Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.
Writing Quotes
The page is led by Shakespeare, then William Zinsser, the author of On Writing Well, followed by Horace and Orwell. Three old sources are worth knowing: Bacon’s Meditationes Sacræ (1597) says reading makes a full man, conference a ready man and writing an exact man; Thoreau’s journal for 1838 says it is vain to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live; and Horace’s Ars Poetica is the source for the idea that the writer wins by mixing profit with pleasure.
“Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then for your friends, then for money” is credited to Virginia Woolf and flagged misattributed. The notes quote an anecdote from a Tyrol coffee-house in which someone else says something similar. Two more flagged lines are credited to Cicero and to Menander.
The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.
Three sleepless nights I passed in sounding on,
Through words and things, a dim and perilous way.
I have collected all the writings of the Empire and burnt those which were of no use.
Of all those arts in which the wise excel,
Nature’s chief masterpiece is writing well.
In influencing write-ups, words seem to move despite residing still on paper.
In every man's writings, the character of the writer must lie recorded.
Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.
And to bring in a new word by the head and shoulders, they leave out the old one.
The proper definition of a man is an animal that writes letters.