Writing Quotes

My final merit I refuse you, I refuse putting from me what I really am, Encompass worlds but never try to encompass me, I crowd your sleekest and best by simply looking toward you. Writing and talk do not prove me, I carry the plenum of proof in my face, With the hush of my lips I wholly confound the skeptic.

Walt Whitman

Report writing, like motor - Car driving and love - Making, is one of those activities which almost every Englishman thinks he can do well without instruction. The results are of course usually abominable.

Tom Margerison, "A Random Walk in Science" compiled by R. L. Weber, edited by E. Mendoza

True glory consists in doing what deserves to be written in writing what deserves to be read and in so living as to make the world happier for our living in it.

Pliny the Elde

Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography, but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility.

Katherine Paterson, The Spying Heart, 1989

There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.

W. Somerset Maugham

This is the challenge of writing. You have to be very emotionally engaged in what you? re doing, or it comes out flat. You can? t fake your way through this.

Real Live Preacher, RealLivePreacher. com Weblog, January 29, 2004

When something can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing.

Enrique Jardiel Poncela

Arranging a bowl of flowers in the morning can give a sense of quiet in a crowded day - Like writing a poem, or saying a prayer.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Good writing takes more than just time; it wants your best moments and the best of you.

Real Live Preacher, RealLivePreacher. com weblog, 10 - 09 - 04

Not only the studying and writing of history but also the honoring of it both represent affirmations of a certain defiant faith - A desperate, unreasoning faith, if you will - But faith nevertheless in the endurance of this threatened world - Faith in the total essentiality of historical continuity.

George Frost Kennan

Of writing well the source and fountainhead is wise thinking.

Horace

If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead, either write things worth reading, or do things worth writing.

Benjamin Franklin

A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

Thomas Mann

Television has raised writing to a new low.

Samuel Goldwyn

Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins commited in previous lives.

James Joyce

Major writing is to say what has been seen, so that it need never be said again.

Delmore Schwartz

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be read once.

Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise (1938)

Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinions in good men is but knowledge in the making.

John Milton

I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. N. B. This quote is commonly attributed to Voltaire, but it is not found in his writing.

S. G. Tallentyre

When writing a novel a writer should create living people people not characters. A character is a caricature.

Ernest Hemingway

God is love, but get it in writing.

Gypsy Rose Lee

Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.

Sir Francis Bacon

The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.

Edwin Schlossberg

This is the challenge of writing. You have to be very emotionally engaged in what youre doing, or it comes out flat. You cant fake your way through this.

Real Live Preache

Never be entirely idle; but either be reading, or writing, or praying or meditating or endeavoring something for the public good.

Thomas a Kempis

If you would not be forgotten, as soon as you are rotten, either write things worth reading or do things worth the writing.

Benjamin Franklin

If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead, either write something worth reading or do things worth writing.

Benjamin Franklin

Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living. The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in the mirror which waits always before or behind.

Catherine Drinker Bowen

A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose.

Samuel McChord Crothers