Brief Writing Quotes

#1. Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing; it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration that it creates.

Mordecai Richler

#2. What are minnows but brief flashes? And what are thoughts? And how do you capture a brief flash, even for a second?

Dinty W. Moore

#3. Richard Price, who has made a fortune writing fake ghetto books, says he takes a cab into the ghetto, transcribes Black speech for a brief time and returns home. His fake ghetto books have bought him a townhouse in Gramercy Park and home on Staten Island.

Ishmael Reed

#4. People moving in Heaven move with grace and beauty and slowly glide along with their feet hardly seeming to touch the ground!

David Berg

#5. Aside from a brief stint as a writing tutor during graduate school, I have managed to avoid respectable employment all my adult life.

Jesse Kellerman

#6. Working on newspapers, you're writing to a certain length, often very brief pieces; you tend to look for easy forms of humor - women can't drive, things like that. That's about the level of a lot of newspaper humor. It becomes a form of laziness.

Tom Wolfe

#7. ..they all emulated and admired and were students of Spartan education, could tell their wisdom was of this sort by the brief but memorable remarks they each uttered when they met, writing what is on every man's lips: Know thyself, and Nothing too much.

Plato

#8. All writing is about the same thing - it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration it creates

Mordecai Richler

#9. A lawyer is a person who writes a 10,000-word document and calls it a "brief."

Franz Kafka

#10. The Frankfurt Museum of Decorative Arts is a handsome building, which takes its cues from the riverside Biedermeier villa next to it, and it is well-integrated into an overall scheme for a group of small museums.

Martin Filler

#11. I shall be as brief as I can, for it is not by piling up detail that I hope to achieve my picture, but by putting the emphasis where I think it belongs.

Robertson Davies

#12. To speak much is one thing; to speak to the point another!

Sophocles

#13. The conviction of the rich that the poor are happier is no more foolish than the conviction of the poor that the rich are.

Mark Twain

#14. In brief, we who write are all in the same boat, as if we are survivors of torpedoes, and we hope to reach the shores of thought with strength for more activity.

Mary Ritter Beard

#15. For me writing biographies is impossible, unless they are brief and concise, and these are, I feel, the most eloquent.

Alfred Nobel

#16. After university, I went into film. I started out making tea, managed a brief stint as an assistant director, then found myself writing a screenplay. In the end, I wrote quite a few - but by January 2006, I wanted out.

Nick Harkaway

#17. The thing that usually gets me through the writing is that my feelings of wretched inadequacy are irregularly punctuated by brief flashes of omnipotence.

James L. Brooks

#18. Modern tragic writers have to write short stories; if they wrote long stories ... cheerfulness would creep in. Such stories are like stings; brief, but purely painful.

G.K. Chesterton

#19. I was the drummer in a band called Hemsworth for a brief stint, too - it was not very great. I didn't even write the songs, but the band was named after me.

Ryan Hemsworth

#20. Sometimes, I feel like I'm just a step away from that, just one breakdown away from chopping my own dick off and slapping somebody with it. The only thing stopping me is that I happen to like my dick. It gives me some of the only pleasure I get out of this life I've been given.

J.M. Darhower

#21. I came up professionally as a lawyer, and when you're a lawyer, writing a 50-page brief in one night is just another day at the office. You learn to make choices really quickly, and you learn how to get thoughts down very quickly.

Marc Guggenheim

#22. In brief, I spend half my time trying to learn the secrets of other writers - to apply them to the expression of my own thoughts.

Shirley Ann Grau

#23. The woman set Sig's chocolate orgy out in front of her and deposited my steak on the table.
"Y'all must work out," the waitress observed a little sourly. She apparently did not.
"I'm going to throw this up later," Sig said expressionlessly.
"I have a tapeworm," I said cheerfully.

Elliott James

#24. Any one who wishes to become a good writer should endeavour, before he allows himself to be tempted by the more showy qualities, to be direct, simple, brief, vigorous, and lucid.

Henry Watson Fowler

#25. Speech is highly elliptical. It would scarcely be endurable otherwise. Ellipsis is indispensable to the writer or speaker who wants to be brief and pithy, but it can easily cause confusion and obscurity and must be used with skill.

Bergen Evans

#26. Comedy writing is taking the brief thought and going with it.

Chris O'Dowd

#27. In my brief writing life, it means I am still lucky that I have at least one more novel to complete. I do not expect that a story will arrive just because it is time to write another novel. It doesn't happen that way.

David Bergen