Quotes About Writing

pretentious and over-active" semicolons have reached epidemic proportions in the world of academe, where they are used to gloss over imprecise thought.

Joseph Robertson wrote in an essay on punctuation in 1785, "The art of punctuation is of infinite consequence in writing; as it contributes to the perspicuity, and consequently to the beauty, of every composition.

I have been told that the dying words of one famous 20th-century writer were, "I should have used fewer semicolons

As we shall see, the tractable apostrophe has always done its proper jobs in our language with enthusiasm and elegance, but it has never been taken seriously enough; its talent for adaptability has been cruelly taken for granted; and now, in an age of supreme graphic frivolity, we pay the price.

No matter that you have a PhD and have read all of Henry James twice. If you still persist in writing, Good food at it's best, you deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked uo on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave.

So how should you use a colon, to begin with? H. W. Fowler said that the colon delivers the goods that have been invoiced in the preceding words, which is not a bad image to start off with.

In her autobiographical Giving Up the Ghost (2003), Hilary Mantel reveals: "I have always been addicted to something or other, usually something there's no support group for. Semicolons, for instance, I can never give up for more than two hundred words at a time.

The American writer Donald Barthelme wrote that the semicolon is "ugly, ugly as a tick on a dog's belly".

How on earth does she make the English language float and float?

Is there a secret? Yes. Anaïs Nin and Pauline Réage and Anne Rampling and Erica Jong all knew it. E. L. James knows it. It is the secret behind all of our writing. And our reading. Arousal starts in the mind. And grows in the mind. The brain is the most erogenous zone in a woman's body. That is our secret. And it is what we share.

I paint as the mood takes me- it is an emotional release. But in this society moods and images can incriminate you. Writing is much safer for me. I can hide myself behind a maze of words and the details of people's lives.

Beijing Coma took me 10 years to finish. The first few years, I wrote very little. A single recurrent image was blocking my progress: a man lying naked on an iron bed, a sparrow perched on his arm, his chest illuminated by a cold beam of light. Those 10 years were a struggle to prove to myself the power and meaning of that single beam of light.

he best thing to do is to loosen my grip on my pen and let it go wandering about until it finds an entrance. There must be one – everything depends on the circumstances, a rule applicable as much to literary style as to life. Each word tugs another one along, one idea another, and that is how books, governments and revolutions are made – some even say that is how Nature created her species.

Esquecer é uma necessidade. A vida é uma lousa, em que o destino, para escrever um novo caso, precisa de apagar o caso escrito.

Assim na cama, envolvido no lençol, tratei de poetar.

Devia tê-la marcado; sinto a falta de uma nota escrita naquela mesma noite, e que eu poria aqui com os erros de ortografia que trouxesse, mas não traria nenhum, tal era a diferença entre o estudante e o adolescente. Conhecia as regras do escrever, sem suspeitar as do amar; tinha orgias de latim e era virgem de mulheres.

ce ne sont pas mes gestes que j'escris, c'est moi, c'est mon essence.

Escreveme longamente; contame tudo o que houver interessante; falame de ti, que é o meio de consolar minhas saudades, que são imensas, imensas como este amor que tenho à minha família toda.

It's not my brain that's writing the book, it's these hands of mine.

In the final exam in the Chaucer course we were asked why he used certain verbal devices, certain adjectives, why he had certain characters behave in certain ways. And I wrote, 'I don't think Chaucer had any idea why he did any of these things. That isn't the way people write.' I believe this as strongly now as I did then. Most of what is best in writing isn't done deliberately.

A winter ago I had an after-school seminar for high-school students and in one of the early sessions Una, a brilliant fifteen-year-old, a born writer who came to Harlem from Panama five years ago, and only then discovered the conflict between races, asked me, Mrs. Franklin, do you really and truly believe in God with no doubts at all? Oh, Una, I really and truly believe in God with all kinds of doubts. But I base my life on this belief.

We must pray when prayer seems dry as dust; we must write when we are physically tired, when our hearts are heavy, when our bodies are in pain.

Anything that stretches the mind is a help to the potential author.

If I never had another book published, and it was very clear to me that this was a real possibility, I still had to go on writing. I'm glad I made this decision in a moment of failure. It's easy to say you're a writer when things are going well. When the decision is made in the abyss, the in is quite clear that it is not one's own decision at all.