Quotes About Writing

I'm trying to work on a children's book and a screenplay about zombies that take over a drug rehab. These writing projects usually go nowhere, but it feels like I always have to be working on something. Writing gives me a purpose. I think in some ways it has helped keep me alive. Without it I'm not sure I would ever have enough hope to get sober—to make that decision to live.

Sylvia Plath's writing, to her, broke open the "vaults of the dead"

Our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.

Should the Egyptians learn to write, Thamus goes on, "it will implant forgetfulness in their souls: they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks." The

As social concerns override literary ones, writers seem fated to eschew virtuosity and experimentation in favor of a bland but immediately accessible style. Writing will become a means for recording chatter.

They would, as Robert Martensen describes in The Brain Takes Shape, fit the visible structure of the brain into their preferred metaphysical metaphor, arranging the organ's physical parts "so as to portray likeness in their own terms."2 Writing

The earliest examples of reading and writing date back many thousands of years. As long ago as 8000 BC, people were using small clay tokens engraved with simple symbols to keep track of quantities of livestock and other goods.

By substituting outer symbols for inner memories, writing threatens to make us shallower thinkers, he says, preventing us from achieving the intellectual depth that leads to wisdom and true happiness.

In the books inked by scribes, words ran together without any break across every line on every page, in what's now referred to as scriptura continua.

The fact that people will pay you to talk to people and travel to interesting places and write about what intrigues you, I am just amazed by that.

Why one goes on writing when one sees what writing can be - and what one's own writing is not. Aldous Huxley

with the exception of Chinese, even the languages that originated writing, and so made the earliest use of it, have dropped their original system, and borrowed another

A writer can never have complete command or mastery over what s/he writes. Neither can a reader.

There's something paralyzing about being a writer that you have to escape.... The 26 letters distance us from our own hesitations and they make us sound as if we know what we're doing. We know grammar, we know prose, but actually we're all just struggling in the dark, really.

So I really began as a failed poet - although when I first wanted to be a writer, I learned to write prose by reading poetry.

Sometimes I'll spend an hour writing a tiny email. I work on it until I've created the illusion that I've dashed it off in three minutes. If I make a typo, I let it stand. Sometimes in fact I correct the typo without thinking, and then I back up and retype the typo so that it'll look more casual. I don't know why.

Orwell found that communists and their fellow travellers at the celebration adopted the Marxist position that bourgeois freedoms were illusions, and intellectual honesty was a form of antisocial selfishness: 'Out of this concourse of several hundred people, perhaps half of whom were directly connected with the writing trade, there was not a single one who could point out that freedom of the press, if it means anything at all, means the freedom to criticise and oppose.

Writers write badly when they have something to hide. Clarity makes their shaky assumptions plain to the readers – and to themselves. By keeping it foggy they save themselves the trouble of spelling out their beliefs and recommendations for the future. For academics, of all people, this is a disreputable way of going about business, but one that has many uses. Obscurantism spared the theorists who emerged from the grave of Marxism the pain of testing dearly held beliefs and prejudices

Writers write badly when they have something to hide.

Writers write badly when they have something to hide. Clarity makes their shaky assumptions plain to the readers – and to themselves.

Read as much as you can. Write only when you feel the inner need to do so. And don't ever rush into print.

If I was not having much fun, David was certainly not having an easy time either. Roger was studiously ignoring any of David's suggestions, which is why he probably wanted Michael on board to augment the musical input. In many ways Michael was probably as much a substitute for David as for Rick or Bob, given his melodic strengths and his experience in writing, and arranging. It may well have been paranoia, but it did look as though David was being frozen out.

That such a scrap of kitsch has endured in a way that the writing of Francis Bacon has not says much about what's really timeless and what isn't; that the 1959 "Deck of Cards" was far more popular with pop audiences than with country audiences says much about who the real kitschmongers are.

Writing and coin. She could send a message and gift to anyone, anywhere. She could watch and weave the pattern of the world. And all she had to do was earn the gifts to turn into coin was to see clearly, see first.