Quotes About Academic Writing

#1. For so long I'd felt that what I'd been trained to do in academic writing was to press my nose to the ground, and here was Nell Stone with her head raised and swiveling in all directions. It was exhilarating and infuriating

Lily King

#2. Academic writing was actually about hiding what you didn't know. There was a language, a technique, and I had mastered it. In everything there were gaps which language could cover over as long as you had acquired the know-how.

Karl Ove Knausgard

#3. Academic writing you have to get right. Fiction you have to get plausible. And there's a world of difference.

Elliott Colla

#4. I don't think academic writing ever was wonderful. However, science used to be much less specialized.

Stephen Jay Gould

#5. I've often heard academics disparage non-academic writing in terms that suggest it could be a negative in the tenure process, irrespective of the quality of academic work under review.

Daniel Drezner

#6. I had been writing for about twelve years. I knew pretty well how you could find things out, but I had never been trained in an academic way how to go about the research.

David McCullough

#7. All writers are like bomb-throwers, whether they attack with dense academic prose or jazzy riffs of stream-of-consciousness writing.

Betsy Lerner

#8. I instantly chucked my academic ambitions and began writing fiction full-time.

Peter Straub

#9. It took me a couple of years after I got out of Berkeley before I dared to start writing. That academic mind-set - which was kind of shallow in my case anyway - had begun to fade.

Joan Didion

#10. To be a writer you have to write
and no academic degree is going to do the writing for you.

Michelle Richmond

#11. If I was writing about an academic or a more difficult person, I would use the Latinate vocabulary more, but I do think Anglo-saxon is the language of emotion.

Lydia Davis

#12. I did a lot of my writing as though I was an academic, doing some piece of research as perfectly as possible.

A.S. Byatt

#13. First organizing it on paper isn't just academic, it's an applied prerequisite for manifestation.

T.F. Hodge

#14. I had my own insecurities, which a lot of my comedy would come from, about not being able to live up to their academic expectations. Acting out those insecurities was a way of confronting them, like, "Let me just lean into being a guy who can't read or write."

Charlie Day

#15. I was pretty dead set against ever writing an academic novel. It's always been my view that there are already more than enough academic novels and that most of them aren't any good. Most of them are self-conscious and bitter, the work of people who want to settle grudges.

Richard Russo

#16. Also, I liked John Cage's music. I liked it for its craziness, the use of silence, the boldness-anything to get me away from writing about.. I don't know what academic poets write about.

Kenneth Koch

#17. As a graduate student at Oxford in 1963, I began writing about books in revolutionary France, helping to found the discipline of book history. I was in my academic corner writing about Enlightenment ideals when the Internet exploded the world of academic communication in the 1990s.

Robert Darnton

#18. My lab and academic work fill my day from about 9 am to 7 p.m. Then I zoom out the lens to work on my other writing.

David Eagleman

#19. I am not built for academic writings. Action is my domain.

Mahatma Gandhi

#20. When writing fiction, you only have to know enough to be convincing on the page. I mean really convincing, of course - but you don't need academic depth.

Simon Mawer

#21. I kind of got more interested in writing after I turned in my last college essay and nobody was going to tell me what kind of academic papers to write anymore. I could write whatever I wanted, and I realized that I actually liked it when I could choose what I would write.

Dan Millman

#22. Any academic skill is quickly achievable if charged with clear purpose and an appeal to enthusiastic self-interest. Tarzan of the Apes only needed about twenty minutes to figure out how to read the beautiful Jane Porter's cursive writing.

T.K. Naliaka

#23. In 'Pictures from an Institution,' Randall Jarrell was able to transcend the academic novel by simply ignoring it, writing a comedy with no plot at all beyond his own pleasure in language and humanity itself.

Cathleen Schine

#24. No academic ever expects to be taken seriously by more than three other people, because really, we write for three people in our field.

Howard Gardner

#25. Every time I've had to do journalistic investigations, I've cursed, but later I discovered that it had helped me enormously with writing fiction. It's the one thing that can save me from becoming an academic writer.

Italo Calvino

#26. Writing on the blog, you want to get attention and make strong claims. In academic work, that often doesn't pay, so sometimes it's a little bit difficult going back and forth to navigate these differences.

Alex Tabarrok

#27. I published only in academic journals in philosophy until I was in my 40s, but I had been writing fiction and poetry my whole adult life - without ever once trying to publish it, and rarely letting anyone read it.

Cheryl Mendelson

#28. I have no education, I have no academic background in painting or in music, but I write music and I compose music and I write and I sell paintings, and my rule is, well, they can't arrest me.

Anthony Hopkins

#29. I've always been a writer because I've always been a student. My mom's a retired professor, so I come from a very academic background. I love writing, you know?

Kerry Washington

#30. To condemn Wordsworth for not writing verse of political and social protest, or for having forsaken the revolution, is to cross the final divide between academic arrogance and moral smugness.

Harold Bloom

#31. A large part of academic community is unthinkingly self-involved, producing reams of sterile writing - often consuming unbelievable amounts of public funds - and serving as an instruction manual for how to chase away readers and ignore historical insights.

Gotz Aly

#32. [In my writing] I know that I have made a caricature out of [others' academic] theories [but] I think that caricatures are frequently good portraits.

Umberto Eco

#33. Doctoral training is devoted almost entirely to learning to do research, even though most Ph.Ds who enter academic life spend far more time teaching than they do conducting experiments or writing books.

Derek Bok

#34. I was so naive about writing, I went to the public library and checked out the only volume they had on the topic - an academic treatise about publishing from the WWII era.

Bruce Feiler

#35. When I was confronted with official tuition, the academic thing, I could see no relationship whatever between that and the music I'd been writing since I was 11.

Harrison Birtwistle

#36. I don't consider myself attractive. I'm an academic, and in academia, people will write you off if you look younger.

Alissa Nutting

#37. If you detect a needlessly complex style when you read, look for characters and actions so that you can unravel for yourself the complexity the writer needlessly inflicted on you.

Joseph M. Williams

#38. Writing in the first person helps to make clear the author's role in constructing rather than discovering the story/knowledge.

Gayle Letherby

#39. I was just this chubby little Indian kid who looked like a nerd. I didn't have a ton of academic skills. It wasn't until I was in high school that I was like, "I guess I like writing dialogue." So that's how I got into it.

Mindy Kaling