Writing Quotes - Page 218

When writing is good, everything is symbolic, but symbolic writing is seldom good.

I write [music] as a sow piddles.

Clutter is the disease of American writing.

Few people realize how badly they write. Nobody has shown them how much excess or murkiness has crept into their style.

One of underestimated tasks in nonfiction writing is to impose narrative shape on an unwieldy mass of material.

Clear thinking becomes clear writing; one can't exist without the other.

If writing seems hard, it's because it is hard. It's one of the hardest things people do.

Every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great and original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished.

Vigorous writing is concise.

Science is experimental, moving forward step-by-step, making trial and learning through success and failure. Is not this also the way of religion, and especially of the Christian religion? The writings of those who preach the religion have from the very beginning insisted that it is to be proved by experience. If a man is drawn towards honour and courage and endurance, justice, mercy, and charity, let him follow the way of Christ and find out for himself. No findings in science hinder him in that way.

Graham Greene at 82 years old was still writing, and I don't think anyone can deny the force, the expertise, and the unique quality of his writing, if you take his complete oeuvre.

If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, all of us.

Shakespeare often writes so ill that you hesitate to believe he could ever write supremely well; or, if this way of putting it seem indecorous and abominable, he very often writes so well that you are loth to believe he could ever have written thus extremely ill.

Who will dare to write a history of human goodness?

No one can write their real religious life with pen or pencil. It is written only in actions, and its seal is our character, not our orthodoxy. Whether we, our neighbor, or God is the judge, absolutely the only value of our religious life to ourselves or to anyone is what it fits us for and enables us to do.

I put the copy of 'A Christmas Carol' that my grandfather had first read to me 60 years ago on my desk, and I began to write. The result, for better or for worse, is the 'Christmas Spirits.' I plan to read it to my grandson.

I consider a story merely as a frame on which to stretch my materials.

I'm not one of those people who write all the time. Sometimes I'll go several months without writing anything. I'll sometimes second guess myself and wonder if I'll ever write another song.

There is nothing like writing to force you to think and get your thoughts straight.

Art is too popular. If plumbing was as popular as art is we would have amateur plumbers running around brandishing wrenches and Roto-Rooters, climbing in and out of sewers and writing gibberish about pipe systems. And none of our our toilets would work.

Words have weight, sound and appearance; it is only by considering these that you can write a sentence that is good to look at and good to listen to.

Our sufferings and weaknesses, in so far as they are personal, are of no literary interest whatsoever. They are only interesting in so far as we can see them as typical of the human condition.

Aphorisms are essentially an aristocratic genre of writing. The aphorist does not argue or explain, he asserts; and implicit in his assertion is a conviction that he is wiser and more intelligent than his readers.

The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.

It is worth mentioning, for future reference, that the creative power which bubbles so pleasantly in beginning a new book quiets down after a time, and one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in. Then one becomes resigned. Determination not to give in, and the sense of an impending shape keep one at it more than anything.