Quotes About Writing

What has emerged in our own time as a dominant form of life writing can trace its lineage back to this extended footnote.

literary biographies, the genre didn't come into its own until the eighteenth century, spurred by an intense interest in life writing

Underlying his reasoning here was the presumption that Shakespeare could only write about what he had felt or done rather than heard about, read about, borrowed from other writers or imagined. The floodgates were now open and others would soon urge, based on their own slanted reading of the plays, that Shakespeare must have been a mariner, a soldier, a courtier, a countess and so on.

With sixty staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and definite hardening of the paragraphs.

I admire the person who can write it right off. Mencken once said that a person who thinks clearly can write well. But I don't think clearly--too many thoughts bump into one another. Trains of thought run on a track of the Central Nervous System--the New York Central Nervous System, to make it worse.

At forty my faculties may have closed up like flowers at evening, leaving me unable to write my memoirs with a fitting and discreet inaccuracy, or, having written them, unable to carry them to the publisher.

When I was a young writer, I liked to imagine that I was paying someone for every word I wrote, rather than being paid for it; it was a fine way to discipline myself to use only those words I needed.

The extensive surplus of food is what allowed those areas to become densely populated in the first place. It is these two things that allowed for political systems, specialized labor,  writing, property ownership, and more- all things we can't imagine modern society without.

because writing is not only music. It is also architecture, demanding the technique, mastered only after months and years of bitterest labor, which that art possesses---if the architect is to construct a cathedral of merit instead of a mere group of disordered, flimsy outhouses.

PROOFREADER'S MARKS

A person who can write a long letter with ease, cannot write ill.

I am not at all in a humor for writing; I must write on till I am.

I could not sit seriously down to write a serious Romance under any other motive than to save my life, & if it were indispensable for me to keep it up & never relax into laughing at myself or other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter. No - I must keep my own style & go on in my own way; and though I may never succeed again in that, I am convinced that I should totally fail in any other.

Oh! write, write. Finish it at once. Let there be an end of this suspense. Fix, commit, condemn yourself.

I think I may boast myself to be, with all possible vanity, the most unlearned and uninformed female who ever dared to be an authoress.

My style of writing is very different from yours.

Every body allows that the talent of writing agreeable letters is peculiarly female.

It is this delightful habit of journalizing which largely contributes to form the easy style of writing for which ladies are so generally celebrated. Every body allows that the talent of writing is particularly female. Nature might have done something, but I am sure it must be essentially assisted by the practice of keeping a journal.

I can always live by my pen.

Every body at all addicted to letter writing, without having much to say, which will include a large proportion of the female world at least…

And if I had not a letter to write myself, I might sit by you and admire the evenness of your writing, as another young lady once did. But I have an aunt too, who must not be longer neglected.

If a book is well written i would find it too short.

My ideas flow so rapidly that I have not time to expressed them.

If a book is well written i always find it too short