Writing Quotations

Writing

From Wikiquote Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal. ~ Martin Amis

Writing is the representation of language in a textual medium through the use of a set of signs or symbols (known as a writing system). It is distinguished from illustration, such as cave drawing and painting, and the recording of language via a non-textual medium such as magnetic tape audio.

Quotes

Learn as much by writing as by reading. ~ Lord Acton

Alphabetized by author

When I was young I longed to write a great novel that should win me fame. Now that I am getting old my first book is written to amuse children. … I have learned to regard fame as a will-o-the-wisp which, when caught, is not worth the possession; but to please a child is a sweet and lovely thing that warms one's heart and brings its own reward. ~ L. Frank Baum The original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate. ~ François-René de Chateaubriand If nobody reads the writing on the wall, man will be reduced to the state of the beast, whom he is shaming by his manners. ~ Mahatma Gandhi When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page. It is not necessarily the actual face of the writer. ~ George Orwell Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it. ~ George Orwell True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, As those move easiest who have learn'd to dance. ~ Alexander Pope Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly misunderstand them. ~ John Ruskin How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live. ~ Henry David Thoreau The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure pure reasoning, and inhibit clarity. With a little practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog! ~ Bill Watterson

• Learn as much by writing as by reading.
  • John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton, The Study Of History (1895)

• After being Turned Down by numerous Publishers, he had decided to write for Posterity.
  • George Ade, "Fables in Slang", 1899

• Science fiction is no more written for scientists than ghost stories are written for ghosts.
  • Brian Aldiss, Penguin Science Fiction (1961) Introduction

• Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.
  • Martin Amis, The Observer [London] (30 August 1987)

• I'm a bit of a grinder. Novels are very long, and long novels are very, very long. It's just a hell of a lot of man-hours. I tend to just go in there, and if it comes, it comes. A morning when I write not a single word doesn't worry me too much. If I come up against a brick wall, I'll just go and play snooker or something or sleep on it, and my subconscious will fix it for me. Usually, it's a journey without maps but a journey with a destination, so I know how it's going to begin and I know how it's going to end, but I don't know how I'm going to get from one to the other. That, really, is the struggle of the novel.[1]
  • Martin Amis, Interview 1995.

• Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.
  • James Baldwin "Autobiographical Notes" (1952); republished in Notes of a Native Son (1955)

• I am a galley slave to pen and ink.
  • Honore de Balzac letter to Madame Zulma Carraud, 2 July 1832

• When I was young I longed to write a great novel that should win me fame. Now that I am getting old my first book is written to amuse children. For aside from my evident inability to do anything "great," I have learned to regard fame as a will-o-the-wisp which, when caught, is not worth the possession; but to please a child is a sweet and lovely thing that warms one's heart and brings its own reward.
  • L. Frank Baum, in a personal inscription on a copy of Mother Goose in Prose which he gave to his sister, Mary Louise Baum Brewster, quoted in The Making of the Wizard of Oz (1998) by Aljean Harmetz, p. 317

• The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.
  • Robert Benchley, quoted by James Thurber in The Bermudian (November 1950).

• It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.
  • Robert Benchley, quoted in Nathaniel Benchley Robert Benchley, ch. 1 (1955).

• That so many writers have been prepared to accept a kind of martyrdom is the best tribute that flesh can pay to the living spirit of man as expressed in his literature. One cannot doubt that the martyrdom will continue to be gladly embraced. To some of us, the wresting of beauty out of language is the only thing in the world that matters.
  • Anthony Burgess, English Literature: A Survey for Students (1958, revised 1974)

• The tendinous part of the mind, so to speak, is more developed in winter; the fleshy, in summer. I should say winter had given the bone and sinew to literature, summer the tissues and the blood.
  • John Burroughs, The Snow-Walkers

• A well-written Life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.
  • Thomas Carlyle, Richter (1827)

• In every man's writings, the character of the writer must lie recorded.
  • Thomas Carlyle, Goethe (1828)

• The original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate.
  • François-René de Chateaubriand, Le génie du Christianisme (1802)

• Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason; they made no such demand upon those who wrote them.
  • Charles Caleb Colton, Lacon, 1820

• Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.
  • Cyril Connolly, The New Statesman (February 25, 1933)

• These two rules make the best system: first, have something to say; second, say it.
  • Nathanael Emmons, as quoted by Edwards Amasa Park in "Miscellaneous Reflections of a Visiter upon the Character of Dr. Emmons", published in The Works of Nathanael Emmons (1842), ed. Jacob Ide, Vol. 1, p. cxxxii
  • Compare: First, have something to say. Second, say it. Third, stop when you have said it. Fourth, give it a good title.
    • John Shaw Billings, as quoted in "Johns Hopkins Historical Club: Special Meeting, May 26, 1913, in Memory of Dr. John Shaw Billings", Bulletin of the Johns Hopkins Hospital, Vol. 25, No. 282 (August 1914), p. 247.

• You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we're doing it.
  • Neil Gaiman. Where do you get your ideas? Essay. (1997).

• Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters.
  • Neil Gaiman. somewhat less sinister ducks Blog entry. (23 April 2004)

• If nobody reads the writing on the wall, man will be reduced to the state of the beast, whom he is shaming by his manners. I read the writing when the hostilities broke out. But I had not the courage to say the word. God has given me the courage to say it before it is too late.
  • Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, in "To Every Briton" (2 July 1940); published in Harijan (6 July 1940)

• May God give power to every word of mine. In his name I began to write this, and in His name I close it.
  • Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, in "To Every Briton" (2 July 1940); published in Harijan (6 July 1940)

• [Writing is] a bit like shitting...if it's coming in dribs and drabs or not coming at all, or being forced out, or if you're missing the rhythm, it's no pleasure at all.
  • Germaine Greer, "Advice to Writers" (1999)

• Please write again soon. Though my own life is filled with activity, letters encourage momentary escape into others lives and I come back to my own with greater contentment.
  • Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey, A Woman of Independent Means (1978)

• Good writers indulge their audience; great writers know better.
  • Tom Heehler, The Well-Spoken Thesaurus

• There rise authors now and then, who seem proof against the mutability of language, because they have rooted themselves in the unchanging principles of human nature.
  • Washington Irving, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, "The Mutabilities of Literature" (1819–1820)

• Well personally I like bad writing. I know this because no matter what I like, someone tells me that [it's] badly written. I like bad acting too.
  • David Johnston, Usenet article <442fe1b5.8008467@news.telusplanet.net> (2006)

• You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair — the sense that you can never completely put on the page what's in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.
  • Stephen King "On Writing" 2000

• If it was easy, everyone would do it rather than going around telling you their ideas and saying how they could be a writer if they had the time.
  • Arthur M. Jolly, interview with Write On Online (2009)

• Writing is nothing less than thought transference, the ability to send one's ideas out into the world, beyond time and distance, taken at the value of the words, unbound from the speaker.
  • Arthur M. Jolly, interview with Purple Pencil Adventures (2010)

• A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
  • Thomas Mann, Essays of Three Decades (1942)

• I turned to writing full time in my middle fifties, in part to learn a few of those many things one never has time for in a conventional career … I enjoy trying to write simply, freshly and directly about subjects that specialized experts tend to deal with in jargon.
  • Herbert Merillat, as quoted in "Herbert Merillat; wrote about what he saw at Guadalcanal" by Adam Bernstein in The Washington Post (2 May 2010)

• You ask me why I do not write something....I think one's feelings waste themselves in words, they ought all to be distilled into actions and into actions which bring results.
  • Florence Nightingale, Letter to a friend, quoted in The Life of Florence Nightingale (1913) by Edward Tyas Cook, p. 94

• When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page. It is not necessarily the actual face of the writer. I feel this very strongly with Swift, with Defoe, with Fielding, Stendhal, Thackeray, Flaubert, though in several cases I do not know what these people looked like and do not want to know. What one sees is the face that the writer ought to have. Well, in the case of Dickens I see a face that is not quite the face of Dickens's photographs, though it resembles it. It is the face of a man of about forty, with a small beard and a high colour. He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry — in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.
  • George Orwell, in "Charles Dickens" (1939), Inside the Whale and Other Essays (1940)

• The Spanish war and other events in 1936-7 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects.
  • George Orwell in "Why I Write", Gangrel (Summer 1946)

• Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.
  • George Orwell in "Why I Write," Gangrel (Summer 1946)

• I have made this [letter] longer, because I have not had the time to make it shorter.
  • Blaise Pascal, "Lettres provinciales", letter 16, 1657

• Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography, but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility.
  • Katherine Paterson, The Spying Heart (1989)

• When something can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing.
  • Enrique Jardiel Poncela

• True ease in writing comes from art, not chance. As those move easiest who have learn'd to dance.
  • Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism, Part II, line 162 (1711)

• Words are like leaves; and where they most abound, much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found.
  • Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism, Part II, line 109 (1711)

• And lo, though I travel through the valley of the archetypes, I shall fear no evil, for I know that the author can't kill me off for at least another 150 pages, no matter how stupid or trite I become, or he ruins the book.
  • Chuq Von Rospach, Usenet article <64898@apple.Apple.COM> (1992)

• Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly misunderstand them.
  • John Ruskin, A Joy for Ever, note 6 (1857)

• How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
  • Henry David Thoreau, Journals (1838-1859), August 19, 1851

• Writers take words seriously — perhaps the last professional class that does — and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader.
  • John Updike, Writers on Themselves, The New York Times (17 August 1986)

• The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure pure reasoning, and inhibit clarity. With a little practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog!
  • Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes, Homicidal Psycho Jungle Cat, p. 62 (1994)

See also

• Authors

External links

Wikipedia has an article about: Writing Look up writing in Wiktionary, the free dictionary

 

Related 'Writing' Searches:

Related Terms:	Linear	Refers	Logographic	Administration
	Script	Writing	Characters	Creative Writing
	Writer	Writers	Represent	Writing Most Likely Began
	Sales	Learned	Alphabet	Writing the Beginning of Writing
	Write	Symbols	Scripts	Writing Became a More Dependable

---

---

or search for "writing" in:		Web:		The Entire Web	Web Directory
		This Site:		Page Titles	This Site	Related Terms	Proximate Terms
		News:		Headlines	Events	Blogs
		Reference:		Encyclopedia	Dictionary	eTexts	Quotes
				Answers
		Multimedia:		Images	Videos	Audio
		People:		Discussion Groups	Social Networking
		Shopping:		General Merch.	Consumer Info		Classifieds

 

---

Everywhere This Site Only Page Titles Only Related Terms Proximate* Terms The Entire Web Web Directory Local Places* News Headlines Weather Events Blogs Encyclopedia Dictionary eTexts Quotes Answers Videos Images Audio Social Networking Discussion Groups Products Classifieds Consumer Info

Sitemap Web News Dictionary Encyclopedia Blogs Answers Videos Images Products More…