Quotes About Writing

Writing distills, crystallizes, and clarifies thought and helps break the whole into parts.

writing is a kind of psycho-neural muscular activity which helps bridge and integrate the conscious and subconscious minds.

writing truly imprints the brain

Writing is another powerful way to sharpen the mental saw. Keeping a journal of our thoughts, experiences, insights, and learnings promotes mental clarity, exactness, and context.

The worst thing you can do is censor yourself as the pencil hits the paper. You must not edit until you get it all on paper. If you can put everything down, stream-of-consciousness, you'll do yourself a service.

Most books are so well written they barely have any effect on the reader's senses

I've always considered them ideas, forever recorded." Malone motioned to one of the paperbacks. "Malory wrote King Arthur in the late part of the 15th century. So you're reading his thoughts from five hundred years ago. We'll never know Malory, but we know his imagination.

When I write a book without a writing schedule, it is really a nightmare

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.1

A lot of happy talk is the kind of self-congratulatory promotional writing that you find in badly written brochures. Unlike good promotional copy, it conveys no useful information, and it focuses on saying how great we are, as opposed to explaining what makes us great.

Yeah, well, we're all writers, aren't we? He's a writer that hasn't been published, and I'm a writer who hasn't written anything.

I am tired, so very tired of thinking about Lacey Yeager, yet I worry that unless I write her story down, and see it bound and tidy on my bookshelf, I will be unable to ever write about anything else.

a real scholar with a bright pen

How's the uh..uh..(look at palm) SCREENPLAY going… uh..uh..(racking brain) LESLIE NIELSEN." Yipes. Or:

Be sure that the names you choose favor read-time convenience over write-time convenience.

Un blog también puede ser un buen lugar para desahogarse, perorar (y, ocasionalmente, despotricar) respecto a asuntos de un carácter más personal.

John Locke first began maintaining a commonplace book in 1652, during

If the commonplace book tradition tells us that the best way to nurture hunches is to write everything down, the serendipity engine of the Web suggests a parallel directive: look everything up.

The better you know something, the less you remember about how hard it was to learn. The curse of knowledge is the single best explanation I know of why good people write bad prose.

Classic writing, with its assumption of equality between writer and reader, makes the reader feel like a genius. Bad writing makes the reader feel like a dunce.

A writer, like a cinematographer, manipulates the viewer's perspective on an ongoing story, with the verbal equivalent of camera angles and quick cuts.

The form in which thoughts occur to a writer is rarely the same as the form in which they can be absorbed by a reader. The advice in this and other stylebooks is not so much on how to write as on how to revise.

Gratuitous redundancy makes prose difficult not just because readers have to duplicate the effort of figuring something out, but because they naturally assume that when a writer says two things she means two things, and fruitlessly search for the nonexistent second point.

Linguistic research has shown that the passive construction has a number of indispensable functions because of the way it engages a reader's attention and memory.