and as I became a better reader, I also became a better writer.”

— Karen Thompson Walker

“The idea of being productive, the idea of producing many books is going to lead you toward you becoming a better and better writer.”

— Walter Mosley

“If I were a better artist, I'd be a painter, and if I were a better writer, I'd write books.. but I'm not, so I draw cartoons!”

— Charles M. Schulz

“I'd like to be a better writer, but I have no dreams to direct or do a screenplay. And I'd love to have a big starring role in a movie because the paycheck would be bigger. That's the only reason I do films.”

— Henry Rollins