Difficulty

Writing is just work--there's no secret. If you dictate or use a pen or type or write with your toes--it is still just work.
--Sinclair Lewis

When you are looking for obstacles, you can't find opportunities.
--J.C.Bell

There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.
--Red Smith

Writing is the hardest work in the world not involving heavy lifting.
--Pete Hamill

Opportunity follows struggle. It follows effort. It follows hard work. It doesn't come before.
--Shelby Steele

Writers are notorious for using any reason to keep from working: overresearching, retyping, going to meetings, waxing the floors--anything.
--Gloria Steinem

Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting down is simplicity itself--it is the occurring which is difficult.
--Stephan Leacock

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

Genuis begins great works; labor alone finishes them.
--Joseph Joubert

I don't know anything about inspiration because I don't know what inspiration is; I've heard about it, but I never saw it.
--William Faulkner

Discovery

Writing teaches us our mysteries.
-- Marie de L'Incarnation

I shall live badly if I do not write, and I shall write badly if I do not live.
--Francoise Sagan

My writing is a conscious letter to myself. It's a way for me to hod on to pieces as I grow and change and get on with my life.
--Joan Stein

The role of writer's is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.
--Anais Nin

Writing is just having a sheet of paper, a pen, and not a shadow of an idea of what you are going to say.
--Francoise Sagan

I can say now that one of the big reasons (for writing) was this: I instinctively reconginzed an opportunity to transcend some of my personal failings--things about myself I didn't particularly like and wanted to change but didn't know how.
--John Steinbeck

Looking back, I imagine I was always wirting. Twaddle it was too. But better far write twaddle or anything, anything, than nothing at all.
--Katherine Mansfield

Drafting

I write rather quickly. I've come to accept it. For a long time I was ashamed of myself for writing fast because I talked to people and I thought I wasn't taking enough pains or something. But I do write the first draft very quickly, and then I come back and work on it.
--Elis Ni Dhubhne

Economic Power

An engineer, without the tools of communication, is unable to sell his ideas, no matter how good those ideas are. (C.I. Gilmore, Industrial Engineering)

Most students consider English a waste of time. Yet, I get letters from former students thanking me for the strict approach I took toward writing. Probably no other trait sets out a new engineer from his contemporarires in his first assignments as does the ability to write. (D. Saylak, Civil Engineering)

My major criticism of the written communications of our newly hired graduates is that they write too much or too little. The knack ofeeffective communication is to give all that is needed for complete understanding, bu no more. (Paul J. Wolfe, Executive Vice President, Mobil Oil)

 

Education

Education is our passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today.
--Malcolm X

Those who trust us educate us.
--George Eliot

No person is your friend who demands your silence or denies your right to grow.
--Alice Walker

Character--the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life--is the source from which self-respect springs.
--Joan Didion

We wear the mask that grins and lies.
--Paul Laurence Dunbar

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
--Martin Luther King

A child cannot be taught by someone who despises him.
--James Baldwin

Planning

The best time for planning is when you are doing the dishes.
-- Agatha Christie

Strategy is better than strength.
--Hausa legend

A work has form insofar as one part of it leads a reader to anticipate another part, to be gratified by the sequence.
--Kenneth Burke

Power

I started writing because of a terrible felling of powerlessness. I felt I was drifting and obscure, and I rebelled against that. I didn't see what I could do to change my condition. I wanted to control rather than be controlled, to ordain rather than be ordained, and to relegate rather than be relegated.
--Anita Brookner

"Voice" and Audience

I have come to see that "the voice of the text" best describes what actually happens. We all speak one way to grandffather in the nursing home and another to an old acquaintance at a party. We have child voices and parent voices, neighborhood voices, and stranger voices, a hundred varieties of work voices, voices for friends and voices for lovers.
-- Donald M. Murray

Writing is the seense of being in contact with people who are part of a particular audience that really makes a difference to me.
--Shirley Anne Williams

Writer's Block

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

The ideal view for daily writing, hour on hour, is the blank brick wall of a cold-storage warehouse. Failing this, a stretch of sky will do, cloudless if possilbe.
--Edna Ferber

I need noise and interruptions and irritation: irritation and discomfort are a great starter. The loneliness of doing it any other way would kill me.
--Anita Brookner

Page last updated: 1 January, 2004