Talk:Writing

notability, questions about quote removal

 * Well personally I like bad writing. I know this because no matter what I like, someone tells me that [it's] badly written.  I like bad acting too.
 * David Johnston,
 * is this really quoteworthy? is David Johnston "somebody"?

'''From the quotes themselves, the following are not clearly about the art/craft of writing. Should they be removed?'''
 * I've only written a tenth of what I know-- and they're already screaming.
 * Albert Camus


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


 * When a man is tired of pens, he is tired of life.
 * Stephen Overbury


 * Words are like eye glasses, blurring everything that they do not make clear.
 * Unknown

Stealing writing
I heard a quote by a fomous Author that went something like "good authors borrow ideas, the best autors steal them." If some one can find that it should be added here.

Two quotes I'm looking for..
Two quotes I'm looking for that I think should be added here. I am going to mangle these and have no idea of the sources. However they are great for the subject and one should be the mantra of every Wikiquotian.


 * 1) If something is easy to read great effort went into writing it.
 * 2) *When something can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing. ~Enrique Jardiel Poncela (from http://www.quotegarden.com, citation information.)
 * 3) Writing well is removing everything that isn't needed until there is nothing left to remove.

-- Greyed 21:51, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

Unsourced

 * But it takes an awful long time to not write a book!
 * Douglas Adams


 * If you can't annoy somebody with that you write, I think there's little point in writing.
 * Kingsley Amis


 * You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you're working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success - but only if you persist.
 * Isaac Asimov


 * It's easy, after all, to not be a writer. Most people are not writers, and very little harm comes to them.
 * Julian Barnes


 * Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time... The wait is simply too long.
 * Leonard Bernstein


 * About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment.
 * Josh Billings


 * Great literature must spring from an upheaval in the author's soul. If that upheaval is not present then it must come from the works of any other author which happens to be handy and easily adapted.
 * Robert Benchley, as quoted in The Routledge Dictionary of Quotations : A Dictionary of Quotations (1987) by Robert Andrews, p. 154


 * I take the view, and always have, that if you cannot say what you are going to say in twenty minutes you ought to go away and write a book about it.
 * Lord Brabazon


 * To write well is to think well, to feel well, and to render well; it is to possess at once an intellect, soul, and taste.
 * George Louis Buffon


 * No one ever committed suicide while reading a good book, but many have tried while trying to write one.
 * Robert Byrne


 * In my writing and my thinking and my work, I've thought of myself as addressing artists and writers. The rest of the world can take it or leave it as far as I'm concerned.
 * Joseph Campbell


 * I've only written a tenth of what I know-- and they're already screaming.
 * Albert Camus


 * The important thing is that there should be a space of time, say four hours a day at least, when a professional writer doesn't do anything else but write. He doesn't have to write, and if he doesn't feel like it he shouldn't try. He can look out of the window or stand on his head or writhe on the floor, but he is not to do any other positive thing, not read, not write letters, glance at magazines, or write checks. Either write or nothing.
 * Raymond Chandler


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


 * The more books we read, the sooner we perceive that the only function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece. No other task is of any consequence.
 * Cyril Connolly


 * The cure for writer's cramp is writer's block.
 * Inigo DeLeon


 * I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.
 * Joan Didion


 * The written word is weak. Many people prefer life to it. Life gets your blood going, and it smells good. Writing is mere writing, literature is mere. It appeals only to the subtlest senses - the imagination's vision and the imagination's hearing - and the moral sense, and the intellect. This writing that you do, that so thrills you, that so rocks and exhilarates you, as if you were dancing next to the band, is barely audible to anyone else. The reader's ear must adjust down from loud life to the subtle, imaginary sounds of the written word. An ordinary reader picking up a book can't hear a thing; it will take half an hour to pick up the writing's modifications, its ups and downs and louds and softs.
 * Annie Dillard


 * The best way to become acquainted with a subject is to write a book about it.
 * Benjamin Disraeli


 * Learn to write well, or not to write at all.
 * John Dryden


 * When the past is recaptured by the imagination, breath is put back into life.
 * Marguerite Duras


 * Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.
 * T. S. Eliot


 * All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.
 * F. Scott Fitzgerald, Undated letter to his daughter "Scottie" (Frances Scott Fitzgerald).


 * Getting even is one reason for writing.
 * William Gass


 * I write because I hate. A lot. Hard.
 * William Gass


 * I think of a writer as a river: you reflect what passes before you.
 * Natalia Ginzburg


 * The natural state of all writing is mediocrity.
 * Ira Glass


 * If any man wish to write in a clear style, let him be first clear in his thoughts; and if any would write in a noble style, let him first possess a noble soul.
 * Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


 * The writer's intention hasn't anything to do with what he achieves. The intent to earn money or the intent to be famous or the intent to be great doesn't matter in the end. Just what comes out.
 * Lillian Hellman


 * The first draft of anything is always shit.
 * Ernest Hemingway


 * A serious writer is not to be confused with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.
 * Ernest Hemingway


 * The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything.
 * John Irving


 * The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.
 * Samuel Johnson


 * Writing is as much a work in progress as the writing itself.
 * Alexander Keyes


 * All of us learn to write in the second grade. Most of us go on to greater things.
 * Bobby Knight


 * What a heavy oar the pen is, and what a strong current ideas are to row in!
 * D.H. Lawrence


 * It is splendid to be a great writer, to put men into the frying pan of your words and make them pop like chestnuts.
 * D.H. Lawrence


 * I like to write when I feel spiteful; it's like having a good sneeze.
 * D.H. Lawrence


 * First sentences are doors to worlds.
 * Ursula K. Le Guin


 * Writing is no trouble, you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity enough - it is the occurring which is difficult.
 * Stephen Leacock


 * Your life story would not make a good book. Don't even try.
 * Fran Lebowitz


 * You should write, first of all, to please yourself. you shouldn't care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can't be a way of life - the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.
 * Doris Lessing


 * Writing is simple. First you have to make sure you have plenty of paper... sharp pencils... typewriter ribbon. Then put your belly up to the desk... roll a sheet of paper into the typewriter... and stare at it until beads of blood appear on your forehead.
 * Jeff MacNelly


 * Being a real writer means being able to do the work on a bad day.
 * Norman Mailer


 * Writing is the supreme solace.
 * Somerset Maugham


 * Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.
 * Daphne du Maurier


 * If you copy from one author, it’s plagiarism; if you copy from two, it’s research.
 * Wilson Mizner


 * An author is a fool who, not content with boring those he lives with, insists on boring future generations.
 * Charles de Montesquieu


 * When a man is tired of pens, he is tired of life.
 * Stephen Overbury


 * The great art of writing is the art of making people real to themselves with words.
 * Logan Pearsall Smith


 * Don't write until you're 25. Don't write for the high school yearbook. Don't write for the college literary magazine. Don't write for any of that stuff; you never had any experiences, you don't know anything. Just shut up.
 * Joe Queenan


 * Writers are made, not born.
 * Ayn Rand


 * Literature is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none.
 * [Jules Renard]]


 * Beneath the rule of men entirely great, The pen is mightier than the sword.
 * Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Richelieu


 * A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood. The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that perhaps, is what makes him different from others.
 * Leo Rosten


 * The only reason for being a professional writer is that you can't help it.
 * Leo Rosten


 * The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.
 * Edwin Schlossberg


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


 * Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.
 * Gloria Steinem


 * 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.
 * John Steinbeck, New York Times (2 June 1969)


 * Write something to suit yourself and many people will like it; write something to suit everybody and scarcely anyone will care for it.
 * Jesse Stuart


 * The natural writer hopes to communicate - to present somebody else his interpretation of life.
 * Booth Tarkington


 * The shelf life of a modern hardback writer is somewhere between milk and yogurt.
 * Calvin Trillin


 * Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing to say?
 * Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.