Quotes About Writing

Pronouns are proxies for nouns. They stand in willingly when nouns don't want to hang around sounding repetitive. The noun (or noun phrase), whose bidding the pronoun does, is called the antecedent—because it goes (ced-) before (ante-) the pronoun in the sentence or paragraph.

You'll most likely find interjections at the beginning of a sentence, followed by a comma or an exclamation point: Ahem! Wake up—this is the last chapter on parts of speech.

The English critic George Saintsbury once compared the act of sentence making--the letting out and pulling in of clauses--to the letting out and pulling in of the slide of a trombone or the "draws" of a telescope.

What would a grammar book be if it didn't lounge around in a little Latin? Let

If you write short, crisp sentences without any sinces or whens or althoughs, try stringing varied sentences together by using subordinate conjunctions. If you already rely on subordinate conjunctions, try rebalancing your sentences with ands and buts and fors and sos. Does the change of conjunctions change your style?

Ernest Hemingway once advised prose artists to "Write hard and clear about what hurts." It's good advice. But to follow it, you must stop reading.

Voice is the je ne sais quoi of spirited writing. It separates brochure from brilliance, memo from memoir, a ship's log from The Old Man and the Sea .…The writer leaves us with a sense that we are listening to a skilled raconteur rather than passing our eyes over ink on paper.

We can twist poet Alexander Pope's diktat—"the sound must seem an echo of the sense"—into a caveat for the novice writer: When sound doesn't echo sense, the writing misfires.

Entrepreneurs are, by definition, active types, so how is it that so much business writing sags with the passive voice? ...If you are using the passive voice to evade responsibility, start owning up. If you are using it out of habit or laziness, or because you just didn't think about it, start thinking about it.

Why do so many of us, when we sit down to write, sound like word processors rather than wordsmiths? Why do we spew the slogans of the consumer culture we work for, rather than sounding like the bards we want to be?

The art of sentence making comes down to experimentation, skill, and variety. Just because you can do the three-and-a-half-somersault tuck off the high board doesn't mean you must ditch the gorgeous swan dive. Good sentences can be short and muscular, and they can be long and graceful.

The long form of the possessive pronoun replaces the noun. completely.

It's simply not the case that people use one particular lobe, or a circumscribed area of the brain, to read a novel, or write an essay, or solve an equation, or calculate the angle of a triangle. And, unfortunately, neuroscience has yet to reach the stage at which it can peer into the brain and determine capacity for solving simultaneous equations or readiness to learn calculus.

I'm trying to get in the habit of, you know, picking up a book and learning how to write my feelings down, not my feelings but my thoughts, about things, and hopefully I'll moving toward the writing and directing thing soon.

So what? All writers are lunatics!

Writing stories is a kind of magic, too.

The written word Should be clean as bone, Clear as light, Firm as stone. Two words are not As good as one.

It isn't dying I'm afraid of, it isn't that at all; I know what it is to die, I've died already. It is the endless obliteration, the knowledge that there will never be anything else. That's what I can't stand, to try so hard and to end in nothing. You know what I mean, don't you? ... I really loved to write.

I wasn't that good you know. What I was was a guy who could write a little, publishing in magazines surrounded by people who couldn't write at all. So I looked pretty good. But I never thought I was that good at all. All that I thought was that I tried to tell the truth.

The story thread suddenly dropped in a hopeless snarl, just as he was about to get it through the needle's eye of the first line.

We write to taste life twice," Anaïs Nin said, "in the moment and in retrospection.

I had this really great amazing thing happen where I almost finished the book and I really needed to come up with an ending and I decided to go back and re-read the book and see if I could come up with an ending.

Novels for me are how I find out what's going on in my own head. And so that's a really useful and indeed critical thing to do when you do as many of these other things as I do.

I am simply of the opinion that you cannot be taught to write. You have to spend a lifetime in love with words.