Writing Principles Quotes

I never learned to be a writer. I never took screenwriting courses. I never read anyone's scripts. As a writer, my only guiding principle has been to write about things that scare me, write about things that make me feel vulnerable, write about things that will expose my deepest fears, so that's how I write.

There is no such thing as a natural sentence but there is such a thing as a natural paragraph and it must be found.

A writer should never be brief at the expense of being clear.

And I've always worked on the principle that if it interests me enough to write about it, then it must interest a lot of other people.

You can't write just anything. Your story needs structure.

Good sense is both the first principal and the parent source of good writing.

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

I think, in general, as a writer, you can't really hide your values. They're always going to fall out onto the page, and I tend to trust that I don't have to force my ideals into the expression of what's going to happen naturally.

There are no rules in writing. There are useful principles. Throw them away when they're not useful. But always know what you're throwing away.

a writer's first duty is to be clear. Clarity is an excellent virtue. Like all virtues it can be pursued at ruinous cost. Paid, so far as I am concerned, joyfully.

It wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics.

I don't have the notion that everybody has to write in some single academic style.

I think that the biggest, quickest and hardest thing to learn for a writer is that what we think of as the unchanging verities of story are a load of bollocks. Absolute rubbish. There are no unchanging verities.

It ought to be the first endeavour of a writer to distinguish nature from custom; or that which is established because it is right, from that which is right only because it is established; that he may neither violate essential principles by a desire of novelty, nor debar himself from the attainment of beauties within his view, by a needless fear of breaking rules which no literary dictator had authority to enact.