The secret of good writing is to say an old thing in a new way or to say a new thing in an old way.
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader - not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.
Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don't see any.
All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.
All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.
What I like in a good author is not what he says but what he whispers.
Good writing is like a windowpane.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis.
Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.
Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but that's the only way you can do anything really good.
To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.
If you have other things in your life-family, friends, good productive day work-these can interact with your writing and the sum will be all the richer.
Anecdotes don't make good stories. Generally I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdotes were about.
The test of any good fiction is that you should care something for the characters; the good to succeed, the bad to fail. The trouble with most fiction is that you want them all to land in hell, together, as quickly as possible.
The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything.
Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.
In good writing, words become one with things.
The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.
or simply: