Good Writing Quotes

“Bad writing is more than a matter of shit syntax and faulty observation; bad writing usually arises from a stubborn refusal to tell stories about what people actually do― to face the fact, let us say, that murderers sometimes help old ladies cross the street.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“When Jace opened the greenhouse door, the scent hit Clary, soft as the padded blow of a cat's paw...”
― Cassandra Clare

“Good writing is good writing. In many ways, it’s the audience and their expectations that define a genre. A reader of literary fiction expects the writing to illuminate the human condition, some aspect of our world and our role in it. A reader of genre fiction likes that, too, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of the story.”
― Rosemary Clement-Moore

“He wrote as if he were the reader. It was also how he kept his writing from becoming too cute, which is to say, about him not the subject. Rook was a journalist but strove to be a storyteller, one who let his subjects speak for themselves and stayed out of their way as much as possible.”
― Richard Castle, Naked Heat

“Few knew that she was broken. Whatever power had blessed her, divine or otherwise, was gone-or at least out of reach. Her followers were kept at a distance so they could not see that her eyes were dark hollows, that her breath came in frightened gasps. She walked slowly, tentatively, her driftwood bones fragile in her body, this sickly girl upon whom all their hopes rested.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Ruin and Rising

“To have touched the feet of Christ is no excuse for mistakes in punctuation.

If a man writes well only when he's drunk, then I'll tell him: Get drunk. And if he says that it's bad for his liver, I'll answer: What's your liver? A dead thing that lives while you live, whereas the poems you write live without while.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“That sound - the swift, shocking report of gunfire - called the scattered, irascible, permanently seeking part of his mind into focus like nothing else.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Six of Crows

“After his initial homecoming week, after he'd been taken to a bunch of sights by his cousins, after he'd gotten somewhat used to the scorching weather and the surprise of waking up to the roosters and being called Huascar by everybody (that was his Dominican name, something else he'd forgotten), after he refused to succumb to that whisper that all long-term immigrants carry inside themselves, the whisper that says You do not belong, after he'd gone to about fifty clubs and because he couldn't dance salsa, merengue, or bachata had sat and drunk Presidentes while Lola and his cousins burned holes in the floor, after he'd explained to people a hundred times that he'd been separated from his sister at birth, after he spent a couple of quiet mornings on his own, writing, after he'd given out all his taxi money to beggars and had to call his cousin Pedro Pablo to pick him up, after he'd watched shirtless shoeless seven-year-olds fighting each other for the scraps he'd left on his plate at an outdoor cafe, after his mother took them all to dinner in the Zona Colonial and the waiters kept looking at their party askance (Watch out, Mom, Lola said, they probably think you're Haitian - La unica haitiana aqui eres tu, mi amor, she retorted), after a skeletal vieja grabbed both his hands and begged him for a penny, after his sister had said, You think that's bad, you should see the bateys, after he'd spent a day in Bani (the camp where La Inca had been raised) and he'd taken a dump in a latrine and wiped his ass with a corn cob - now that's entertainment, he wrote in his journal - after he'd gotten somewhat used to the surreal whirligig that was life in La Capital - the guaguas, the cops, the mind-boggling poverty, the Dunkin' Donuts, the beggars, the Haitians selling roasted peanuts at the intersections, the mind-boggling poverty, the asshole tourists hogging up all the beaches, the Xica de Silva novelas where homegirl got naked every five seconds that Lola and his female cousins were cracked on, the afternoon walks on the Conde, the mind-boggling poverty, the snarl of streets and rusting zinc shacks that were the barrios populares, the masses of niggers he waded through every day who ran him over if he stood still, the skinny watchmen standing in front of stores with their brokedown shotguns, the music, the raunchy jokes heard on the streets, the mind-boggling poverty, being piledrived into the corner of a concho by the combined weight of four other customers, the music, the new tunnels driving down into the bauxite earth [...]”
― Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“Show Pleasant Riderhood a Wedding in the street, and she only saw two people taking out a regular license to quarrel and fight. Show her a Christening, and she saw a little heathen personage having a quite superfluous name bestowed upon it, inasmuch as it would be commonly addressed by some abusive epithet; which little personage was not in the least wanted by anybody, and would be shoved and banged out of everybody's way, until it should grow big enough to shove and bang. Show her a Funeral, and she saw an unremunerative ceremony in the nature of a black masquerade, conferring a temporary gentility on the performers, at an immense expense, and representing the only formal party ever given by the deceased. Show her a live father, and she saw but a duplicate of her own father, who from her infancy had been taken with fits and starts of discharging his duty to her, which duty was always incorporated in the form of a fist or a leathern strap, and being discharged hurt her. All things considered, therefore, Pleasant Riderhood was not so very, very bad.”
― Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend

“She smiled. "How...cute." She chose the word rather like a candy, which she bit.”
― Matthew Skelton, Endymion Spring

“Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader--not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.”
― E.L. Doctorow

“I refuse to let you build your house on such shiftless & ureal sand.”
― Tamsyn Muir, Harrow the Ninth

“Good fiction writers have an instinctive understanding of human nature. That's what makes stories and characters captivating. Good spiritual writers share what they sincerely practice themselves.”
― Donna Goddard

“...Mr. Wegg sits down on a box in front of the fire, and inhales a warm and comfortable smell which is not the smell of the shop. 'For that,' Mr. Wegg inwardly decides, as he takes a corrective sniff or two, 'is musty, leathery, feathery, cellary, gluey, gummy, and,' with another sniff, 'as it might be, strong of old pairs of bellows.”
― Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend

“At seven o'clock, Noah pulled up in front of Mack's house in a dirty white van that couldn't have been more obvious in its nondescript creepiness if he'd spray painted "Free Puppies" on the side.”
― Lyssa Kay Adams, Undercover Bromance

“Behind her, for a moment, the sky was very full: an aerostat droned in the distance; tiny specks lurched erratically around it, winged figures playing in its wake like dolphins round a whale; and in front of them all another train, heading into the city this time, heading for the centre of New Crobuzon, the knot of architectural tissue where the fibres of the city congealed, where the skyrails of the militia radiated out from the Spike like a web and the five great trainlines of the city met, converging on the great variegated fortress of dark brick and scrubbed concrete and wood and steel and stone, the edifice that yawned hugely at the city's vulgar heart, Perdido Street Station.”
― China Mieville, Perdido Street Station

“He should have that chilled but somehow enthusiastic look, as if he believed in nothing and yet somehow had absolute faith.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle

“... a slipstream of darkness so complete it helps illuminate the evening sky. It's like somebody dropped a dome over the ocean & lit it up with Christmas lights. ...Sans moon, Norfolk is wrapped in a mantle of pure, unadulterated blackness, leaving the stars to twinkle in harmony above. It thoroughly disorientates me.”
― Tim Latham, Norfolk: Island of Secrets : The Mystery of Janelle Patton's Death

“.. they look like they've escaped from a nursing home. Everywhere I turn I see puffy skin & radiant expressions, crinkles & pearls, broad smiles & high hair... Collectively they all lean forward, like bamboo in the wind. Their postures may be cruelled by age but their excitement is adolescent. Cackling & wheezing with laughter the elderly hordes squeeze into the waiting vans & shuffle about...”
― Tim Latham, Norfolk: Island of Secrets : The Mystery of Janelle Patton's Death

“Don't speak ill of anyone! Then, good luck will make you happy.”
― Ettore Grillo

“The swordmaiden wears her loyalty like a necklace of dead stars. Their worth is eternal, although they no longer shine.”
― Sofia Samatar, The Winged Histories

“He is unable to think in words. The shells begin once again to pound the water around him, to make it into a bloody broth of metal and the dead.”
― China Miéville, The Scar

“Good writing is about telling the truth.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“Good writing is seldom written but gets written.”
― BS Murthy

“Beyond the rock where we sheltered there was a blackness filled with screams where all the gods unknown to us had been released.”
― Sofia Samatar, The Winged Histories

“Any writing, whether fiction or non fiction, that makes you think about it (think, not recollect) long after you have read it, is good writing.”
― Alok Karkera

“Well, now, Coin," said Billias. "You want to see the best I can do, eh?"
"Yes."
"Yes, Sir," snapped Spelter. Coin gave him an unblinking stare, a stare as old as time, the kind of stare that basks on rocks on volcanic islands and never gets tired. Spelter felt his mouth go dry.”
― Terry Pratchett, Sourcery

“Culture contains everything. there would be no peaks without valleys, gentle slopes, and meadows, at lower altitudes. The genius of democracy is a love for everything, to offer everything, value everything, and let individual freedom express its preferences here as elsewhere...and the key word, where culture and art are concerned, is pleasure!”
― Laurence Cossé, A Novel Bookstore

“In ‘Hakon’s of Rogen’s Saga’, I have attempted to tell the story of a boy who lived at the end of the Viking period. It was not written for ‘youth,’ in the sense that I have blunted my pen before I started. I abhor those writers who have not the skill to keep the attention of adults, and therefore think themselves equipped to write for children. I have done my best, and I leave you to be my critic.”
― Erik Christian Haugaard, Hakon of Rogen's Saga

“You must believe: a poem is a holy thing--a good poem, that is.”
― Theodore Roethke, Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke