Written Word Quotes - Page 2

• If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.

  Toni Morrison

  Inspirational, Happiness, Attitude

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• I try to leave out the parts readers skip.

  Elmore Leonard

  Writing, Trying, Reader

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Flowers have spoken to me more than I can tell in written words. They are the hieroglyphics of angels, loved by all men for the beauty of their character, though few can decipher even fragments of their meaning.

  Lydia M. Child

  Love, Flower, Angel

  "Letters from New York". Book by Lydia Maria Child, Letter No. 26, 1843.

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• The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar things new.

  William Makepeace Thackeray

  Writing, Two, Familiar

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• One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them.

  Hart Crane

  Creative Writing, Written Language, Power Of Language

  Brom Weber, Hart Crane (1970). “Hart Crane: a biographical and critical study”

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• One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment.

  Hart Crane

  Inspirational, Writing, Men

  Hart Crane (1965). “Letters, 1916-1932”

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• Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.

  Anton Chekhov

  Inspirational, Writing, Moon

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• What good are laws that cannot be read or understood, or a tongue that spews only hatred or ignorance? What good is the written word to an illiterate man?

  Delores Phillips

  Ignorance, Men, Law

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• Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality.

  Joseph Conrad

  Writing, Reality, Speech

  1911 Under Western Eyes, prologue.

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• It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.

  Robert Benchley

  Inspirational, Funny, Time

  Quoted in Reader's Digest, Sept. 1949. According to Nigel Rees, Cassell's Humorous Quotations, the following appeared in Punch in 1924: " 'It took me nearly ten years to learn that I couldn't write.' 'I suppose you gave it up then?' 'Oh, no! By that time I had a reputation established.' " The issue referred to by Rees is 6 Feb., and the cartoonist is R. Curry.

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

  Peter De Vries

  Work, Writing, I Can

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• No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.

  Henry Adams

  Truth, Mean, Men

  The Education of Henry Adams ch. 31 (1907)

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• He that uses many words for explaining any subject, doth, like the cuttlefish, hide himself for the most part in his own ink.

  John Ray

  Writing, Use, Using Words

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• If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.

  Anais Nin

  Writing, Commitment, Culture

  "Woman as Writer" by Jeannette L. Webber and Joan Grumman, (p. 38), 1978.

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• Reading asks that you bring your whole life experience and your ability to decode the written word and your creative imagination to the page and be a co-author with the writer, because the story is just squiggles on the page unless you have a reader.

  Katherine Paterson

  Reading, Imagination, Creative

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• Its focus wasn't on the written word but how the word was written.

  Neville Brody

  Focus, Design, Typography

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• The maker of a sentence launches out into the infinite and builds a road into Chaos and old Night, and is followed by those who hear him with something of wild, creative delight.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Inspirational, Life, Writing

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt McLaughlin (2010). “The Laws of Nature: Excerpts from the Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.13, North Atlantic Books

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• The written word has taught me to listen to the human voice, much as the great unchanging statues have taught me to appreciate bodily motions.

  Marguerite Yourcenar

  Voice, Appreciate, Taught

  Marguerite Yourcenar (1954). “Memoirs of Hadrian”

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• The written word, obviously, is very inward, and when we're reading, we're thinking. It's a sort of spiritual, meditative activity. When we're looking at visual objects, I think our eyes are obviously directed outward, so there's not as much reflective time. And it's the reflectiveness and the spiritual inwardness about reading that appeals to me.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Spiritual, Reading, Eye

  Tavis Smiley interview, PBS, June 28, 2005.

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

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Goodbye, Art, Business

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow “The Complete Poems of Longfellow”, Library of Alexandria

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• I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.

  James A. Michener

  Writing, Swings, Emotion

  Ernest Hemingway, James A. Michener (1986). “The dangerous summer”, Scribner Book Company

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• I think the written word is my first love. I was just a very imagination - centered child and a big part of that imaginary life came from reading.

  Zoe Kazan

  Children, Reading, First Love

  Source: collider.com

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• A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips; -- not be represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Art, May, Lips

  Henry David Thoreau (2012). “Walden; Or, Life in the Woods”, p.67, Courier Corporation

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• There can be no more thrilling idea of intimacy that connecting with someone through the agency of the written word. Here we meet, on the page, naked and unadorned: shorn of class, race, gender, sexual identity, age and nationality. The reader I seek is a tautology, for he/she is simply exactly the person who wants to read what I have written...

  Will Self

  Race, Class, Ideas

  "Will Self". Interview with Sarah Kinson, www.theguardian.com. May 9, 2007.

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• The act of writing bears something in common with the act of love. The writer, at his most productive moments, just flows. He gives of that which is uniquely himself. He makes himself naked, recording his nakedness in the written word. Herein lies some of the terror which frequently freezes a writer, preventing him from producing. Herein, too, lies some of the courage that must be entailed in letting others learn how one has experienced or is experiencing the world.

  Sidney Jourard

  Love, Lying, Writing

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