Criteria Quote by Maryam Abdullah Alnaymi

“A writer needs four things to achieve greatness, Pasquale: desire, disappointment, and the sea.”

— Jess Walter

“Good writers are avid readers. They have absorbed a vast inventory of words, idioms, constructions, tropes, and rhetorical tricks,”

— Steven Pinker

At the beginning of their careers many writers have a need to overwrite. They choose carefully turned-out phrases; they want to impress their readers…

— Jorge Luis Borges

“...a writer has the duty to be good, not lousy; true, not false; lively, not dull; accurate, not full of error. He should tend…

— E. B. White

“To write an excellent novel, make the outcome of the story matter to the reader through the evolving relationships between well-designed characters.”

— Martin Sandforth

“The reader must not imagine that he is to find in it wisdom, brilliancy, fertility of invention, ingenuity of construction, excellence of form, purity…

— Mark Twain

“A writer's style should be direct and personal, his imagery rich and earthy, and his words simple and vigorous. The greatest writers have the…

— Ernest Hemingway

“Literary works are pieces of rhetoric as well as reports. They demand a peculiarly vigilant kind of reading, one which is alert to tone,…

— Terry Eagleton

“Quite often, too, a writer who has for a time been believed to possess a great store of ordinarily profound ideas, and who is…

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The more stringent the rules and the more limiting they are, the more the poet and writer is forced to resort to special techniques…

— Simin Behbahani

“all writers, given adequate technique—technique that communicates—can stir our interest in their special subject matter, since at heart all fiction treats, directly or indirectly,…

— John Gardner

“We do need to bring to our writing, over and over again, all the abundance we possess. To be able, to be ready, to…

— Eudora Welty