I never had a highfalutin' view of what I write.
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.
Generals who can write always make me nervous.
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.
Even the most deft pen is a clumsy tool.
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.
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.
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.
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.]
Nothing leads so straight to futility as literary ambitions without systematic knowledge.
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.
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.
As a rule, one must write a great many words before one learns to write well.
From writing rapidly it does not result that one writes well, but from writing well it results that one writes rapidly.
Read at the level at which you want to write. Reading is the nourishment that feeds the kind of writing you want to do.
I'm older than my sister so I started writing first. I started writing at school. I was always top of my class in composition, essays, English Lit and all of that.
