writing

1.

Any historian of the literature of the modern age will take virtually for granted the adversary intention, the actually subversive intention, that characterizes modern writing -- he will perceive its clear purpose of detaching the reader from the habits of thought and feeling that the larger culture imposes, of giving him a ground and a vantage point from which to judge and condemn, and perhaps revise, the culture that produces him.

- Trilling, Lionel

2.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

- Walker, Alice

3.

Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.

- Maugham, W. Somerset

4.

I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork.

- Peter De Vries

5.

A man who publishes his letters becomes a nudist -- nothing shields him from the world's gaze except his bare skin. A writer, writing away, can always fix himself up to make himself more presentable, but a man who has written a letter is stuck with it for all time.

- White, Elwyn Brooks

6.

Writing a novel without being asked seems a bit like having a baby when you have nowhere to live.

- Ellman, Lucy

7.

Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing; for life itself is a writer's love until death.

- Ferber, Edna

8.

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once.

- Connolly, Cyril

9.

True glory consists in doing what deserves to be written; in writing what deserves to be read; and in so living as to make the world happier and better for our living in it.

- Pliny the Elder

10.

All a good letter has to do is make you feel special.

- Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

11.

That which resembles most living one’s life over again, seems to be to recall all the circumstances of it; and, to render this remembrance more durable, to record them in writing.

- Benjamin Franklin

12.

It's not a bad idea to get in the habit of writing down one's thoughts. It saves one having to bother anyone with them.

- Isabel Colegate

13.

Good critical writing is measured by the perception and evaluation of the subject; bad critical writing by the necessity of maintaining the professional standing of the critic.

- Chandler, Raymond

14.

Not every story has explosions and car chases. That's why they have nudity and espionage.

- Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum

15.

For this invention of yours will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn it, by causing them to neglect their memory, inasmuch as, from their confidence in writing, they will recollect by the external aid of foreign symbols, and not by the internal use of their own faculties. Your discovery, therefore, is a medicine not for memory, but for recollection-for recalling to, not for keeping in mind.

- Plato

16.

After being Turned Down by numerous Publishers, he had decided to write for Posterity.

- George Ade

17.

First you're an unknown, then you write one book and you move up to obscurity.

- Martin Myers

18.

NOSE, n. The extreme outpost of the face. From the circumstance that great conquerors have great noses, Getius, whose writings antedate the age of humor, calls the nose the organ of quell. It has been observed that one's nose is never so happy as when thrust into the affairs of others, from which some physiologists have drawn the inference that the nose is devoid of the sense of smell. There's a man with a Nose, And wherever he goes The people run from him and shout: "No cotton have we For our ears if so be He blow that interminous snout!" So the lawyers applied For injunction. "Denied," Said the Judge: "the defendant prefixion, Whate'er it portend, Appears to transcend The bounds of this court's jurisdiction." Arpad Singiny

- Ambrose Bierce

19.

All writing comes by the grace of God.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

20.

That which resembles most living one's life over again, seems to be to recall all the circumstances of it; and, to render this remembrance more durable, to record them in writing.

- Franklin, Benjamin