Writing quotes
30.7K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"All men are really most attracted by the beauty of plain speech, and they even write in a florid style in imitation of this. Theyprefer to be misunderstood rather than to come short of its exuberance."
"No doubt Carlyle has a propensity to exaggerate the heroic in history, that is, he creates you an ideal hero rather than another thing.... Yet what were history if he did not exaggerate it? How comes it that history never has to wait for facts, but for a man to write it? The ages may go on forgetting the facts never so long, he can remember two for every one forgotten. The musty records of history, like the catacombs, contain the perishable remains, but only in the breast of genius are embalmed the souls of heroes."
"Letter-writing too often degenerates into a communicating of facts, and not of truths; of other men's deeds and not our thoughts.What are the convulsions of a planet, compared with the emotions of the soul? or the rising of a thousand suns, if that is not enlightened by a ray?"
"As for style of writing, if one has anything to say, it drops from him simply and directly, as a stone falls to the ground."
"Paper is cheap, and authors need not now erase one book before they write another. Instead of cultivating the earth for wheat andpotatoes, they cultivate literature, and fill a place in the Republic of Letters. Or they would fain write for fame merely, as others actually raise crops of grain to be distilled into brandy."
"Steady labor with the hands, which engrosses the attention also, is unquestionably the best method of removing palaver and sentimentality out of one's style, both of speaking and writing."
"We are often struck by the force and precision of style to which hard-working men, unpracticed in writing, easily attain when required to make the effort. As if plainness and vigor and sincerity, the ornaments of style, were better learned on the farm and in the workshop than in the schools. The sentences written by such rude hands are nervous and tough, like hardened thongs, the sinews of the deer, or the roots of the pine."
"Writing may be either the record of a deed or a deed. It is nobler when it is a deed."
"There are two classes of authors: the one write the history of their times, the other their biography."
"What avail all your scholarly accomplishments and learning, compared with wisdom and manhood? To omit his other behavior, see whata work this comparatively unread and unlettered man wrote within six weeks. Where is our professor of belles-lettres, or of logic and rhetoric, who can write so well?"
"I really got to fuse some of my hip hop & R&B background into the Jessica 6 album since I was really hands on with Morgan & Andrew while writing and producing the record."
"Hypertext, as Nelson [Ted Nelson] originally wrote, is interlinked reading and writing. Links make hypertext."
"When I started writing this blog more than years ago, it was in response to traditional media's habit of twisting interviews to fit the headlines they wanted to create."
"Go out there and get rich. Get so obnoxiously rich that when that tax bill comes, your first thought will be to choke on how big a check you have to write."
"If Ayn Rand were an up-and-coming author today, she wouldn't write about steel or railroads, it would be Net Neutrality."
"You need a place where you can explain yourself. You can write as much or as little as you would like, but the words will be all yours. You can create the context. You can make sure that all issues are addressed. You can take issue with individuals or the media as a whole. Your words, your message."
"I think I turned to writing really just to wake up in the morning and be a musician and to have something to do, and feel like a musician every day even if I wasn't working."
"When I was writing the book, I thought "Who wants to hear another story about some actor who lost his way?" But my story is a little unique in that I realized when I was 14 years old that I was different. I think a lot of gay people use drugs and alcohol to quell that fear and shame - especially people of my age."
"Kafka's writings often display an insidious power to describe a wholly secular and "factical" world in which the eerie or "unheimlich" elements gang up behind or beneath the ego's awareness and immerse it in a waking dream of something Other, an alien world-order similar to ancient irrationalist cultures (in transition from primitivism to civilized mythos-culture)."
"Adrienne [ Shelly] had 100 per cent control over this movie [ Waitress] as a director. She didn't just write it, direct it and act in it, she was the creative force behind everything, from the jokes down to the expressions."
