Quotes About Writing

O moral Gower, this book I directeTo the.

And theron heng a brooch of gold ful sheene,On which ther was first write a crowned A,And after Amor vincit omnia.

Yet do not miss the moral, my good men. For Saint Paul says that all that's written well Is written down some useful truth to tell. Then take the wheat and let the chaff lie still.

Last days, last things, loom on: I write / to astonish myself. So much for all / plain speaking...

Everything that I write is a kind of battle won—or lost—against silence and incoherence." —Geoffrey Hill

Writing has nothing to do with pretty manners, and less to do with sportsmanship or restraint [...] Every writer begins as a subversive, if in nothing more than the antisocial means by which he earns his keep. Finally, every fantasist who cannibalizes himself knows that misfortune is his friend, that grief feeds and sharpens his fancy, that hatred is as sufficient a spur to creation as love (and a world more common) and that without an instinct for lunacy he will come to nothing.

A writer who wishes to be read by posterity must not be averse to putting hints which might give rise to whole books, or ideas for learned discussions, in some corner of a chapter so that one should think he can afford to throw them away by the thousand.

I would often rather read what a famous author has cut from one of his works than what he has let stand.

There is something in our minds like sunshine and the weather, which is not under our control. When I write, the best things come to me from I know not where.

In his Comedy , Dante Alighieri names Virgil, with many tokens of respect, as his teacher, and yet as Herr Meinhard remarks, makes such ill use of him: clear proof that even in the days of Dante one praised the ancients without knowing why. This respect for poets one does not understand and yet wishes to equal is the source of the bad writing in our literature.

It requires no especially great talent to write in such a way that another will be very hard put to it to understand what you have written

Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer.

La escritura es excelente para despertar el sistema que dormita en cada hombre; cualquiera que haya escrito habrá notado que al escribir siempre se despierta algo que hasta entonces conocíamos de un modo impreciso y que sin embargo yacía en nosotros.

He was of the opinion... that his ideas were generally misunderstood and distorted even by those who professed to be his disciples. He doubted he would be better understood in the future. He once said he felt as though he were writing for people who would think in a different way, breathe a different air of life, from that of present-day men. { Von Wright on his tutor, the great philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein }

The only literary men are those who have to work at it.

After being Turned Down by numerous Publishers, he had decided to write for Posterity.

After being turned down by numerous publishers, he decided to write for posterity.

A veteran journalist has never had time to think twice before he writes.

I thought to myself, 'why not write a bestseller?' In the first place, more people buy them and more people read them. You make more money and it doesn't take any more time to write a bestseller than it does to write a book nobody buys.

Not only the studying and writing of history but also the honoring of it both represent affirmations of a certain defiant faith-a desperate, unreasoning faith, if you will-but faith nevertheless in the endurance of this threatened world-faith in the total essentiality of historical continuity.

It is almost possible to measure a writer's skill by the dexterity with which he repeats, and yet avoids monotony.

This book was started during the first wave of COVID pandemic, when pictures of bodies loaded into refrigerated trucks were coming out of New York. It came about because an ICU nurse emailed us and asked us to post something, anything, because reading our work on her short break between grueling shifts kept her sane.

Tutto ciò che è stato scritto dagli uomini sulle donne deve essere ritenuto sospetto dal momento che essi sono ad un tempo giudici e parti in causa.

Chi di voi vorrà fare il giornalista, si ricordi di scegliere il proprio padrone: il lettore.