Quotes About Writing

signs , , and to represent the syllables yu, sa, and na, respectively.

Not a trace of its use for literature has survived. The Iliad and Odyssey were composed and transmitted by nonliterate bards for nonliterate listeners, and not committed to writing until the development of the Greek alphabet hundreds of years later.

As a result of that confined distribution, peoples who pride themselves on being civilized have always viewed writing as the sharpest distinction raising them above "barbarians" or "savages.

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

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. Of

Writing marched together with weapons, microbes, and centralized political organization as a modern agent of conquest.

For instance, today almost all Japanese and Scandinavians are literate but most Iraqis are not: why did writing nevertheless arise nearly four thousand years earlier in Iraq?

We calculate that our urgings of the coauthors of those com- pleted volumes cost us on the average, per volume, two friendships for life and several more friendships for at least a decade.

It's not quite true that history is written by the winners. It's written by the best publicists on the winning team.

An ad for cigars appears in 100,000 newspapers; sales of that brand increase by 3% for a short time thereafter. A new play receives a viciously negative review in a theatrical journal that prints 500 copies; the playwright shoots himself. Who's the better writer?

There's a lot of bad travel writing. And bad travel writing can be self-indulgent, ill-informed, overwrought with purple prose, and lacking context. Worse, it can be full of prejudice and stereotypes, and historically was an instrument of colonialism and propaganda. But the best travel writing is none of these.

The genre is called travel writing for a reason: it involves a traveler. Mostly, the traveler in good travel writing is not a local and doesn't pretend to be.

An honest, engaging traveler inspires us to make our own journeys and helps us to see and understand new (to us) places. Good travel writing is about human connection.

Prices of semicolons, plot devices, prologues and inciting incidents continued to fall yesterday, lopping twenty points off the TomJones Index.

Good evening," said the barman. "Why is a raven like a writing desk?" "Because Poe wrote on both?

being written by someone who might not quite understand the subconscious nuance of the character leaves us in varying degrees of flatness.

After all, reading is arguably a far more creative and imaginative process than writing; when the reader creates emotion in their head, or the colors of the sky during the setting sun, or the smell of a warm summer's breeze on their face, they should reserve as much praise for themselves as they do for the writer—perhaps more.

It is written.

There were no characters or events written in, which was a shame—considering the work he did on the world itself, this might have been a bestseller.

Writing is a subtle art that is reached mostly by self-discovery and experimentation.

Since nothing annoys a writer who doesn't write as much as being asked what he's writing

se puede ser un buen escritor siendo una pésima persona..." "De todas las historias de la historia", escribió Jaime Gil de Biedma, "sin duda la más triste es la de España, porque termina mal

porque los libros siempre acaban cobrando vida propia, y porque uno no escribe acerca de lo que quiere, sino de lo que puede...un escritor no escribe nunca acerca de lo que conoce, sino precisamente de lo que ignora.

Para escribir novelas no hace falta imaginación—dijo Bolaño—. Sólo memoria. Las novelas se escriben combinando recuerdos.