Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself.
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.
It is not that writing is easy, but because you do it everyday, it becomes easy.
“Drawing is telling a story with pictures. Writing is telling a story with words.”
Readers soon tire of prefaces, and skip them, and so the labor of writing them is lost.
"Sometimes this is the price I pay for writing but it is better than keeping quiet."
Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.
I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall be no more.
Write knowledge since you can’t memorize unless with writing. Heart confides to the written.