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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.

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Most quoted on writing:

Our weakness in the West is born of the fact of so-called "objectivity." Objectivity does not exist. The word is a hypocrisy which is sustained by the lie that the truth stays in the middle. No, sir: Sometimes truth stays on one side only.

Oriana Fallaci

We have too many high sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them.

Abigail Adams Letter to John Adams (1774)

I say, stamping the words with emphasis,
Drink from here energy and only energy

Stephen Spender

I write songs about things that I'm simultaneously trying to not think about.

Warren Zevon

The Thou encounters me by grace — it cannot be found by seeking. But that I speak the basic word to it is a deed of my whole being, is my essential deed.

Martin Buber I and Thou (1923)

Words are made for a certain exactness of thought, as tears are for a certain degree of pain. What is least distinct cannot be named; what is clearest is unutterable.

René Daumal A Night of Serious Drinking (1938)

If you talk to the shadows,
at least you know them well
and the words, all of them,
unfold themselves with ease
on muddled walls and streets,
when dusk comes on.

Fausto Cercignani Examples of self-translation (2004)

Jeremiah was a bull frog
Was a good friend of mine
I never understood a single word he said
But I helped him a-drink his wine
And he always had some mighty fine wine.

Hoyt Axton Joy To The World (1971)

If ever I do escape, no one shall reproach me with having broken or violated my faith, not having given my word to any one, whosoever it may be.

Joan of Arc Trial records (1431)

Yesterday's science fiction is today's prosaic, everyday reality.

Garry Davis Letters to World Citizens (2004)

We live in a time when the words impossible and unsolvable are no longer part of the scientific community's vocabulary. Each day we move closer to trials that will not just minimize the symptoms of disease and injury but eliminate them.

Christopher Reeve

Critics search for ages for the wrong word, which, to give them credit, they eventually find.

Peter Ustinov BBC obituary (2004)

I think love and sex are separate and only vaguely similar. Like the word bear and the word bare. You can get in trouble mistaking one for the other.

Harlan Ellison Shatterday (1980)

You don't fight a war with words, but with fortifications. The pickaxe and the shovel are as important at the rifle. I can't say it often enough.

Buenaventura Durruti

Writings such as commentaries and annotations exist to assist people in becoming sages, but in fact they close the doors to sagehood.

Li Zhi

As there are so many who talk prose without knowing it, or, again, who syllogize without having the least idea what a syllogism is, so economists have long been mathematicians without being aware of the fact.

William Stanley Jevons The Theory of Political Economy (1871)

My writing is done in railroad yards while waiting for a freight, in the fields while waiting for a truck, and at noon after lunch. Towns are too distracting.

Eric Hoffer Letter to Margaret Anderson (1941)

I was bitter about everything and at loose ends when I got out of the service. I think I turned to writing to get it off my chest.

Rod Serling

A native of America who cannot read and write is as rare an appearance as a Jacobite or a Roman Catholic, that is, as rare as a comet or an earthquake.

John Adams A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law (1765)

Would you not like to try all sorts of lives — one is so very small — but that is the satisfaction of writing — one can impersonate so many people.

Katherine Mansfield

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