Writing quotes

Writing

30.7K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.

30.7K quotes

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Writing quotes (page 41 of 1537)

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Malcolm Gladwell Journalist, Author
Writing

"Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else's head."

Writing Success Communication
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Writing

"I remember standing on a street corner with the black painter Beauford Delaney down in the Village, waiting for the light to change, and he pointed down and said, 'Look.' I looked and all I saw was water. And he said, 'Look again,' which I did, and I saw oil on the water and the city reflected in the puddle. It was a great revelation to me. I can't explain it. He taught me how to see, and how to trust what I saw. Painters have often taught writers how to see. And once you've had that experience, you see differently."

Writing Light Cities
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Maria Montessori Educator, Physician
Writing

"This system in which a child is constantly moving objects with his hands and actively exercising his senses, also takes into account a child's special aptitude for mathematics. When they leave the material, the children very easily reach the point where they wish to write out the operation. They can thus carryout an abstract mental operation and acquire a kind of natural and spontaneous inclination for mental calculations."

Writing Children Moving
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George Orwell Writer, Journalist
Writing

"Political writing in our time consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted together like the pieces of a child's Meccano set. It is the unavoidable result of self-censorship. To write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox."

Thinking Writing Children
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Gustave Flaubert Novelist
Writing

"Whatever the thing you wish to say, there is but one word to express it, but one verb to give it movement, but one adjective to qualify it; you must seek until you find this noun, this verb, this adjective."

Writing Giving Wish
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Herbert Simon Economist
Writing

"Mathematics is a language. We want scientists to be able to read it, speak it, and write it. But we are are not training them to be grammarians."

Writing Learning Training
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Mark Twain Writer, Humorist
Writing

"To string incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they are absurdities, is the basis of the American art, if my position is correct."

Writing Art Together
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Mark Twain Writer, Humorist
Writing

"I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English―it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don't let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in. When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don't mean utterly, but kill most of them―then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart. An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice."

Writing Mean Flower
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Writing

"I think I am probably in love with silence, that other world. And that I write, in some way, to negotiate seriously with it . Because there is, of course, always the desire, the hope, that they are not two separate worlds, sound and silence, but that they become each other, that only our hearing fails."

Thinking Writing Other Worlds
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Maya Angelou Poet, Memoirist
Writing

"Easy reading is damn hard writing. But if it's right, it's easy. It's the other way round, too. If it's slovenly written, then it's hard to read. It doesn't give the reader what the careful writer can give the reader."

Writing Giving Reading
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Paul McCartney Musician, Singer-songwriter
Writing

"I think people who create and write, it actually does flow-just flows from into their head, into their hand, and they write it down. It's simple."

Thinking Writing Simple
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Diana Ross Singer
Writing

"It's easier for me to sit with the producers and the writers and I give them my feelings and my thoughts and what I think I feel like singing about and then they go away and write it."

Thinking Writing Giving
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Donald Murray Author, Educator
Writing

"How to read writers on writing: With respect, amusement, and skepticism. They will contradict one another-as they should-for each writer brings an individual history to the writing task. There is no single theology here."

Writing Tasks Amusement
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