Quotes About Writing

Not everything we write will be great. That's natural.

Writing is not about impressing; it is about expressing.

We can't motivate them by deluging them with more terminology or someone else's bulleted lists. We can't motivate them to revise their writing by stapling a rubric or checklist to their paper. We can't motivate them by simply hanging some posters on the wall. We must facilitate writing behaviors.

Every act of his is marked by an unstable ambivalence. He is the god of calculation, arithmetic and rational science; and he also presides over the occult sciences, astrology and alchemy. He is the god of magic formulae, of secret accounts, of hidden texts. And so he is the god of medicine. The god of writing is the god of the pharmakon…

So now we begin to understand the paradoxical phonocentric "history of silence", that repression of writing which can scarcely be acknowledged.

But Derrida is confronting an argument for the priority of speech over writing. A side issue? According to Derrida, setting speech to rule over writing is crucial to the underpinning presuppositions of Western philosophy.

We demonstrate human intelligence through our speech, writing, and actions, right? Yes, but only to a point. Intelligence is something that is happening in your head. Behavior is an optional ingredient. This is not intuitively obvious, but it's not hard to understand either.

James M. Cain (1892–1977) wrote two indisputable masterpieces, The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity.

She jotted this down in her ubiquitous notebook.

Someone once asked him why he didn't just use a tape recorder or at least type answers into a computer or tablet. His response: Speaking or typing creates just a glancing relationship with the words. Only when you write by hand do you truly possess them.

the Nero Award, and he is a three-time recipient of the Ellery Queen Readers Award for Best Short Story of the Year and a winner of the British Thumping Good Read Award.

When you write something by hand, slowly, you own the words. You type them, less so. You read them, even less. And you listen, hardly at all.

His best work bore the stamp of John O'Hara and John P. Marquand.

Faulkner didn't put those

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog," which, Mr. Holcombe pointed out, contained every letter in the alphabet. I checked, and he turned out to be right.

pencil hadn't stopped scribbling

But maybe they understood more about life than I did. From an early age they knew what little value the world placed in books, and so didn't waste their time with them. Whereas I, even now, persist in believing that these black marks on white paper bear the greatest significance, that if I keep writing, I might be able to catch the rainbow of consciousness in a jar.

Whereas I, even now, persist in believing that these black marks on white paper bear the greatest significance, that if I keep writing I might be able to catch the rainbow of consciousness in a jar.

She thought a writer should work harder writing a book than she did reading it.

Where else would she feel more comfortable than in this subterranean realm where people wrote down what they couldn't say, where they gave voice to their most shameful longings and knowledge?

Now I've given up any hope of lasting fame or literary perfection. I don't care if I write a great book anymore, but just one which, whatever its flaws, will leave a record of my impossible life.

It is perhaps in reading a love story (or in writing one) that we can simultaneously partake of the ecstasy and agony of being in love without paying a crippling emotional price. I offer this book, then, as a cure for lovesickness and an antidote to adultery. Read these love stories in the safety of your single bed. Let everybody else suffer.

Fin da piccole sapevano quanto poco valore il mondo attribuisse ai libri, e non perdevano tempo a leggerli. Mentre io, anche adesso, continuo a credere che quei puntini neri su fondo bianco abbiano il più alto dei significati, che se insisto a scrivere potrò cogliere l'arcobaleno della coscienza e rinchiuderlo in un barattolo.

If this story is written only for myself, then so be it. But it doesn't feel that way. I feel you out there, reader. This is the only kind of intimacy I'm comfortable with. Just the two of us, here in the dark.