Quotes about Writing

The Mill on the Floss was first published in three volumes in 1860 by William Blackwood and Sons of Edinburgh and London, while the first American edition was published by Thomas Y. Crowell Co, of New York. The work is considered to be Eliot's most autobiographical novel and her long time partner George Lewes reported that the process of writing the conclusion to such a personal tale caused her great emotional distress.

What is written without effort in general is read without pleasure.

Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison.

An old tutor of a college said to one of his pupils: Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

The distinction between historian and poet is not in the one writing prose and the other verse — you might put the work of Herodotus into verse, and it would still be a species of history; it consists really in this, that the one describes the thing that has been, and the other a kind of thing that might be. Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.

From my boyhood I have had an intense and overwhelming conviction that my real vocation lay in the direction of literature. I have, however, had a most unaccountable difficulty in getting any responsible person to share my views. - Cyprian Overbeck Wells: A Literary Mosaic

The writer] can easily foresee his fate ... in an age when an author who wants to have readers must take care to write in such a way that the book can easily be perused during an afternoon nap ....

I feel that my life and therefore my writing accept the possibility of all the mystery. Everything we don't know; everything that can possibly happen.

Holiness is nothing but the implanting, writing and living out the gospel in our souls

I count myself as one of the number of those who learn as they write and write as they learn.

Most evangelicals have bought into the need for apparent indifference when writing about massively important things.

I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head.