Inspirational Quotes on Writing

“But a man may then imagine in your work what he pleases, what you never meant!" Not what he pleases, but what he can.”

“Whatever in a work of art is not used, is doing harm.”

“Over-mastered by some thoughts, I yeelded an inckie tribute unto them.”

“Moreover, in order to understand any man one must be deliberate and careful to avoid forming prejudices and mistaken ideas, which are very difficult to correct and get over afterwards.”

“...as soon as you think of yourself as teaching contemplation to others, you make another mistake. No one teaches contemplation except God, who gives it. The best you can do is write something that will serve as an occasion for someone else to realize what God wants of him.”

“Descriptions all fall flat and tame unless the Holy Ghost fills them with life and power”

“The modern cheap and fertile press, with all its translations, has done little to bring us nearer to the heroic writers of antiquity.”

“An existing individual is constantly in process of becoming,... and translates all his thinking into terms of process. It is with (him)... as it is with a writer and his style; for he only has a style who never has anything finished, but 'moves the waters of the language' every time he begins, so that the most common expression comes into being for him with the freshness of a new birth.”

“This lasted longer than I could describe even if I wrote pages and pages about it.”

“To these things do writers sink; and then the critics tell them that they “talk for effect”; and then the writers answer: “What the devil else should we talk for? Ineffectualness?”

“I never thought, when I used to read books, what work it was to write them.... It's work enough to read them sometimes.... As to the writing, it has its own charms.”

“If the world like it not, so much the worse for them.”

“I remember, for instance, the first time I went to the great palace of Versailles outside Paris and how, as I wandered around among all those gardens and fountains and statues, I had a sense that the place was alive with ghosts which I was just barely able to see, that somewhere just beneath the surface of all that was going on around me at that moment, the past was going on around me too with such reality and such poignance that I had to have somebody else to tell about it if only to reassure myself that I wasn’t losing my mind. I wanted and sorely needed to name to another human being the sights that I was seeing and the thoughts and feelings they were giving rise to. I thought that in a way I could not even surely know what I was seeing physically until I could speak of it to someone else, could not come to terms with what I was feeling as either real or unreal until I could put it into words and speak those words and hear other words in response to mine. But there was nobody to speak to, as it happened, and I can still remember the frustration of it: the sense I had of something trying to be born in me that could not be born without the midwifery of expressing it; the sense, it might not be too much to say, of my self trying to be born, of a threshold I had to cross in order to move on into the next room of who I had it in me just then to become. “in the beginning was the Word,” John writes, and perhaps part of what that means is that until there is a word, there can be no beginning. Frederick Buechner, A Room Called Remember, in an essay called The Speaking and Writing of Words.”

“The two things clearest in my mind were, that a remoteness had come upon the old Blunderstone life—which seemed to lie in the haze of an immeasurable distance; and that a curtain had for ever fallen on my life at Murdstone and Grinby's. No one has ever raised that curtain since. I have lifted it for a moment, even in this narrative, with a reluctant hand, and dropped it gladly. The remembrance of that life is fraught with so much pain to me, with so much mental suffering and want of hope, that I have never had the courage even to examine how long I was doomed to lead it. Whether it lasted for a year, or more, or less, I do not know. I only know that it was, and ceased to be; and that I have written, and there I leave it.”

“If you would be remembered, write a book worth the reading or live a life worth the writing about.”

“The last thing we discover in composing a work is what to put down first.”

“„Cititul îl face pe om deplin, vorbirea îl face prompt, iar scrisul îl face exact.”

“Not infrequently it turns out that a writer whom people have long credited with an extraordinary depth of ideas whom they have expected to exert an extraordinary and major influence on the direction of society, displays in the end such a watered down and minuscule version of his basic little idea that no one is even sorry that he’s succeeded in writing himself out.”

“I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.”

“Henry Luce to his Time magazine writers: "Tell the history of our time through the people who make it.”