Quotes about Writing

As ages passed, people learned from their ancestors. The more accurately you knew the position and movements of the Sun and Moon and stars, the more reliably you could predict when to hunt, when to sow and reap, when to gather the tribes. As precision of measurement improved, records had to be kept, so astronomy encouraged observation and mathematics and the development of writing.

Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time — proof that humans can work magic.

Well, I always wanted to write from the time I was very little, and my mother encouraged me. She wrote a journal from the time she was 15 up until about the age of 76.

You could compile, I should think, the worst book in the world entirely out of selecting passages from the best writers in the world.

My cheek blanches white while I write; I start at the scratch of my pen; my own mad brood of eagles devours me; fain would I unsay this audacity; but an iron-mailed hand clenches mine in a vice, and prints down every letter in my spite.

Writing itself is a bad enough trade, rightly held up to ridicule and contempt by the greater part of mankind, and especially by those who do real work, plowing, riding, sailing.

To begin at the beginning is, next to ending at the end, the whole art of writing; as for the middle you may fill it in with any rubble that you choose.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.

I'm super happy to say that it's not that hard to write bad stand-up. I guess the trick is to write bad stand-up that sounds like you're trying to be good.

My greatest disappointment is that I believe that those of us who went through the war and tried to write about it, about their experience, became messengers. We have given the message, and nothing changed.

I think my goal is to find a way to spend all of my time writing. I mean, sort of; true success is I'm doing nothing but writing if I do my job correctly.

The reason one writes isn't the fact he wants to say something. He writes because he has something to say.