Quotes About Writing

I both admired my father and his writing, and I saw how much he valued it.

Getting 'Millionaire' right was as hard as writing 'Dirty Pretty Things.' Harder. In the pilots, contestants kept wanting to take the money; we had to find ways - the lifelines - of keeping them in the seat, answering the questions. But there is so much snobbery about popular culture. A game show just isn't valued as much as a novel.

She thinks in wild gardens, and his thoughts are espaliered into an introduction with a thesis, then supporting paragraphs, and a conclusion. She

As we shall see, the prerequisites for those developments consisted of several features of human society that determined whether a society would find writing useful, and whether the society could support the necessary specialist scribes. Many

INVENTING A WRITING system from scratch must have been incomparably more difficult than borrowing and adapting one. The first scribes had to settle on basic principles that we now take for granted. For example, they had to figure out how to decompose a continuous utterance into speech units, regardless of whether those units were taken as words, syllables, or phonemes. They

the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss put it, ancient writing's main function was "to facilitate the enslavement of other human beings.

Before the spread of alphabetic writing, systems making much use of logograms were more common and included Egyptian hieroglyphs, Maya glyphs, and Sumerian cuneiform.

As the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss put it, ancient writing's main function was "to facilitate the enslavement of other human beings." Personal uses of writing by nonprofessionals came only much later, as writing systems grew simpler and more expressive.

Besides Sumerian cuneiform, the other certain instance of independent origins of writing in human history comes from Native American societies of Mesoamerica, probably southern Mexico. Mesoamerican

All of these parallels between Mesoamerican and ancient western Eurasian writing testify to the underlying universality of human creativity. While Sumerian and Mesoamerican languages bear no special relation to each other among the world's languages, both raised similar basic issues in reducing them to writing. The solutions that Sumerians invented before 3000 B.C. were reinvented, halfway around the world, by early Mesoamerican Indians before 600 B.C.

Chinese culture is still so great in Japan and Korea that Japan has no thought of discarding its Chinese-derived writing system despite its drawbacks for representing Japanese speech, while Korea is only now replacing its clumsy Chinese-derived writing with its wonderful indigenous han'g?l alphabet.

The earliest preserved examples of the Etruscan and Roman alphabets are also inscriptions on drinking cups and wine containers.

All of these parallels between Mesoamerican and ancient western Eurasian writing testify to the underlying universality of human creativity.

the north–south axes and ecological barriers within Africa and the Americas retarded the diffusion of crops and domestic animals. The history of writing illustrates strikingly the similar ways in which geography and ecology influenced the spread of human inventions.

TODAY, PROFESSIONAL LINGUISTS design writing systems for unwritten languages by the method of blueprint copying.

Information could be spread far more widely, more accurately, and in more detail by writing than it could be transmitted by mouth.

Thus, Sumerian writing came to consist of a complex mixture of three types of signs: logograms, referring to a whole word or name; phonetic signs, used in effect for spelling syllables, letters, grammatical elements, or parts of words; and determinatives, which were not pronounced but were used to resolve ambiguities. Nevertheless

Immediate reasons for Pizarro's success included military technology based on guns, steel weapons, and horses; infectious diseases endemic in Eurasia; European maritime technology; the centralized political organization of European states; and writing.

Many modern alphabets, including ours, retain with minor modifications that original sequence (and, in the case of Greek, even the letters' original names: alpha, beta, gamma, delta, and so on) over 3,000 years later. One

Knowledge brings power. Hence writing brings power to modern societies, by making it possible to transmit knowledge with far greater accuracy and in far greater quantity and detail, from more distant lands and more remote times.

The kings and priests of ancient Sumer wanted writing to be used by professional scribes to record numbers of sheep owed in taxes, not by the masses to write poetry and hatch plots.

THE LIMITED USES and users of early writing suggest why writing appeared so late in human evolution.

The combination of government and religion has thus functioned, together with germs, writing, and technology, as one of the four main sets of proximate agents leading to history's broadest pattern.

An example of a much more difficult invention is writing, which does not suggest itself by observation of any natural material. As we saw in Chapter 12, it had only a few independent origins, and the alphabet arose apparently only once in world history.