Writing

"When you look for the motivations you always go to the basic instincts, to the basic emotions, the basic things that have moved humankind always. That's what all writers write about, ultimately. What did Shakespeare write about? Jealousy, love, sex, power, greed, the same stuff that soap operas and the Bible are made of. It's always the same."

"Writing is like training to be an athlete. There is a lot of training and work that nobody sees in order to compete. The writer needs to write every day, just as the athlete needs to train. Much of the writing will never be used, but it is essential to do it. I always tell my young students to write at least one good page a day. At the end of the year they will have at least 360 good pages. That is a book."

"The written word is an act of human solidarity. I write so that people will love each other more."

"Writing is a terrible way to make a living, almost as bad as criticism."

"Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man."

"Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent."

"I am a galley slave to pen and ink."

"When I was young I longed to write a great novel that should win me fame. Now that I am getting old my first book is written to amuse children. For aside from my evident inability to do anything "great," I have learned to regard fame as a will-o-the-wisp which, when caught, is not worth the possession; but to please a child is a sweet and lovely thing that warms one's heart and brings its own reward."

"The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps."

"It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous."

"When that passage was written only God and Robert Browning understood it. Now only God understands it."

"SCRIBBLER, n. A professional writer whose views are antagonistic to one's own."

"These two rules make the best system: first, have something to say; second, say it."

"So I had this problem—work or starve. So I thought I'd combine the two and decided to become a writer."

"A writer — and, I believe, generally all persons — must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art."

"The personal essay is vulnerable. It cannot stand upon its footnotes."

"That so many writers have been prepared to accept a kind of martyrdom is the best tribute that flesh can pay to the living spirit of man as expressed in his literature. One cannot doubt that the martyrdom will continue to be gladly embraced. To some of us, the wresting of beauty out of language is the only thing in the world that matters."

"The tendinous part of the mind, so to speak, is more developed in winter; the fleshy, in summer. I should say winter had given the bone and sinew to literature, summer the tissues and the blood."

"Oh that I had the art of easy writing What should be easy reading! could I scale Parnassus, where the Muses sit inditing Those pretty poems never known to fail, How quickly would I print (the world delighting) A Grecian, Syrian, or Assyrian tale; And sell you, mix'd with western sentimentalism, Some sample of the finest Orientalism."

"I've half a mind to tumble down to prose, But verse is more in fashion—so here goes!"

"A well-written Life is almost as rare as a well-spent one."

"In every man's writings, the character of the writer must lie recorded."

"Writing is a lonely occupation at best. Of course there are stimulating and even happy associations with friends and colleagues, but during the actual work of creation the writer cuts himself off from all others and confronts his subject alone. He moves into a realm where he has never been before — perhaps where no one has ever been. It is a lonely place, even a little frightening."

"The proper definition of a man is an animal that writes letters."

"My mouth shall be the mouth of those calamities that have no mouth, my voice the freedom of those who break down in the prison holes of despair."

"Un poète doit laisser des traces de son passage, non des preuves. Seules les traces font rêver."

"L'écrivain original n'est pas celui qui n'imite personne, mais celui que personne ne peut imiter."

"Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason; they made no such demand upon those who wrote them."

"Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self."

"In its focus on beauty, cursive handwriting is an activity more formative to what parents hope for their children than any single standardized test could be. It uplifts a work-a-day practice like writing and recording into a transcendent good. Content mastery is essential, of course, but cursive instills in students an appreciation of craftsmanship and the importance of taking pride in appearance."

"The trick is not becoming a writer. The trick is staying a writer."

"Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously. This is what I've always thought it meant to be a writer. Writing, knowing in part that no matter how trivial your words may seem, someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or her life to read them. Coming from where I come from, with the history I have having spent the first twelve years of my life under both dictatorships…this is what I've always seen as the unifying principle among all writers. This is what, among other things, might join Albert Camus and Sophocles to Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Osip Mandelstam, and Ralph Waldo Emerson to Ralph Waldo Ellison. Somewhere, if not now, then maybe years in the future, a future that we may have yet to dream of, someone may risk his or her life to read us."

"To outsiders, teaching writing might seem like leading students through endless punctuation exercises. It’s not. In reality, a postsecondary writing classroom is a place where students develop higher-order skills like formulating (and continuously fine-tuning) a persuasive argument, finding relevant sources, and integrating compelling evidence. But they also extend to essential beneath-the-surface abilities like finding ideas worth writing about in the first place and then figuring out how to organize and structure those ideas."

"If I let my fingers wander idly over the keys of a typewriter it might happen that my screed made an intelligible sentence. If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters they might write all the books in the British Museum."

"Happy is he who looks only into his work to know if it will succeed, never into the times or the public opinion; and who writes from the love of imparting certain thoughts and not from the necessity of sale—who writes always to the unknown friend."

"Good typography should be like like a wonderful clear crystal goblet that holds wine. [It is] much better than a golden goblet with jewels on the outside because the point of the crystal goblet is that you can see the wine that is inside. You can appreciate the colors of it. You can see how when you swirl the wine how the texture of the wine clings to the glass and how quickly it drips down back into the pool of wine. And you can see the sediment in the bottom when you hold it up in the light. That's the purpose of typography. It should be invisible."

"You can gather however that I know I am not a real artist, and at the same time am fearfully serious over my work and willing to sweat at atmosphere if it helps me do what I want. What I want, I think, is the sentimental, but the sentimental reached by no easy beaten track—I cannot explain myself properly, for you must remember (I forget it myself) that though 'clever' I have a small and cloudy brain, and cannot clear it by talking or reading philosophy."

"As for 'story' I never yet did enjoy a novel or play in which someone didn't tell me afterward that there was something wrong with the story, so that's going to be no drawback as far as I'm concerned. "Good Lord, why am I so bored"—"I know; it must be the plot developing harmoniously." So I often reply to myself, and there rises before me my special nightmare—that of the writer as craftsman, natty and deft."

"You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we're doing it."

"Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters."

"Writers live in houses other people built."

"If nobody reads the writing on the wall, man will be reduced to the state of the beast, whom he is shaming by his manners. I read the writing when the hostilities broke out. But I had not the courage to say the word. God has given me the courage to say it before it is too late."

"May God give power to every word of mine. In his name I began to write this, and in His name I close it."

"Effective writing isn’t in the mechanics. Anyone can master the mechanical act of stringing together words and sentences and paragraphs to make a character move from A to B. The bookstores are full of evidence. But that’s not writing. Writing isn’t about the words, it’s about the experience. It’s about the feeling that the story creates inside of you. If there’s no feeling, there’s no story. But sometimes, there’s only the feeling without any meaning or understanding. And that’s not a story either."

"[Writing is] a bit like shitting...if it's coming in dribs and drabs or not coming at all, or being forced out, or if you're missing the rhythm, it's no pleasure at all."

"I could only see myself making a living through writing, as I had done in China. But should I write in Chinese here, a foreign land, or enrol in a language class and study English grammar? If I continued to write in Chinese I would have no readers here. Besides, I would never create a community of fellow artists and thinkers in my Western life while speaking Chinese."

"Please write again soon. Though my own life is filled with activity, letters encourage momentary escape into others lives and I come back to my own with greater contentment."

"Good writers indulge their audience; great writers know better."

"The first person you should think of pleasing, in writing a book, is yourself. If you can amuse yourself for the length of time it takes to write a book, the publishers and the readers can and will follow."

"I always feel you're writing the book you couldn't find, so you have to write it yourself."

"I don’t think about rules when I’m writing – that’s the great thing about writing: it’s the one place in my life that I can do whatever I want."

"Intellectually as well as emotionally he (Nietzsche) needed solitude. This fact emerges, I believe, from the manner of thinking and style of writing revealed in his books, which are essentially a species of talking to oneself. … He is a man whose mind is full, overfull, of ideas; he is constantly finding ways of expressing them which, as he says in his letters, surprise and delight him; he spends much of each day walking, and at night he sits crouched over his table; and all the time he is talking to himself. He loves his own company, for with no one else can he enjoy such entertaining conversation. Sometimes he contradicts himself, but what would conversation be without contradiction? He argues, he grows angry, he laughs at himself; he postures and exposes himself as a posturer; he announces he is the freest of free-thinkers, and retorts that free-thinking is mere destructiveness. Gradually a philosophy emerges, his philosophy: none of it is of any use to anyone, no one is even interested in it; but one day — so he tells himself — mankind will open its eyes and see that a new world has been discovered."

"He wins every hand who mingles profit with pleasure, by delighting and instructing the reader at the same time."

"murderous signs, scratched in a folded tablet, and many of them too, enough to kill a man."

"There rise authors now and then, who seem proof against the mutability of language, because they have rooted themselves in the unchanging principles of human nature."

"If it was easy, everyone would do it rather than going around telling you their ideas and saying how they could be a writer if they had the time."

"Writing is nothing less than thought transference, the ability to send one's ideas out into the world, beyond time and distance, taken at the value of the words, unbound from the speaker."

"The present writer ... writes because for him it is a luxury that becomes all the more enjoyable and conspicuous the fewer who buy and read what he writes."

"For me, writing is an act of reciprocity with the world; it is what I can give back in return for everything that has been given to me."

"You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair — the sense that you can never completely put on the page what's in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page."

"The job of the writer is to kiss no ass, no matter how big and holy and white and tempting and powerful."

"A preface is a species of literary luxury, where an author, like a lover, is privileged to be egotistical."

"I have been writing all my life, and even now I do not understand the faculty of composition; but this I do know, that the history of the circumstances under which most books are written would be a frightful picture of human suffering. How often is the pen taken up when the hand is unsteady with recent sickness, and bodily pain is struggled against, and sometimes in vain! How often is the page written hurriedly and anxiously,—the mind fevered the while by the consciousness that it is not doing justice to its powers!"

"Advice to writers: Sometimes you just have to stop writing. Even before you begin."

"A writer is like God. He can destroy empires, create new universes."

"He is no parasite on anything, whose work is real: a mechanic, a doctor, a builder, a tailor, a dishwasher. What, in comparison, does a writer produce? Semblances. This is a serious occupation?"

"I love physics, but what was even more important to me was leading a creative life ... And I knew that writers could continue doing their best work later in life.”"

"If I may, I would at this point urge young writers not to be too much concerned with the vagaries of the marketplace. Not everyone can make a first-rate living as a writer, but a writer who is serious and responsible about his work, and life, will probably find a way to earn a decent living, if he or she writes well. A good writer will be strengthened by his good writing at a time, let us say, of the resurgence of ignorance in our culture. I think I have been saying that the writer must never compromise with what is best in him in a world defined as free."

"I have written almost all my life. My writing has drawn, out of a reluctant soul, a measure of astonishment at the nature of life. And the more I wrote well, the better I felt I had to write. In writing I had to say what had happened to me, yet present it as though it had been magically revealed. I began to write seriously when I had taught myself the discipline necessary to achieve what I wanted. When I touched that time, my words announced themselves to me. I have given my life to writing without regret, except when I consider what in my work I might have done better. I wanted my writing to be as good as it must be, and on the whole I think it is. I would write a book, or a short story, at least three times — once to understand it, the second time to improve the prose, and a third to compel it to say what it still must say. Somewhere I put it this way: first drafts are for learning what one's fiction wants him to say. Revision works with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to re-form it. Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing: The men and things of today are wont to lie fairer and truer in tomorrow's meadow, Henry Thoreau said. I don't regret the years I put into my work. Perhaps I regret the fact that I was not two men, one who could live a full life apart from writing; and one who lived in art, exploring all he had to experience and know how to make his work right; yet not regretting that he had put his life into the art of perfecting the work."

"A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people."

"Premeditated details arrive, when you're writing, and my instinct is always to reach for the nearest weapon."

"A rule says "You must do it this way". A principle says, "This works... and has through all remembered time." The difference is crucial. Your work needn't be modeled after the well-made play; rather it must be well made within the principles that shape our art. Anxious, inexperienced writers obey rules. Rebellious, unschooled writers break rules. Artists master the form."

"I turned to writing full time in my middle fifties, in part to learn a few of those many things one never has time for in a conventional career … I enjoy trying to write simply, freshly and directly about subjects that specialized experts tend to deal with in jargon."

"If you steal from one author, it's plagiarism. If you steal from two, it's research."

"Sadly, reading and writing are, at least in part, the victims of a television and internet culture that has effectively encumbered the minds of people. This is problematic because, without reading, it becomes difficult to think analytically and imaginatively about the world’s problems and issues, and it hampers the development of appropriate responses and solutions. Lack of reading also often results in the uncritical acceptance of political slogans which, while they appear plausible, are ultimately devoid of merit."

"The reason I got into magic was that it seemed to be what was lying at the end of the path of writing. If I wanted to continue on that path, I was going to have to get into that territory because I had followed writing as far as I thought I could without taking a step over the edges of rationality. The path led out of rational confines. When you start thinking about art and creativity, rationality is not big enough to contain it all."

"I don’t distinguish between magic and art. When I got into magic, I realised I had been doing it all along, ever since I wrote my first pathetic story or poem when I was twelve or whatever. This has all been my magic, my way of dealing with it."

"You can always count on a murderer for fancy prose style."

"You ask me why I do not write something....I think one's feelings waste themselves in words, they ought all to be distilled into actions and into actions which bring results."

"Why one writes is a question I can answer easily, having so often asked it of myself. I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live. I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me — the world of my parents, the world of war, the world of politics. I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself when destroyed by living. That, I believe, is the reason for every work of art."

"I write what I would like to read – what I think other women would like to read. If what I write makes a woman in the Canadian mountains cry and she writes and tells me about it, especially if she says ‘I read it to Tom when he came in from work and he cried too,’ I feel I have succeeded."

"When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page. It is not necessarily the actual face of the writer. I feel this very strongly with Swift, with Defoe, with Fielding, Stendhal, Thackeray, Flaubert, though in several cases I do not know what these people looked like and do not want to know. What one sees is the face that the writer ought to have. Well, in the case of Dickens I see a face that is not quite the face of Dickens's photographs, though it resembles it. It is the face of a man of about forty, with a small beard and a high colour. He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry — in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls."

"The Spanish war and other events in 1936-7 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects."

"Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand."

"what’s a writer for? The whole point is to put yourself into other lives, other heads—writers have always done that. If you screw up, so someone will tell you, that’s all. I think men can write about women and women can write about men. The whole point is to know the facts. Men have so often written about women without knowing the reality of their lives, and worse, without being interested in that daily reality."

"The best training is to read and write, no matter what. Don’t live with a lover or roommate who doesn’t respect your work. Don’t lie, buy time, borrow to buy time. Write what will stop your breath if you don’t write."

"You can’t write without a lot of pressure. Sometimes the pressure comes from anger, which then changes into a pressure to write...The pressure from anger is an energy that can be violent or useful or useless. Also the pressure doesn’t have to be anger. It could be love. One could be overcome with feelings of lifetime love or justice."

"I think a lot of what influences a writer is what you hear in the street, the language you hear, the way people talk, the way, the rhythms, the song, the language of your childhood."

"I have made this [letter] longer, because I have not had the time to make it shorter."

"GR: What advice do you give writers?"

"Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography, but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility."

"In the mental disturbance and effort of writing, what sustains you is the certainty that on every page there is something left unsaid."

"Writing is a fine thing, because it combines the two pleasures of talking to yourself and talking to a crowd."

"To write something long, sophisticated, and coherent means, at least in part, to become more complex, articulate, and deeper in personality."

"Writing, Phaedrus, has this strange quality, and is very like painting; for the creatures of painting stand like living beings, but if one asks them a question, they preserve a solemn silence. And so it is with written words; you might think they spoke as if they had intelligence, but if you question them, wishing to know about their sayings, they always say only one and the same thing."

"Strength of creative writing lies in the skill of handling words and articulating artistic expression of feelings."

"In influencing write-ups, words seem to move despite residing still on paper."

"When something can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing."

"True ease in writing comes from art, not chance. As those move easiest who have learn'd to dance."

"Words are like leaves; and where they most abound, much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found."

"Good authors too, who once knew better words, now only use four-letter words writing prose, anything goes!"

"Most writers enjoy two periods of happiness – when a glorious idea comes to mind and, secondly, when a last page has been written and you haven’t had time to know how much better it ought to be."

"Much of writing might be described as mental pregnancy with successive difficult deliveries."

"I have collected all the writings of the Empire and burnt those which were of no use."

"We should not write so that it is possible for [the reader] to understand us, but so that it is impossible for him to misunderstand us."

"Ethelfreda blinked in surprise. “How did you...” “Know that you're a writer?” When Ethelfreda nodded, Mrs. Gotti said, “You have that pale, physically unfit, financially desperate, and emotionally downtrodden look about you. It’s unmistakable. Only writers ever look like that.”"

"The things you remember have no form. When you write about them, you have to give them a beginning, a middle, and an end. To give life shape—that is what a writer does. That is what is so difficult."

"... I think writing is one of the most pleasurable things one can do. It can be a private thing ... many hours alone in a room typing away, or sometimes racking one's brain to think of things to write. But it is also something that we can share."

"what is writing if not a form of confession in disguise? No matter what the subject, all literary roads lead back to the self. The writer descends like a miner into the deepest shafts of her soul in order to unearth the blackest coals of her torment, or to retrieve the most glittering diamonds of her memories, and bring them back to the surface in the form of fictions that she wishes to share with the world."

"I was never a Sunday scribbler. Writing was never a hobby for me, a pastime to while away the hours. On the contrary, it was as necessary to me as life itself; it was a refuge, a substitute for living, a confrontation with myself, a form of confession - but always it was a necessity that allowed me to feel that my life had an accompanying motif, an underlying melody. Writing often gave me moments of such ecstasy as can only be experienced by lovers; it gave me instances of such intense spiritual forgetfulness that I truly believed that I and the cosmos were one, so that through the simple act of breathing the air in my room I felt that I was inhaling the universe itself. Clasped within the bosom of this universe, my physical self simply ceased to be. Rare moments these, but blessed."

"And lo, though I travel through the valley of the archetypes, I shall fear no evil, for I know that the author can't kill me off for at least another 150 pages, no matter how stupid or trite I become, or he ruins the book."

"I felt that writing for bread would soon have stifled my genius and destroyed my talents, which were more those of the heart than of the pen, and arose solely from a proud and elevated manner of thinking, which alone could support them."

"I have always felt that the position of an author is not and cannot be distinguished and respectable, except in so far as it is not a profession. It is too difficult to think nobly, when one thinks in order to live. In order to be able and to venture to utter great truths, one must not be dependent on success."

"The need of success … might have made me strive to say what might please the multitude, rather than what was true and useful, and instead of a distinguished author which I might possibly become, I should have ended in becoming nothing but a mere scribbler."

"The bottom line is, I have to write the story I want to write. I never wrote them with a focus group of 8-year-olds in mind. I have to continue telling the story the way I want to tell it. I don't at all relish the idea of children in tears, and I absolutely don't deny it's frightening. But it's supposed to be frightening! And if you don't show how scary that is, you cannot show how incredibly brave Harry is."

"I found that life intruding on writing was, in fact, life. And that tempting as it may be for a writer who is also a parent, one must not think of life as an intrusion. At the end of the day, writing has very little to do with writing and much to do with life. And life, my definition, is not an intrusion."

"Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly misunderstand them."

"Life is writing. The sole purpose of mankind is to engrave the thoughts of divinity onto the tablets of nature."

"Every writer is a frustrated actor who recites his lines in the hidden auditorium of his skull."

"Of all those arts in which the wise excel, Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well."

"People make interesting assumptions about the profession. The writer is a mysterious figure, wandering lonely as a cloud, fired by inspiration, or perhaps a cocktail or two."

"Fine writers should split hairs together, and sit side by side, like friendly apes, to pick the fleas from each other's fur."

"The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true."

"Here's a statement made recently by a man who feels that women writers are quite different from men writers: “I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. I think it is unequal to me.” He talked about something called “feminine tosh”. He didn't mean it in an unkind way, he added. He said this is because of women's “sentimentality, their narrow view of the world . . . And inevitably for a woman, she is not a complete master of a house, so that comes over in her writing, too”."

"Reading and writing are two essential skills of learning — gateway skills. Our K-12 schools and universities had better get them right. Reading opens up worlds. Writing changes worlds. We only speak as well as we write and think. We only write as well as we read. …Images quickly disappear. A shot on the TV screen lasts three to eight seconds. Writing doesn’t vaporize. There is something lasting about it. It’s been said that if you want to extend your life, write and leave something worth reading. …There will always be room for and need for great writers."

"S/he who writes, writes. In uncertainty, in necessity. And does not ask whether s/he is given the permission to do so or not. Yet, in the context of today’s market-dependent societies, “to be a writer” can no longer mean purely to perform the act of writing. For a laywo/man to enter the priesthood—the sacred world of writers—s/he must fulfill a number of unwritten conditions. S/he must undergo a series of rituals, be baptized and ordained. S/he must submit her writings to the law laid down by the corporation of literary/literacy victims and be prepared to accept their verdict. Every woman who writes and wishes to become established as a writer has known the taste of rejection."

"Good writing is thus differentiated from bad writing through a building up of skill and vocabulary and a perfecting of techniques. Since genius cannot be acquired, sophisticated means, skills, and knowledge are dangled before one’s eyes as the steps to take, the ladder to climb if one wishes to come any closer to the top of this monument known as Literature. Invoke the Name. Follow the norms. Of. The Well Written. The master-servant’s creed carries on: you must learn through patience and discipline. And what counts most is what it costs in labor to engender a work, hence the parallel often abusively drawn between the act of writing and the birth process."

"To write is to become. Not to become a writer (or a poet), but to become, intransitively. Not when writing adopts established keynotes or policy, but when it traces for itself lines of evasion."

"It is said that the writer’s choice is always a two-way choice. Whether one assumes it clear-sightedly or not, by writing one situates oneself vis-à-vis both society and the nature of literature, that is to say, the tools of creation. The way I encounter or incorporate the former, in other words, is the way I confront merge into the latter, for these are the two inseparable faces of a single entity. Neither entirely personal nor purely historical, a mode of writing is in itself a function. An act of historical solidarity, it denotes, in addition to the writer’s personal standpoint and intention, a relationship between creation and society. Dealing exclusively with either one of these two aspects, therefore, proves vain as an approach. So does the preaching of revolution through a writing more concerned with imposing than raising consciousness regarding the process by which language works or regarding the nature, activity, and status of writing itself. No radical change can occur as long as writing is not recognized, precisely, as “the choice of that social area within which the writer elects to situate the Nature of her/his language.”"

"Writing as a system by itself has its own rules and structuring process. The abc lesson says that for letters to become words and for words to take on meanings, they must relate to other letters, to other words, to the context in which they evolve—be it verbal or nonverbal—as well as to other present and absent contexts. (Words are think-tanks loaded with second- and third-order memories that die hard despite their ever-changing meanings.) Thus, writing constantly refers to writing, and no writing can ever claim to be “free” of other writings."

"When asked why they write, writers usually answer that they do so to create a world of their own, make order out of chaos, heighten their awareness of life, transcend their existences, discover themselves, communicate their feelings, or speak to others. Some add that they write as they breathe, as they stay alive, or as “birds sing,” to unfold “the comings and goings of a desire” and “exhaust a task that bears in itself its own bliss.” At times Writing is considered as a substitute for something lying beyond it, at other times as a necessity and an activity in its own right, devoid of any ulterior motive or any finality."

"Writing necessarily refers to writing. The image is that of a mirror capturing only the reflections of other mirrors. [...] Writing reflects. It reflects on other writings and, whenever awareness emerges, on itself as writing. Like the Japanese boxes that contain other boxes, nest one inside the other ad nihilum, writing is meshing one’s writing with the machinery of endless reflexivity. Footprints of emptiness multiplied to infinity in an attempt at disarming death."

"Writing, for the majority of us who call ourselves writers, still consists of “expressing” the exalted emotions related to the act of creating and either appropriating language to ourselves or ascribing it to a subject who is more or less a reflection of ourselves."

"Writing, in a way, is listening to the others’ language and reading with the others’ eyes. The more ears I am able to hear with, the farther I see the plurality of meaning and the less I lend myself to the illusion of a single message."

"Writing, like a game that defies its own rules, is an ongoing practice that may be said to be concerned, not with inserting a “me” into language, but with creating an opening where the “me” disappears while “I” endlessly come and go, as the nature of language requires. To confer an Author on a text is to close the writing. Eureka! It makes sense! This is it! I hold the key to the puzzle! Fear and seek. Fear and seek. The danger we fear most is forgetting to fear. Seek and lose. Lose, freely. When you are silent, it speaks; when you speak, it is silent. Writing is born when the writer is no longer."

"Writing as an inconsequential process of sameness/otherness is ceaselessly re-breaking and re-weaving patterns of ready-mades. The written bears the written to infinity."

"If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you."

"How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live."

"You don't really understand your thoughts until you express them in words."

"Writers take words seriously — perhaps the last professional class that does — and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader."

"Did you ever think? Old-fashioned writing is the ultimate in context tagging. It’s passive, informative, and present exactly where you need it."

"Originality is nothing but judicious imitation. The most original writers borrowed one from another. The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbor's, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all."

"I realized that the purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity. With a little practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog!"

"In 1966 I was installed as a at , to teach '.' In my opening address I warned my students that creative writing could not be taught; the most I could do was to tell them what being a professional writer meant. ... One cannot be taught how to write. One teaches oneself by writing."

"The effort of expression has a bearing not only on the form but on the thought and on the whole inner being. So long as bare simplicity of expression is not attained, the thought has not touched or even come near to true greatness. … The real way of writing is to write as we translate. When we translate a text written in some foreign language, we do not seek to add anything to it; on the contrary, we are scrupulously careful not to add anything to it. That is how we have to try to translate a text which is not written down."

"It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? for the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone."

"A man really writes for an audience of about ten persons. Of course if others like it, that is clear gain. But if those ten are satisfied, he is content. A certain amount of encouragement is necessary.""

"I am more or less familiar with the works of the members of this Institute. I have worked in the same field. I have felt that quick comradeship of letters which is a very real comradeship, because it is a comradeship of thought and of principle."

"I think writing, my writing, is a species of mediumship. I become the person."

"The imaginative artist willy-nilly influences his time. If he understands his responsibility and acts on it—taking the art seriously always, himself never quite—he can make a contribution equal to, if different from, that of the scientist, the politician, and the jurist. The anarchic artist so much in vogue now—asserting with vehemence and violence that he writes only for himself, grubbing in the worst seams of life—can do damage. But he can also be so useful in breaking up obsolete molds, exposing shams, and crying out the truth, that the broadest freedom of art seems to me necessary to a country worth living in."

"For diff’rent styles with diff’rent subjects sort, As sev’ral garbs with country, town, and court."

"For there is no art where there is no style, and no style where there is no unity, and unity is of the individual."

"From the point of view of style, a healthy work of art is one whose style recognizes the beauty of the material it employs, be that material one of words or of bronze, of colour or of ivory, and uses that beauty as a factor in producing the æsthetic effect."

"I can't listen to anyone unless he attracts me by a charming style or by beauty of theme."

"Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings."

"Le style c’est l’homme."

"The style shows the man."

"Ce qui n’est pas clair, n’est pas Français."

"What is not clear (intelligible) is not French."

"Clarus ob obscuram linguam magis inter inanes Quamde graves inter Graios qui vera requirunt: Omnia enim stolidi magis admirantur amantque Inversis que sub verbis latitantia cernunt."

"His obscure style took with the shallower pates, (Not with the serious Greeks who ask for facts): For nothing captivates your dull man more Than dark, involved, mysterious verbiage."

"Decipimur specie recti; brevis esse laboro, Obscurus fio."

"We aim at the ideal, and fail. I try To be concise, and end in being obscure."

"Non liquet."

"It is not evident."

"Obscuris vera involvens."

"Cloaking the truth in mystery."

"Cela doit être beau, car je n’y comprends rien."

"That ought to be fine, for I don’t understand a word of it."

"Ornari res ipsa negat, contenta docere."

"The subject of itself is incompatible with an ornamental style, content if it is able to instruct."

"Verba nitent phaleris, at nullas verba medullas Intus habent."

"The words make a fine show, but they have no pith in them."

"Consuetudinem sermonis vocabo consensum eruditorum; sicut vivendi consensum bonorum."

"The practice of educated men is the best standard of language, just as the lives of the good are our pattern in morals."

"Fungar vice cotis, acutum Reddere quæ ferrum valet, exsors ipsa secandi. Munus et officium, nil scribens ipse, docebo."

"Mine be the whetstone’s lot Which makes steel sharp, though cut itself will not. Although no writer, I may yet impart To writing folk the precepts of their art."

"Ne forçons point notre talent, Nous ne ferions rien avec grâce."

"Don’t force your powers unduly, if you aim at a graceful effect."

"Occidit miseros crambe repetita magistros."

"Like warmed-up cabbage served at each repast, The repetition kills the wretch at last."

"Sæpe stilum vertas, iterum que digna legi sint Scripturus; neque te ut miretur turba labores, Contentus paucis lectoribus."

"Oh yes! believe me, you must draw your pen Not once or twice, but o’er and o’er again Through what you’ve written, if you would entice The man that reads you once to read you twice, Not making popular applause your cue, But looking to fit audience, although few."

"Sumite materiam vestris, qui scribitis, æquam Viribus, et versate diu quid ferre recusent, Quid valeant humeri. Cui lecta potenter erit res, Nec facundia deseret hunc, nec lucidus ordo."

"Good authors, take a brother bard’s advice: Ponder your subject o’er not once or twice, And oft and oft consider if the weight You hope to lift be, or be not too great. Let but our theme be equal to our powers, Choice language, clear arrangement, both are ours."

"Ornata hoc ipso, quod ornamenta neglexerant."

"Ornate for the very reason that ornament had been neglected."

"Plus aloes quam mellis habet."

"He has in him more aloes than honey."

"Ce que l'on concoit bien s’énonce clairement Et les mots pour le dire arrivent aisément."

"A felicitous thought is as clearly exprest, And true words are not wanting in which it is drest."

"Est brevitate opus ut currat sententia."

"Terseness there wants to make the thought ring clear."

"Ante mare, et tellus, et, quod tegit omnia cœlum, Unus erat toto nature vultus in orbe, Quem dixere Chaos; rudis indigestaque moles."

"Ere sea, and land and heaven’s vault were made, Nature, throughout the globe, bore one aspect, Called chaos—a rude and undigested mass."

"Arenæ funis effici non potest."

"You can’t make a rope of sand."

"Velut egri somnia, vanæ Fingentur species, ut nec pes, nec caput uni Reddatur formæ."

"Like sick men’s dreams, when shadowy images appear, and nether head nor feet fit their respective forms."

"Le secret d’ennuyer est celui de tout dire."

"The surest way of wearying your readers is to say everything that can be said on the subject."

"Quot pæne verba, tot sententiæ sunt; quot sensus, tot victoriæ."

"Almost every word is a sentence in itself, and every thought amounts to a demonstration."

"Difficilis optimi perfectio atque absolutio."

"Perfection and finish of the highest kind is very hard to attain."

"Limæ labor ac mora."

"The labour and tediousness of polishing (any work of art, poetry, painting, etc.) as though with a file."

"Ore rotundo."

"In well-turned phrase."

"Nec pluteum credit, nec demorsos sapit ungues."

"It does not smack of the desk, or bitten nails."

"Nihil est hirsutius illis."

"Nothing can be more rugged."

"Nearly a quarter of a century ago I left the security of a well-paid and well-pensioned position to go on a mission to show doctors how much they — and their patients — would benefit from knowing the simple techniques of effective writing. As an editor on medical magazines for a decade, I had been surprised by much of what I had seen: winding texts of long and pompous words brought together in rambling sentences that obscured any sensible meaning. Here was a great opportunity, I thought, to pass on what I had learnt as a professional writer: that the best way to express clear and well-ordered thoughts was through clear and simple language. I was confident that within a year or two the culture would start to change, and instead of glibly trotting out phrases like Long-term medication is predicated, doctors would start writing: You may have to take these pills for a long time. To my surprise I met fierce resistance. 'You can't use simple words, they are for children'; ' Approximately is a proper scientific word; it would be wrong to write about '; 'Don't put We examined the patient; instead write, The patient was examined '. One exasperated public health doctor went so far as to say: 'We're doctors. We don't necessarily want people to understand what we are writing'."

"Words matter in science that matters. Far too often, however, the words in medical literature are chosen and arranged without enough care. This leads to confusing, jargon-filled writing that is difficult to read, even for medical researchers. Not only is careless writing a barrier to publication, it makes it more difficult for peers to understand and build on other researchers’ work. Poor communication limits the impact of medical research, so clinicians and patients ultimately suffer as well. Vague and ambiguous clinical practice guidelines, for example, have been linked to medical errors and inconsistent interpretation. … Writing about complex medical research in plain language is challenging. Technical terms, acronyms and jargon, although used too frequently, cannot be avoided entirely. But the benefits — improved knowledge translation, less research waste — are too great for needlessly complicated writing to be accepted as inevitable. Medical educators, academic institutions and health care researchers have a duty to improve the quality of written communication to extend the reach of useful medical knowledge."

"Medical editors, however much they may disagree on scientific, social, or economic problems, will agree on one point: papers submitted for publication are, with few exceptions, badly written. The need for better medical writing is a perennial complaint: but what to do about it? One remedy is a book designed for self-study. Almost every year, publishers will bring out one or more volumes of this type, often helpful if used earnestly and critically. ... A second resource for improvement is the workshop or short course in writing. ..."

"There is probably more bad writing in medical journals than in any other kind of periodicals. For this there is a variety of reasons. Medical men are without leisure, and there is so much in medicine about which something may be written, that they lose their way. Besides, it is a common delusion that the mere fact of attendance for four or five years upon lectures in a faculty of a university confers upon a man those qualitiies of aptitude, precision, and harmony, which are commonly called style. On the contrary, the pursuit of a single, dominating interest, as told the students of , limits a man's breadth of outlook and the range of his intellectual curiosity; it dulls his zest and diminishes his eagerness to know and integrate into himself the best that has been thought and written for the enrichment of his mind. In short, it is a bar to the perception of what is good and what is evil in the art of writing."

"Presenting and communicating information effectively in any medical document is of paramount importance. The facts must be presented in such a way that they can be understood as intended. Many medical manuscripts are used for the diagnosis and treatment of patients: if they are misinterpreted, the consequences could be harm to the patient. Far too many errors that occur in medical practice are the result of poorly written documents, which in turn can result in miscommunication of information."

"The ability to endure rejection is a must. I began medical writing in the early 1970s while in small-town private practice. I had some early success in conducting clinical studies and seeing the results in print in respected journals. I also wrote some articles for controlled circulation, advertiser-supported journals, such as Medical Economics. Not everything I wrote was published. I also began writing health books for non-medical people, what the editors call the "lay audience." Here I collected so many rejection letters that I could have wallpapered a room with them. Only when I began writing and editing medical books did my acceptance rate become favorable. However, after 40 years of medical writing experience, I still receive rejections for clinical papers, editorials, and book proposals. And, yes, it still hurts. If you aspire to be a medical writer you will need determination. Being a writer takes a lot of effort and you really need to want to see your work in print."

"Medical writing, like the treatments it describes, can be used to improve health but also has the potential to harm. Rudyard Kipling (Kipling, 1923) wrote that ‘words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind’, reminding us that writing has the power to change behaviours and attitudes. Medical writing therefore carries a heavy burden of responsibility. However, working with a powerful, or potentially dangerous, substance can be exhilarating. Another factor that makes medical writing such an interesting area is that it inhabits a strange boundary zone between science and art. Medical writing, especially reporting clinical trial results must be factual and objective. Certain aspects can undoubtedly be improved by following checklists and guidelines (Plint et al, 2006). Yet formulaic papers that report results dispassionately tend to be dry and uninteresting, while good papers should be inspiring and persuasive. But if the persuasive elements are taken too far or the arguments are not properly grounded in the findings, the report becomes biased and potentially misleading. Writers therefore walk a tightrope along what has been termed ‘the rhetoric of research’ (Horton, 1995; Schriger, 2005). They need to understand both the underlying science and the expressive art and to know where one should stop and the other begin."

"In 1953, Watson and Crick wrote a letter to that must be one of the most important publications in the biological sciences. ... It occupied just more than one page of the journal, including the references and the acknowledgements. It is a good example of clear scientific writing, and many of the principles of clear writing are well illustrated by their opening paragraph. We wish to suggest a structure for the salt of . This structure has novel features which are of considerable biological interest."

"Besides books, the other major predecessor and rival for communicating new science in the seventeenth century was the "learned letter," most famously illustrated by Galileo's letters on s and the . As the ideas of the scientific revolution spread in England and on the Continent, the accelerated pace of scientific activity compelled natural philosophers to communicate their recent findings through personal correspondence within and between countries. But these are not "letters" in the traditional sense of the word; authors wrote these epistles on some scientific or technical topic with the understanding that they would be passed on to others. Thus the actual intended audience was interested members of the scientific community at large, though short passages within them may personally address the primary recipient. To disseminate the information in these learned letters more efficiently, industrious scholars became centers for spreading the latest technical news at home and abroad. Their job was to receive letters, make copies, and pass them on to other interested scholars. After the emergence of , the job of "trafficker in intelligence" became more formalized in that the societies themselves appointed a secretary to handle correspondence and circulate newsworthy learned letters among society members and friends."

"… writing is one of the most inadequately developed of all the skills that scientists use in their research activities. Let us look briefly at the statistics: • 99% of scientists agree that writing is an integral part of their job as scientists. • fewer than 5% have ever had any formal instruction in scientific writing as part of their scientific training. • for most, the only learning experience they have is the example they get from the scientific literature that they read. • About 10% enjoy writing; the other 90% consider it a necessary chore. These figures are, of course, approximate but they come from informal surveys conducted over many years in many countries and, I believe, are close to reality."

"The impact of depends critically on how well it is communicated to others. In most sciences, this means writing a scientific paper that other scientists will read. Perhaps you have done amazing experiments and think that this will guarantee success. However, without good writing, you may struggle to get your paper published and your brilliant experiments will not have the impact they deserve. Good writing can't save bad science, but bad writing can sink good science ..."