Bad 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

“It was one of the dullest speeches I ever heard. The Agee woman told us for three quarters of an hour how she came to write her beastly book, when a simple apology was all that was required.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, The Girl in Blue

“Sit back, enjoy the ride and hang out with me for a little while. ( sorry, cheesy driving metaphor!)”
― Miley Cyrus with Hilary Liftin, Miles to Go

“This too to remember. If a man writes clearly enough any one can see if he fakes. If he mystifies to avoid a straight statement, which is very different from breaking so-called rules of syntax or grammar to make an efffect which can be obtained in no other way, the writer takes a longer time to be known as a fake and other writers who are afflicted by the same necessity will praise him in their own defense. True mysticism should not be confused with incompetence in writing which seeks to mystify where there is no mystery but is really only the necessity to fake to cover lack of knowledge or the inability to state clearly. Mysticism implies a mystery and there are many mysteries; but incompetence is not one of them; nor is overwritten journalism made literature by the injection of a false epic qulaity. Remember this too: all bad writers are in love with the epic.”
― Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon

“I believe it was Thursday; my last memory was Tuesday night, and I did not use to die more than two days in a row.”
― Sergio Cobo, A Story of Yesterday

“Heresy is usually quite sophisticated, actually has a meaning, and is to be taken very seriously. It is therefore to be carefully distinguished from turgid, pretentious, badly-written Bullsgeshichte, to use the technical German theological term.”
― Carl Trueman

“Lightlark was a shining, cliffy thing.”
― Alex Aster, Lightlark

“In less than an hour I have to hold class for a group of idiot freshmen. And, on a desk in the living room, is a mountain of midterm examinations with essays I must suffer through, feeling my stomach turn at their paucity of intelligence, their adolescent phraseology. And all that tripe, all those miles of hideous prose, had been would into an eternal skein in his head. And there it sat unraveling into his own writing until he wondered if he could stand the thought of living anymore. I have digested the worst, he thought. Is it any wonder that I exude it piecemeal? (“Mad House”)”
― Richard Matheson, Collected Stories, Vol. 1

“When reading a book, one hopes it doesn’t turn into a painful process. Predictable is bad enough. Laborious is acceptable if the labor produces fruit. But with painfully bad writing, all one can do is grab a hatchet, slice off its head, and bury it.”
― Chila Woychik, On Being a Rat and Other Observations

“…After all, it isn't really difficult to write books. Especially if you either write a rotten story in good English or a good story in rotten English, which is as far as most people seem to get nowadays.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Unnatural Death

“I would rather be a mediocre writer than a bad actress.”
― Sylvia Plath, Letters Home

“I think the writer is initially set going by literature more than by life. When there are many writers all employing the same idiom, all looking out on more or less the same social scene, the individual writer will have to be more than ever careful that he isn't just doing badly what has already been done to completion. The presence alone of Faulkner in our midst makes a great difference in what the writer can and cannot permit himself to do. Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

“A person who wrote badly did better than a person who does not write at all. A bad writing can be corrected. An empty page remains an empty page.”
― Israelmore Ayivor, How You Can Write Your Dream Book

“Every day, writing. No matter how bad. Something will come.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“She may well have whispered, ‘I’ll miss you,’ once I’d gone, but I couldn’t hear that from where I was, and as this is first-person narration and therefore not omniscient, we just won’t know.”
― Garth Marenghi, Garth Marenghi's TerrorTome

“Roz, I need you to do this,’ I said, although I didn’t, in actual fact – that’s just a lazy phrase which helps steer a lost narrative back on course when readers are giving up in droves, and is, ironically, a major sign of bad writing. But I knew Roz would have encountered that a lot in her career as editor of books by authors other than me, and would no doubt have employed it herself to fix failing narratives in desperate situations, and thus I used it here to snap her attention back from her own internal abyss.”
― Garth Marenghi, Garth Marenghi's TerrorTome

“Tookie was loving Thigh-High Boot Camp. She thought the name was especially fitting because she felt like she was flying on a natural Thigh High.”
― Tyra Banks, Modelland

“I wanted to let go, drop him, anything to get him out of my arms.”
― S.A. Bodeen, The Compound

“Which is why, ultimately, we need to flame the place, Roz. And it's also why we should be eating more meat as a species. Each new vegetarian recipe Mankind allows is a recipe for disaster.'

'That sentence would be brilliantly funny, Nick. If it weren't also terrifyingly true.'

'I know, Roz. If only I could allow myself to appreciate the stark humor of it. Yet the reality is, these vegetarian fast-food outlets are the wild west of the modern convenience snack. And we've only just begun to realize the full implications of messing about with supposedly "healthy" ingredients that Mankind can neither taste nor understand.”
― Garth Marenghi, Garth Marenghi's TerrorTome

“Good job I loaded this with silver bullets from that box of silver bullets that was sitting on that table labelled “Silver Bullets” inside the “Silver Bullet’’ room I just entered.”
― Garth Marenghi, Garth Marenghi's TerrorTome

“Thanks for the warning about leaving the car door open, by the way,’ Capello said, his manner towards Nick softening.

‘You know it makes sense, amigo. I guess we’re both learning something out here.’ He stared deeply at Capello. ‘Learning from each other.’

They gripped hands manfully.”
― Garth Marenghi, Garth Marenghi's TerrorTome

“Bad writing is almost always a love poem addressed by the self to the self. The person who will admire it first and last and most is the writer herself.”
― Toby Litt, The Guardian

“Bad writing is almost always a love poem addressed by the self to the self. The person who will admire it first and last and most is the writer herself.”
― Toby Litt

“She could slip into the storeroom from there for the belated alone.”
― Nora Roberts

“A legion of Boners, who will rise upwards, forcing Mankind to do its bidding. Thrusting it deep into a titanic struggle for its very survival. Yes, soon my Boners will stand proud, hardened against the withering, wilted flock of flaccid prannies you call Humans. Against you, my Boners will rise, their spirits stiffened within, and at my command, they will plunge themselves into all who oppose them.’

Nick grinned wryly at Strain’s choice of words. The kid’s development must have been severely arrested. No one called humans ‘prannies’ these days.”
― Garth Marenghi, Garth Marenghi's TerrorTome

“The very same. But she never returned. Dwayne waited and waited, but always heard nothing. Eventually, he set off to see where she’d got to, knocked on Strain’s door . . . then he disappeared, too.’

‘What, right there at the door, like David Copperfield?’

‘No, no, he went in. Presumably then something happened to him inside the house, which stopped him coming out again alive, because he was never seen again. It wasn’t a magic trick, or anything like that.’

‘I see. So, almost as if he was murdered, then?’

‘Exactly,’ said Capello, fresh tears starting to flow.”
― Garth Marenghi, Garth Marenghi's TerrorTome

“It is very difficult to make people understand the impersonal indignation that a decay of writing can cause men who understand what it implies, and the end whereto it leads. It is almost impossible to express any degree of such indignation without being called 'embittered', or something of that sort.”
― Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading

“More writers fail from lack of character than from lack of intelligence. Technical solidity is not attained without at least some persistence. The chief cause of false writing is economic. Many writers need or want money. These writers could be cured by an application of banknotes. The next cause is the desire men have to tell what they don't know, or to pass off an emptiness for a fullness. They are discontented with what they have to say and want to make a pint of comprehension fill up a gallon of verbiage. An author having a very small amount of true contents can make it the basis of formal and durable mastery, provided he neither inflates nor falsifies [...] The plenum of letters is not bounded by primaeval exclusivity functioning against any kind of human being or talent, but only against false coiners, men who will not dip their metal in the acid of known or accessible fact.”
― Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading

“Pisseur de copie. It means that he pisses hack journalism, it means he urinates frightful prose.”
― Muriel Spark

“I’ve always felt an almost physical loathing for secret things--intrigues, diplomacy, secret societies, occult sciences. What especially irks me are these last two things--the pretension certain men have that, through their understandings with Gods or Masters or Demiurges, they and they alone know the great secrets on which the world is founded.

I can’t believe their claims, though I can believe someone else might. But is there any reason why all these people might not be crazy or deluded? The fact there are a lot of them proves nothing, for there are collective hallucinations.

What really shocks me is how these wizards and masters of the invisible, when they write to communicate or intimate their mysteries, all write abominably. It offends my intelligence that a man can master the Devil without being able to master the Portuguese language. Why should dealing with demons be easier than dealing with grammar?”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet