Quotes About Writing

Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.

Good prose is like a windowpane.

There exists a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.

In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning.

Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

Never use a long word where a short one will do.

To mark the paper was the decisive act.

For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional sincerity.

What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way about. In prose, the worst thing you can do with words is to surrender them.

I have managed to make the Capitalist class pay me several pounds a week for writing books against Capitalism.

Bir sonu olmayan ve kimsenin okumayaca??, ama birisi için yaz?lm?? ve bununla biçimlenen bir mektup gibiydi günlük.

Bad writers, and especially scientific, political and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones, and unnecessary words like expedite, ameliorate, predict, extraneous, deracinated, clandestine, sub-aqueous and hundreds of others constantly gain ground from their Anglo-Saxon opposite numbers.

It is easier – even quicker, once you have the habit – to say In my opinion it is a not unjustifiable assumption that than to say I think. If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don't have to hunt about for words; you also don't have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences, since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious.

consciously or unconsciously everyone writes as a partisan.

But, he realised, even in his panic he had not wanted to smudge the creamy paper by shutting the book while the ink was wet.

Dickens seems to have succeeded in attacking everybody and antagonizing nobody. Naturally this makes one wonder whether after all there was something unreal in his attack upon society.

The people who write that kind of stuff never fight; possibly they believe that to write it is a substitute for fighting. It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda-tours.

Rudyard Kipling was the only popular writer of this century who was not at the same time a thoroughly bad writer.

The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not.

For whom, it suddenly occured to him to wonder, was he writing this diary? For the future, for the unborn.

Winston stopped writing, partly because he was suffering from cramp. He did not know what had made him pour out this stream of rubbish. But the curious thing was that while he was doing so a totally different memory had clarified itself in his mind, to the

Se le persone non sanno scrivere bene allora non sanno pensare bene e se non sanno pensare bene altri penseranno per loro.

From ... the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. ... I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books.

A man who would write the same book twice could not even write it once.