Quotes About Writing

Forms of expression that unnecessarily specify gender are widely regarded as sexist. In technical writing, sexist usage is easy to avoid.

the statement is a record stretching over a whole year and filling three notebooks the size of folios.

The act of writing is not simply replacing facts with arrangements of letters; it is a kind of venturesome trip. I am not like a postman on a preordained route. There is danger, and discover, and satisfaction.

In actual fact I did not perform a single real act but simply went round in circles writing these notes.

We are time machines! The truth's been right in front of our noses since cinema was invented. Hell, since photography was invented. Hell, since writing was invented. Make an image of something, and it escapes the flow of time. That's why it's forbidden! Dickens had a grasp on it with his ghosts, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley almost got it, and Einstein came so close to the truth.

Manche von uns haben Lieblingsbücher, die sie nie gelesen haben. Manche sogar welche, die nie geschrieben wurden. Dieses hier ist eines von meinen, und deshalb schreibe ich es auf.

As soon as I stopped trying to exploit my literary skills to advance my career or enhance my reputation, I found that I was opening myself to the text, could lose myself to the beauty of the words and in the wisdom of the writer. It was a kind of ekstasis, an ecstasy that was not an exotic, tranced state of consciousness but, in the literal sense of the word, a going beyond self.

I was young, and by instinct of self-preservation I had to collect my energy on something, if I were not to be whirled away with the dusk on the farm-roads, or the smoke on the plain. I begun in the evenings to write stories, fairy-tales, and romances, that would take my mind a long way off, to other countries and times.

Gud skapte mannen før kvinnen. Det er sånn som når jeg skriver. Først kladder jeg.

I am commanded to write an account of my days: I am bit by fleas and plagued by family. That is all there is to say.

This is the inscription Ben wrote inside the book: "First you must have the images. Then come the words." —Robert James Waller.

Writers don't have friends. Only deadlines. And cheating publishers. And meddling editors. And carping reviewers. And checks that never come when they're supposed to come, and are always short when they do come.

It is well known how the monks wrote silly lives of Catholic Saints over the manuscripts on which the classical works of ancient heathendom had been written.

Hitherto philosophers have had the solution of all riddles lying in their writing-desks, and the stupid, exoteric world had only to open its mouth for the roast pigeons of absolute knowledge to fly into it.

The write must earn money in order to be able to live and to write, but he must by no means live and write for the purpose of making money

That was how history worked, wasn't it? If it wasn't written down it never existed. You might leave behind jewelry and pottery, ornamental tombs, you might leave behind your own bones to be dug up at a later age, but none of those artifacts could express how you felt .

I think we should begin with a little exercise to flex our writing muscles,' Martha said, speaking very slowly as if she was on prescription drugs but I think it was just her way of trying to communicate with people less intelligent than she thought she was.

Parenting is like writing, most people just make it up as they go along.

Don't seek out elaborate metaphors," her English teacher had said of her school essays, but her mother's death had revealed that there was no metaphor too ostentatious for grief. It was a terrible thing and demanded embellishment.

I get up and I have coffee and I speak to no man and I go to my desk.

There must be something unique about man because otherwise, evidently, the ducks would be lecturing about Konrad Lorenz, and the rats would be writing papers about B. F. Skinner.

[T]he one indispensable ingredient of science fiction [is] a belief in a world being changed by man's intellect, a conviction that what was being written could really happen.

It is the glory and merit of some men to write well and of others not to write at all.

On leaf of palm, on sedge-wrought roll; on plastic clay and leather scroll, man wrote his thoughts; the ages passed, and lo! the Press was found at last!