Quotes About Writing

My unpremeditated verse.

For such kind of borrowing as this, if it be not bettered by the borrower, among good authors is accounted Plagiarè.

Such bickerings to recount, met often in these our writers, what more worth is it than to chronicle the wars of kites or crows flocking and fighting in the air?

Jimmy: One day, when I'm no longer spending my days running a sweet-stall, I may write a book about us all. It's all here. (slapping his forehead) Written in flames a mile high. And it won't be recollected in tranquillity either, picking daffodils with Auntie Wordsworth. It'll be recollected in fire, and blood. My blood.

Holiness is nothing but the implanting, writing and living out the gospel in our souls

By reading the text out loud to an affectionate audience, Hamilton was applying the old speechwriter's trick of writing for the ear as well as the eye, despite the fact that he knew the speech would be printed in a newspaper and not spoken. He was writing for a larger audience: posterity rather than simply this president.

No nation ancient or modern ever lost the liberty of freely speaking, writing, or publishing their sentiments, but forthwith lost their liberty in general and became slaves.

I count myself as one of the number of those who learn as they write and write as they learn.

Most evangelicals have bought into the need for apparent indifference when writing about massively important things.

The desire to become a journalist came really because I very much like living abroad, and like to travel, and wanted to be paid for it.

Ve starém nÄ›meckém písmu, které se hodí snad leda k zápisu zaklínadel, vypadalo hranaté b jako h, stÃ…â"¢ední Evropa tedy pro tón nad A používá písmeno H.

The Egyptian Origins of the Semitic Alphabet'.

Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly misunderstand them.

We've already established whoever is writing us is an asshole.

Someone should take a vacuum cleaner to his sentences.

I'm thinking I don't know what I'd possibly write about in a journal," I told him, even though I knew what he intended. But I'd spent so much time in other windowless rooms, recounting the details of that night at the church for a white-haired detective and a haggard-looking assistant district attorney, that I felt no desire to do it again.

The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.

Books destined to form future thinkers take too much time to write, and when written come, in general, too slowly into notice and repute, to be relied on for subsistence.

Indeed, recent writing suggests that episcopal attempts to quash national parishes, schools, and societies only strengthened national identities by creating a sense of shared victimization.

I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head.

Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper.

I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head.

Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.

I'm willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else's living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another's brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.