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.
Do not the most moving moments of our lives find us all without words?
Writing is a manual labor of the mind: a job, like laying pipe.
He that uses his words loosely and unsteadily will either not be minded or not understood.
Doesn’t matter how old the speaker is, it’s the words that matter.
The word "philosophy" carries unfortunate connotations: impractical, unworldly, weird.
The most important word in the language of the working class is solidarity.
Every word, every image used for God is a distortion more than a description.
The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.