Quotes About Writing

Die Rede erobert den Gedanken, aber die Schrift beherrscht ihn.

A historical materialist cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop. For this notion defines the present in which he himself is writing history.

A left-hander, Leonardo wrote from right to left on a page

Those sentences are somewhat clotted

An academic career in which a person is forced to produce scientific writings in great amounts creates a danger of intellectual superficiality," he said.

asked Jobs why he wanted me to be the one to write his biography. "I think you're good at getting people to talk," he replied.

George Brownell. Franklin excelled in writing but failed math, a scholastic deficit he never fully remedied and that, combined with his lack of academic training in the field, would eventually condemn him to be merely the most ingenious scientist of his era rather than transcending into the pantheon of truly profound theorists such as Newton.

he did criticize his son for his weak and un-persuasive writing style. In reaction, the precocious young teen devised for himself a self-improvement course

Print encourages a sense of closure, a sense that what is found in a text has been finalized, has reached a state of completion.

Without writing, the literate mind would not and could not think as it does, not only when engaged in writing but normally even when it is composing its thoughts in oral form. More than any other single invention, writing has transformed human consciousness.

Indeed, the diary demands, in a way, the maximum fictionalizing of the utterer and the addressee. Writing is always a kind of imitation talking, and in a diary I therefore am pretending that I am talking to myself.

Many of the features we have taken for granted in thought and expression in literature, philosophy and science, and even in oral discourse among literates, are not directly native to human existence as such but have come into being because of the resources which the technology of writing makes available to human consciousness.

bobbybaird i'm a writer, so are you. we try to compose our thoughts and words for effect as well as sense. vain of us? a bit.

Is it possible to be wiser on the page than you are in life? I'm hoping so.

All writing is that structure of revelation. There's something you want to find out. If you know everything up front in the beginning, you really don't need to read further if there's nothing else to find out.

The most important lesson I've learned as a writer is that practice of the art is something I must exercise every day. The reason for this constant training is that any idea worth discovering is bigger than my head. The twists and turns, story and plot, characters and character development of a novel cannot be held in a single thought or even in a train of thought. This novel takes up a lot of space and needs room to breathe and evolve.

If you want to write believable fiction, you will have to cross over the line of your self-restraint and revel in the words and ideas that you would never express in your everyday life.

Even as my body rotted and festered under the unblinking eyes of Clark Heinemann, the thoughts I had at death survived. One thousand unpublished stories, 26,473 rejection letters, and all those editorial twits that never gave me a break. The only thing left of me was a raging emotion at every publisher of every insignificant quarterly—but most of all, Clark Heinemann.

Here he produced two immense folded packets, which appeared each to contain a whole ream of closely written manuscript. They had been the labour of the worthy man's whole life; and never were labour and zeal more absurdly wasted.

Don't live with writers. Writers are bastards.

My neck and shoulders are killing me. Hard to focus on writing about murder, doom, shagging, our hopeless future & other comedy etc etc.

You don't learn journalism in school, you learn it by WRITING FUCKING JOURNALISM. You teach yourself to wire up your own brain and gut and reproductive organs into one frightening machine that you aim at the planet like a meat gun.

Science fiction is always about the time it's written in. 1984 was always about 1948. Science fiction is social fiction.

This is always the writer's cunning plan – writing things down so that you can see them properly.