“If you write to impress it will always be bad, but if you write to express it will be good”

— Thornton Wilder

Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "If you write to impress it will always be bad, but if you write to express it will be good" by Thornton Wilder?

Thornton Wilder photo

Thornton Wilder 61

American playwright and novelist 1897–1975

Related quotes

“Don't believe anything they write about you, good or bad.”

Babe Ruth (1895–1948) American baseball player

Advice to Red Grange as quoted in The Wicked City: Chicago from Kenna to Capone (1998) by Curt Johnson and R. Craig Sautter, p. 159; Unsourced variant: Don't ever forget two things I'm going to tell you. One, don't believe everything that's written about you. Two, don't pick up too many checks.
Context: Keed, I'll give you a little bit of advice. Don't believe anything they write about you, good or bad. Two, get the dough while the getting is good, but don't break your heart trying to get it. And don't pick up too many checks!

“Your writing is never as good as you hoped; but never as bad as you feared.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

“It takes writing a billion bad words before you get to the good ones.”

Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) American writer

“There are alway going to be bad things. But you can write it down and make a song out of it.”

Billie Eilish (2001) American singer-songwriter

“This was such bad writing that it was good.”

William Saroyan (1908–1981) American writer

The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze (1934), A Cold Day

“Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed there are many rewards, if you disgrace yourself you can always write a book.”

Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) American politician, 40th president of the United States (in office from 1981 to 1989)

“Write it, damn you, write it! What else are you good for?”

James Joyce (1882–1941) Irish novelist and poet

“The idea that you write to express yourself seems to me revolting. The idea that you write to glorify or to make glorious the art of expressiveness seems to me spot on.”

Geoffrey Hill (1932–2016) English poet and professor

Interview, Telegraph Review, 2013

“not writing is not good but trying to write when you can't is worse.”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

Source: The Last Night of the Earth Poems

“You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know”

Ernest Hemingway book A Moveable Feast

Source: A Moveable Feast

Related topics