Writing is nothing less than thought transference, the ability to send one’s ideas out into the world, beyond time and distance, taken at the value of the words, unbound from the speaker. Arthur M Jolly, interview Purple Pencil Adventures 2010
The present writer ... writes because for him it is a luxury that becomes all the more enjoyable and conspicuous the fewer who buy and read what he writes. Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 1843
The job of the writer is to kiss no ass, no matter how big and holy and white and tempting and powerful. Ken Kesey, The Art of Fiction
Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly misunderstand them. John Ruskin, A Joy for Ever, 1857
Writers take words seriously – perhaps the last professional class that does. John Updike
You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write. Saul Bellow
Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass. Anton Chekhov
I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn. Anne Frank
Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college. Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country
He asked, ‘What makes a man a writer?’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘it’s simple. You either get it down on paper, or jump off a bridge.’ Charles Bukowski
My bursting heart must find vent at my pen. Abigail Adams
Writing is the only thing that when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else. Gloria Steinem
I have no taste for either poverty or honest labor, so writing is the only recourse left for me. Hunter S Thompson, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967
Given these transformations, what is the main task facing the writer? Can he, any longer, make use of the techniques of the traditional 19th century novel, with its linear narrative, its measured chronology, its consular characters grandly inhabiting their domains within an ample time and space? J G Ballard, Crash foreword
His last effort was the autobiography of a magician: I came, I sawed, I conquered. The Ghost Writer 2010 starring Ewan McGregor & Pierce Brosnan & Kim Cattrall & Olivia Williams & Tom Wilkinson & Timothy Hutton & Jon Bernthal & Tim Preece & Robert Pugh & David Rintoul & Eli Wallach et al, director Roman Polanski, book guy
Now why did he go and get himself mixed up with that damned fool from the White House? ibid. old man
What a real playwright has to do is to say to the audience in effect – this is what you think, you are seeing in life every day, and turn it around and say – This is what it really is. Arthur Miller: Writer, Sky Atlantic 2018
My father had become a national icon of the theatre decades before I was born. ibid. daughter
We didn’t have a freezer. And we didn’t have a cake. ibid. Miller
I finished the play in about five days. ibid.
From the beginning writing meant freedom. ibid.
I felt that I was out of place more than anything else. ibid.
Bruce Chatwin was a legendary adventurer and writer who died in 1989. Filmmaker Werner Herzog collaborated with Chatwin in the last years of his life. This film follows Herzog on a series of encounters inspired by Chatwin’s travels. Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin, Werner Herzog, BBC 2019
1977: In Patagonia … ‘The Brontosaurus, I learned, was an animal that had drowned in the flood, being too big for Noah to ship aboard the Ark.’ ibid. Chatwin
Llanthony Priory, Wales: The landscape around here became one of the essential locations where he would find his inner balance. ibid.
The most a writer can hope from a reader is that he or she should think, here is someone who knows what’s it’s like to be me. Alan Bennett’s Diaries, BBC 2020
Some of the early ones are so embarrassing I destroyed them. ibid.
If this film has a point, it’s about fairness and tolerance, and however grudgingly, helping the less fortunate. ibid.
All my life I’ve worn a tie. ibid.
September 11th: David Cameron has been in Leeds preaching to businessmen the virtues of what he calls the Smart State. This seems to be a state that gets away with doing as little as possible for its citizens. And shuffling as many responsibilities as he can on to whomever thinks can make a profit out of them. ibid.
An ancient technology, one that’s at least 5,000 years old: the technology of writing. Lydia Wilson, The Secret History of Writing 1: From Pictures to Words, BBC 2020
Egypt: The halls of Teti’s tomb with thousands of stylised pictures, but this was not decoration. These pictures are hieroglyphs, a writing system older than the pyramids themselves. ibid.
The creation of writing is the event which gave humanity a history. ibid.
So what I was holding in my hand [Sumerian clay tablet] was the distant ancestor of today’s spreadsheet. ibid.
Like hieroglyphs, Chinese characters are stylised pictures … ‘There are so many similarities.’ ibid. academic in both
In the year of our Lord 1448 in Mainz, Germany, a goldsmith by the name of Johannes Gutenberg was experimenting with a lead alloy and a hand-held mould. His aim was to speed up the process of putting ink on paper but what he did was to speed up history. Gutenberg’s invention spelled the end of the Middle Ages and ushered in the modern world of science and industry. Lydia Wilson, The Secret History of Writing II: Words on a Page
The fall of the Roman Empire is one of the great inflection points of history and it coincides with a change in the technology of Europe. As papyrus disappeared so did the book as a relatively inexpensive everyday commodity. ibid.
The fact that parchment could be folded made it possible to stitch leaves together into a codex, the modern form of the book. ibid.
Brush calligraphy produced works of art that were prized in China every bit as much as illuminated manuscripts were in Europe. But in a medieval manuscript the art is in the decoration around the text. The nature of the Latin alphabet and the characteristics of parchment produced letters that were regular and repetitive. But in Chinese brush-calligraphy the art is in the brushwork that produces the characters themselves. And that is made possible by the nature of the writing surface. Paper was invented in China in 2nd century A.D. ibid.
Paper was key to another Chinese invention: woodblock printing. Each handwritten page of text was glued to a wooden block and then the characters were carved out by a skilled craftsman. This step was laborious and expensive. ibid.
The Islamic Golden Age: the arts and sciences flourished … We still count using an Arabic numbering system. ibid.
The secret of Gutenberg’s printing press was his ability to mass-produce copies of each individual letter. And in this he had a hidden advantage: ‘the letters of the alphabet are really simple shapes … These simple block-like letters can become blocks of metal and can become printed.’ ibid. expert
For 5,000 years the technology of writing has allowed people to communicate across space and time and make civilisation itself possible. From common roots, writing developed into a myriad of distinct scripts. But today a new digital communication technology is becoming universal across the globe. Lydia Wilson, The Secret History of Writing III: Changing the Script
A movement that swept across the world in the twentieth century: a series of script reforms that threatened to replace the multitude of traditional writing systems with a single universal script: the Latin alphabet. ibid.
With a change in script comes a fundamental change in identity … Latinization was at heart a political project. ibid.
‘I was born among the working classes and brought up among them. My father was a collier, and only a collier. Nothing praiseworthy about him. He wasn’t even respectable in so far as he got drunk frequently.’ D H Lawrence: Sex, Exile and Greatness, Sky Arts 2021
Though in his early life Lawrence disliked and even hated his father, in later years he came to respect and to love him. Lawrence had a great love of nature which he inherited from his father. He could name most plants and wild flowers. ibid.