writing

"It is not evident."

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

"Nothing can be more rugged."

"Ore rotundo."

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

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

"You can’t make a rope of sand."

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

"He has in him more aloes than honey."

"Ornata hoc ipso, quod ornamenta neglexerant."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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

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

"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."

"Obscuris vera involvens."

"Cloaking the truth in mystery."

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

"Ornari res ipsa negat, contenta docere."

"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!"

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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”."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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.”"

"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."

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

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

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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

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

"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."