Art Of Writing Quotes:

I can’t write five words but that I change seven.

- Dorothy Parker

source: Dorothy Parker, Stuart Y. Silverstein (2009). “Not Much Fun: The Lost Poems of Dorothy Parker”, p.47, Simon and Schuster

topic: Writing, Revision, Seven, Great Writing, Writing By Writers

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

- Ray Bradbury

topic: Inspirational, Writing, Reality, Inspiring Writing, Writers And Writing

You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.

- Saul Bellow

topic: Inspirational, Change, Inspiring, Inspiration To Write, Middle Of The Night

Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what it is one is saying.

- John Updike

topic: Writing, Rewriting, Constant, Art Of Writing

Great is the art of beginning, but greater is the art of ending.

- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

topic: Art, Writing, I Ll Miss You, Beginnings And Ends, Inspirational New Beginning

I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.

- Truman Capote

topic: Believe, Writing, Crafts, Scissors, Written Language

The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.

- Gustave Flaubert

topic: Inspirational, Life, Art, Writer's Block, Writers And Writing

When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, 'I am going to produce a work of art.' I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.

- George Orwell

topic: Art, Lying, Book, Famous Writers, Art Of Writing

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.

- Arthur Quiller-Couch

source: On the Art of Writing "On Style" (1916)

topic: Writing, Pieces, Crafts, Art Of Writing

The art of writing has for backbone some fierce attachment to an idea.

- Virginia Woolf

source: Virginia Woolf, David Bradshaw (2009). “Selected Essays”, p.21, Oxford University Press

topic: Art, Philosophy, Writing, Art Of Writing

I rewrote the ending of 'Farewell to Arms' 39 times before I was satisfied.

- Ernest Hemingway

topic: Farewell, Writing, Arms, Farewell To Arms, Art Of Writing

Remember: Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations. Plot is observed after the fact rather than before. It cannot precede action. It is the chart that remains when an action is through. That is all Plot ever should be. It is human desire let run, running, and reaching a goal. It cannot be mechanical. It can only be dynamic.

- Ray Bradbury

topic: Running, Character, Goal, Reaching Goals, Art Of Writing

Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.

- Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

topic: Judging, Down And, Stuff, Great Writing, Editing And Writing

I have rewritten — often several times — every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.

- Vladimir Nabokov

source: Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (1973). “Strong opinions”, McGraw-Hill Companies

topic: Writing, Revision, Pencils, Great Writing, Erasers

Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.

- Stephen King

source: Stephen King (2000). “On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft”, p.271, Simon and Schuster

topic: Kings, Writing, Heart, Egocentric, Art Of Writing

Read over your compositions and whenever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

- Samuel Johnson

source: "The Sayings of Doctor Johnson".

topic: Art, Writing, Thinking, Great Writing, Editing And Writing

Substitute "damn" every time you're inclined to write "very"; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

- Mark Twain

topic: Writing, Editors, Crafts, Cursing, Creative Writing

The craft or art of writing is the clumsy attempt to find symbols for the wordlessness.

- John Steinbeck

topic: Art, Writing, Crafts, Art Of Writing

The art of writing fiction is to sail as dangerously close to the truth as possible without sinking the ship

- Kinky Friedman

topic: Art, Writing, Fiction, Art Of Writing

The art of writing is to explain the complications of the human soul with the simplicity that can be universally understood.

- Alan Sillitoe

source: Alan Sillitoe (1988). “The far side of the street: fifteen short stories”

topic: Art, Writing, Simplicity, Art Of Writing

The art of writing is the art of doing what you think you're doing. This is not as simple as it sounds. It implies a very difficult undertaking: the necessity to think. And it implies the requirement to think out three separate, very hard problems: What is it you want to say? How are you going to say it? Have you really said it?

- Ayn Rand

topic: Art, Writing, Simple, Art Of Writing

The great art of writing is knowing when to stop.

- Josh Billings

topic: Art, Writing, Knowing, Art Of Writing

There is an art of reading, as well as an art of thinking, and an art of writing.

- Clarence Day

topic: Art, Reading, Writing, Joy Of Reading, Art Of Writing

I definitely have loads of respect for writers and the art of writing.

- Molly Shannon

source: Source: collider.com

topic: Art Of Writing

The art of writing is not, as many seem to imagine, the art of bringing fine phrases into rhythmical order, but the art of placing before the reader intelligible symbols of the thoughts and feelings in the writer's mind.

- George Henry Lewes

source: George Henry Lewes (1891). “The Principles of Success in Literature”

topic: Art, Writing, Order, Art Of Writing

The art of writing history is the art of emphasizing the significant facts at the expense of the insignificant. And it is the same in every field of knowledge. Knowledge is power only if a man knows what facts not to bother about.

- Robert Wilson Lynd

topic: Art, Writing, Men, Writing History, Art Of Writing

coincident with the explosive growth of research, the art of writing science suffered a grave setback, and the stultifying convention descended that the best scientific prose should sound like a non-human author addressing a mechanical reader. ... We injure ourselves when we fail to make our discipline as clear and vibrant as we can to students - prospective scientists - and to the public who pay the taxes.

- David Mermin

source: N. David Mermin (1990). “Boojums All the Way Through: Communicating Science in a Prosaic Age”, p.12, Cambridge University Press

topic: Art, Writing, Discipline, Art Of Writing

Achilles exists only through Homer . Take away the art of writing from this world , and you will probably take away its glory .

- François-René de Chateaubriand

source: Les Natchez preface (1826)

topic: Art, Writing, World, Art Of Writing

... the precedents for feminine self-expression run back through all the ages since the art of writing was invented. ... The era may witness the first female engineer, motor truck chauffeur, radio broadcaster, head of an aviation school, or federal prohibition officer, but it has not produced the first thinking, creative, and writing woman by any means.

- Mary Ritter Beard

source: Mary Ritter Beard, Ann J. Lane (1977). “Making Women's History: The Essential Mary Ritter Beard”, p.133, Feminist Press at CUNY

topic: Running, Art, School, Chauffeurs, Art Of Writing

Whatever may be our natural talents, the art of writing is not acquired all at once.

- Jean-Jacques Rousseau

topic: Art, Writing, May, Art Of Writing

Many great authors of the 19th century wrote under conditions of strict censorship. The great thing about the art of writing a novel, is that you can write about anything. All you have to say is that it's fiction.

- Orhan Pamuk

topic: Art, Writing, Fiction, Great Author, Art Of Writing

It has taken me years of struggle, hard work and research to learn to make one simple gesture, and I know enough about the art of writing to realize that it would take as many years of concentrated effort to write one simple, beautiful sentence.

- Isadora Duncan

source: Isadora Duncan (2013). “My Life (Revised and Updated)”, p.31, W. W. Norton & Company

topic: Beautiful, Dance, Art, Art Of Writing

There is an art of reading, an art of thinking, and an art of writing.

- Isaac D'Israeli

topic: Art, Reading, Writing, Art Of Writing, Book Readers

None of us older writers had gone through such a school. We are all self-taught. And, of course, there is always, in such a school, the danger of goose-stepping, uniformed ranks. But the Serapion Brethren have already, it seems to me, outgrown this danger. Each of them has his own individuality and his own handwriting. The common thing they have derived from the studio is the art of writing with ninety-proof ink, the art of eliminating everything that is superfluous, which is, perhaps, more difficult than writing.

- Yevgeny Zamyatin

topic: Inspirational, Art, Writing, Art Of Writing, Self Taught

The art of writing, like the art of love, runs all the way from a kind of routine hard to distinguish from piling bricks to a kind of frenzy closely related to delirium tremens.

- H. L. Mencken

source: H.L. Mencken (2013). “Minority Report”, p.27, Knopf

topic: Running, Art, Writing, Delirium Tremens, Art Of Writing

The great art of writing is the art of making people real to themselves with words.

- Logan Pearsall Smith

topic: Art, Real, Writing, Art Of Writing

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

- Cyril Connolly

topic: Art, Writing, Literature, Newspaper Reporters, Art Of Writing

The art of writing is mysterious, the opinions we hold are ephemeral.

- Jorge Luis Borges

source: Jorge Luis Borges (2000). “Brodie's report: including the prose fiction from In praise of darkness”

topic: Art, Writing, Ephemeral, Platonic, Romantic Poet

In the world's history certain inventions and discoveries occurred, of peculiar value, on account of their great efficiency in facilitating all other inventions and discoveries. Of these were the art of writing and of printing - the discovery of America, and the introduction of Patent-laws. The date of the first ... is unknown; but it certainly was as much as fifteen hundred years before the Christian era; the second-printing-came in 1436, or nearly three thousand years after the first. The others followed more rapidly - the discovery of America in 1492, and the first patent laws in 1624.

- Abraham Lincoln

source: "Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. Volume 3" by Abraham Lincoln, New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 1953.

topic: Christian, Art, Writing, Discovery Of America, Patent Law

The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.

- Mary Heaton Vorse

topic: Art, Writing, Pants, Writer's Block, Art Of Writing

Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else. What is the other text, the original? I have no answer. I suppose it is the source, the deep sea where ideas swim, and one catches them in nets of words and swings them shining into the boat... where in this metaphor they die and get canned and eaten in sandwiches.

- Ursula K. Le Guin

topic: Art, Writing, Swings, Deep Sea, Art Of Writing

Programming is the art of writing essays in crystal clear prose and making them executable

- Per Brinch Hansen

source: Per Brinch Hansen (1996). “The search for simplicity: essays in parallel programming”, IEEE

topic: Art, Writing, Crystals, Writing Essays, Essays

The ancient codes were doubtless originally suggested by the discovery and diffusion of the art of writing.

- Henry James Sumner Maine

source: Henry Sumner Maine, Sir, J. H. Morgan (2000). “Ancient Law”, p.8, Beard Books

topic: Art, Writing, Discovery, Art Of Writing, Diffusion

It is worth remembering that every writer begins with a naively physical notion of what art is. A book for him or her is not an expression or a series of expressions, but literally a volume, a prism with six rectangular sides made of thin sheets of papers which should include a cover, an inside cover, an epigraph in italics, a preface, nine or ten parts with some verses at the beginning, a table of contents, an ex libris with an hourglass and a Latin phrase, a brief list of errata, some blank pages, a colophon and a publication notice: objects that are known to constitute the art of writing.

- Jorge Luis Borges

source: "Evaristo Carriego" by Jorge Luis Borges, (Ch. 3), 1930.

topic: Art, Latin, Book, Latin Phrases, Blank Pages

To speak technically photography is the art of writing with light. But if I want to think about it more philosophically, I can say that photography is the art of writing with time. When you capture an image you capture not only a piece of space, you also capture a piece of time. So you have this piece of specific time in your square or rectangle. In that sense I find that photography has more to do with time than with light.

- Gerardo Suter

topic: Photography, Art, Writing, Rectangles, Art Of Writing

Of course, it may be that the arts of writing and photography are antithetical. The hope and aim of a word-handler is that he maycommunicate a thought or an impression to his reader without the reader's realizing that he has been dragged through a series of hazardous or grotesque syntactical situations. In photography the goal seems to be to prove beyond a doubt that the cameraman, in his great moment of creation, was either hanging by his heels from the rafters or was wedged under the floor with his lens in a knothole.

- E. B. White

topic: Photography, Art, Writing, Great Moments, Art Of Writing

Such is the art of writing as Dreiser understands it and practices it--an endless piling up of minutiae, an almost ferocious tracking down of ions, electrons and molecules, an unshakable determination to tell it all. One is amazed by the mole-like diligence of the man, and no less by his exasperating disregard for the ease of his readers.

- H. L. Mencken

topic: Art, Determination, Writing, Tracking, Art Of Writing