Quotes About Writing

I am trying to make clear through my writing something which I believe: that biography- history in general- can be literature in the deepest and highest sense of that term.

It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.

The book was a pleasure to write, and I thought it both original and good, though what was original about it was not necessarily good, and what was good about it was not always original.

Daily Law: Think more like a writer in approaching the people you deal with, even the worst sorts.

So I went down to their office and I said, "Well, I'll write a column for you." So the first year I didn't get paid anything, but I wrote a little column every month

So," said Ruth, "how bad is it?" "You haven't read it?" "Not all of it." "Well," I said, politely, "it needs some work." "How much?" The words "Hiroshima" and "nineteen forty-five" floated briefly into my mind. "It's fixable," I said, which I suppose it was: even Hiroshima was fixed eventually.

I have put out my books and now my house has a soul.

History wasn't made without taking risks, that much he knew. So maybe sometimes you had to take risks to write it, too?

I sense that I am dawdling in this narrative, having already reached my eighth roll of Hieratica, and need to speed it up a little, else either I shall die on the job, or you will be worn out reading.

All that will remain of us is what is written down.

Excellent. I approve of statesmen who write philosophy. It means they have given up all hope of power.

Writing can be learned, but not taught.

And I was troubled by the heavy-handed prose of so much psychoanalytic writing, which seemed drowned in its own concepts.

And what is written well and what is written badly...need we ask Lysias or any other poet or orator who ever wrote or will write either a political or other work, in meter or out of meter, poet or prose writer, to teach us this? What is good, PhÊdrus, and what is not good...need we ask anyone to tell us these things?

The pencil is mightier than the pen.

Writing it seemed to have higher quality than not writing it, that was all.

The trouble is that essays always have to sound like God talking for eternity, and that isn't the way it ever is. People should see that it's never anything other than just one person talking from one place in time and space and circumstance. It's never been anything else, ever, but you can't get that across in an essay.

Sometimes just the act of writing down the problems straightens out your head as to what they really are. The

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. MARK TWAIN Did

And Törless could not think but that the problems of philosophy had been solved once and for all by Kant, rendering that a pointless pursuit, just as he also thought it was not worth writing poetry after Goethe and Schiller.

there are two of you, one who wants to write and one who doesn't. The one who wants to write has to keep fooling the one who doesn't.

I once assigned a graduate class Annie Dillard's The Writing Life—a book I love—and one of the students said, "It's so effing high-minded it makes me want to go to the Kmart.

We wrote every day, but the letters began to seem like checks drawn on the summer's capital. There had been a lot in the bank, but it is never good business practice to live on your capital, and I had the feeling, somehow, of living on the capital and watching something dwindle.

I didn't answer right away, and she came across to the writing table, moving quick and nervous, the way she always did, inside of a shapeless shoddy-blue summer suit that she must have got by walking into a secondhand store and shutting her eyes and pointing and saying, "I'll take that.