Writers on Writing

Appropriate Language

Words can destroy. What we call each other ultimately becomes what we think of each other, and it matters.
— Jeane J. Kirkpatrick

Every language reflects the prejudices of the society in which it evolved.
— Casey Miller and Kate Swift

Language screens reality as a filter on a camera screens light waves.
— Casey Miller and Kate Swift

Language is neither innocent nor neutral. Linguistic habits condition our view of the world and hinder social change.
— Carmen Martinez Ten

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Arguments

We have become so democratic in our habits of thought that we are convinced that truth is determined through a plebiscite of facts.
—Erich Heller

Thomas Huxley taught me the importance of giving to every argument a simple sentence.
— H. L. Mencken

"For example" is not proof.
— Yiddish proverb

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Audience

Never underestimate your readers’ intelligence or overestimate their information.
— An old newspaper saying

The audience fails to understand the writer because the writer has failed to understand the audience.
—Anonymous

We often refuse to accept an idea merely because the tone of voice in which it has been expressed is unsympathetic to us.
— Friedrich Nietzsche

There’s still a strange moment with every book when I move from the position of writer to the position of reader and I suddenly see my words with the eyes of the cold public. It gives me a terrible sense of exposure, as if I’d gotten sunburned.
— Eudora Welty

No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader’s intelligence, or whose attitude is patronizing.
— E. B. White

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Computers

I’d sell my computer before I’d sell my children. But the kids better watch their step.
— James Fallows

I think there’s a great deal of nonsense about computers and writers: the machine corrupts the writer, unless you write with a pencil you haven’t chosen the words, and so on. But it has made revision much more inviting to me, because when I revised before on the typewriter, there was a commitment of labor in typing a page; though I might have an urge to change the page, I was reluctant to retype it.
— John Hersey

I don’t type [when I write] because . . . I often have the feeling that everything flows directly from my right hand.
— Anne Tyler

[Typewriting] helps give me the feeling of making my work objective. I can correct better if I see it in typescript.
— Eudora Welty

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Critical Thinking

The world is divided into people who think they are right.
— Anonymous

To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.
— Kenneth Burke

Seeking to know is only too often learning to doubt.
— Antoinette Deshoulières

Opinion is a flitting thing, / But truth, outlasts the Sun — / If then we cannot own them both — / Possess the oldest one —
— Emily Dickinson

A great many people think they are thinking when they are only rearranging their prejudices.
— William James

Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.
— Friedrich Nietzsche

A writer has a facility with words. A good writer can also think.
— Cynthia Ozick

When you open a book, make sure your mind is open too.
— Nancy Packer and John Timpane

People are usually more firmly convinced that their opinions are precious than that they are true.
— George Santayana

Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.
— George Bernard Shaw

The truth is rarely pure and never simple.
— Oscar Wilde

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Drafting

When I start a project, the first thing I do is write down, in longhand, everything I know about the subject, every thought I’ve ever had on it.
— Maya Angelou

It is easy to write a check if you have enough money in the bank, and writing comes more easily if you have something to say.
— Sholem Asch

The important thing is to get started. I’ll often put a piece of paper in the typewriter and decide the paper doesn’t want to be written on, so I’ll throw it away and take another piece of paper.
— Russell Baker

Convince yourself that you are working in clay, not marble, on paper not eternal bronze: Let that first sentence be as stupid as it wishes.
— Jacques Barzun

As against having beautiful workshops, studies, etc., one writes best in a cellar on a rainy day.
— Van Wyck Brooks

In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind.
— Joan Didion

The act of composition is a series of discoveries.
— E. L. Doctorow

Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it’s the only way you can do anything really good.
— William Faulkner

You don’t write because you want to say something; you write because you’ve got something to say.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

Word carpentry is like any other kind of carpentry: You must join your sentences smoothly.
— Anatole France

Nothing you write, if you hope to be any good, will ever come out as you first hoped.
— Lillian Hellman

Easy writing makes hard reading.
— Ernest Hemingway

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration.
— Ernest Hemingway

To be a writer is to sit down at one’s desk in the chill portion of every day, and to write; not waiting for the little jet of the blue flame of genius to start from the breastbone — just plain going at it, in pain and delight. To be a writer is to throw away a great deal, not to be satisfied, to type again, and then again, and once more, and over and over.
— John Hersey

What is written without effort in general is read without pleasure.
— Samuel Johnson

Don’t think and then write it down. Think on paper.
— Harry Kemelman

I put things down on sheets of paper and stuff them in my pockets. When I have enough, I have a book.
— John Lennon

The idea is to get the pencil moving quickly.
— Bernard Malamud

When I sit at my table to write, I never know what it’s going to be till I’m under way. I trust in inspiration, which sometimes comes and sometimes doesn’t. But I don’t sit back waiting for it. I work every day.
— Alberto Moravia

I don’t wait to be struck by lightning and I don’t need certain slants of light in order to be able to write.
— Toni Morrison

Don’t fake enthusiasms. Say what you think, not what you think you ought to think.
— Darcy O’Brien

I write fast, because I have not the brains to write slow.
— Georges Simenon

The wastepaper basket is the writer’s best friend.
— Isaac Bashevis Singer

Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on.
— John Steinbeck

Although I usually think I know what I’m going to be writing about, what I’m going to say, most of the time it doesn’t happen that way at all. At some point I get misled down a garden path, I get surprised by an idea that I hadn’t anticipated getting, which is a little bit like being in a laboratory.
— Lewis Thomas

Once your mind is caught on the right snag, there’s nothing so hard about the mechanics of writing.
— Anne Tyler

There is no royal path to good writing; and such paths as exist do not lead through neat critical gardens, various as they are, but through the jungles of self, the world, and of craft.
— Jessamyn West

When you’re ready to stop, stop. If you have presented all the facts and made the point that you want to make, look for the nearest exit.
— William Zinsser

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Emphasis

I heard an old Negro street singer last week, Reverend Pearly Brown, singing, "God don’t never change!" This is a precise thing he is singing. He does not mean "God does not ever change!" He means "God don’t never change."
— Imamu Amiri Baraka

God is a verb, not a noun.
— Buckminster Fuller

Nouns and verbs are almost pure metal; adjectives are cheaper ore.
— Marie Gilchrist

There is the first satisfaction of arranging it on a bit of paper; after many, many false tries, false moves, finally you have the sentence you recognize as the one you are looking for.
— Vladimir Nabokov

Nothing is more satisfying than to write a good sentence.
— Barbara Tuchman

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Grammar Basics

"Whom are you?" said he, for he had been to night school.
— George Ade

"I don’t need none," shouted the lady of the house even before the young man at the door had a chance to say anything.
"How do you know, lady?" he said. "I just might be selling grammar books."
— An old joke

Grammar is to a writer what anatomy is to a sculptor, or the scales to a musician. You may loathe it, it may bore you, but nothing will replace it, and once mastered it will support you like a rock.
—B. J. Chute

To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed.
— Joan Didion

When I goes to work on an infinitive I don’t just split it; I break it in little pieces.
— Jimmy Durante

You can be a little ungrammatical if you come from the right part of the country.
— Robert Frost

For there be women,
fair as she,
Whose nouns and verbs
do more agree.
— Bret Harte

Where strictness of grammar does not weaken expression, it should be attended to. . . . But where, by small grammatical negligences, the energy of an idea is condensed, or a word stands for a sentence, I hold grammatical rigor in contempt.
— Thomas Jefferson

Looking back at homework in Taft Junior High School, I suppose I found no more pleasure in diagramming a dozen sentences than I found in running twelve arpeggios. Of what use, I wondered, are subjects, predicates, prepositional phrases, and subordinate clauses? In time I would discover that they are the raw material of a writer’s life.
— James J. Kilpatrick

It is the little uncertainty that matters — the small confusion, the modifier that isn’t badly lost but only slightly misplaced. At such pauses along the trail, the reader’s eye flickers and wanders — back up to the subject, down again to the verb.
— James J. Kilpatrick

It is well to remember that grammar is common speech formulated.
— W. Somerset Maugham

Grammar lords it over kings, and with a high hand makes them obey its laws.
— Molière

Grammar is the analysis of language.
— Edgar Allan Poe

A dependent clause is like a dependent child: incapable of standing on its own but able to cause a lot of trouble.
— William Safire

Grammar, like other sciences, deals only with what can be brought under general laws and stated in the form of general rules, and ignores isolated phenomena.
— Henry Sweet

Damn the subjunctive. It brings all our writers to shame.
— Mark Twain

All those clauses, appositions, amplifications, qualifications, asides, God knows what else, hanging inside the poor old skeleton of one sentence like some kind of Spanish moss.
— Tom Wolfe

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