Quotes About Argument Writing

#1. Words are so often used in the opposite sense, as a screen of diversion. It's the struggle towards truthfulness which is the same whether one is writing a poem, a novel or an argument.

John Berger

#2. I really can't complain about actresses who get paid to be dumb. Most of us can't get paid to be smart.

Aaron Allston

#3. Invariably, it is this for which I write: the joy ... of an argument firmly made, like a nail straightly driven, its head flush to the plank.

George Will

#4. Ursula K. Le Guin urges authors to remember why they do what they do. Her argument is that writing is an form of art rather than a commodity.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#5. There is only one way to defeat the enemy, and that is to write as well as one can. The best argument is an undeniably good book.

Saul Bellow

#6. For the plan grows under the author's hand; new thoughts occur to him in the act of writing; he has not worked out the argument to the end before he begins.

Plato

#7. A good story should provoke discussion, debate, argument ... and the occasional bar fight.

J. Michael Straczynski

#8. In all his writing he had tried to reconcile the words "reason," "logic" and "science" with the words "God," "faith" and "Qur'an," and he had not succeeded, even though he used with great subtlety the argument from kindness,

Salman Rushdie

#9. I was a good student, but I didn't like school.

Ashley Benson

#10. A long list of propositions does not necessarily make a coherent argument

Andrew Pettegree

#11. Good editorial writing has less to do with winning an argument, since the other side is mostly not listening, than with telling the guys on your side how they ought to sound when they're arguing.

Adam Gopnik

#12. In any case, you can't turn back the clock.

Michel Patini

#13. That's another argument for writing: making something that outlasts you.

Zia Haider Rahman

#14. In the world of opinion writing, there's something called the 'to be sure' paragraph. A sort of rhetorical antibiotic, it seeks to defend against critics by injecting a tiny bit of counter-argument before moving on with the main point.

Meghan Daum

#15. I don't like the act of talking; it makes me slightly light-headed.

Hugh Laurie

#16. I don't really have those kinds of intentions when I write a scene. I try to follow the internal logic of the fiction, rather than make an argument or an assertion.

Rachel Kushner

#17. Ultimately, whether we are writing posts, paragraphs, essays, arguments, memoirs, monographs or even just the Great American Tweet, writing is and should be a grand adventure.

Constance Hale

#18. Nothing so sharpens the thought process as writing down one's arguments. Weaknesses overlooked in oral discussion become painfully obvious on the written page.

Hyman G. Rickover

#19. Obscurity in writing is commonly an argument of darkness in the mind. The greatest learning is to be seen in the greatest plainness.

John Wilkins

#20. There is an argument for believing that the entire process of writing a piece of fiction is simply a thinly-controlled and highly-internalised nervous breakdown designed, with a bit of luck, to produce something worthwhile at the end.

David Hewson

#21. Does writing exist for the typewriter, or the typewriter for writing? . . . the invention of the computer would one day make [the] argument obsolete . . . technologies exist for humans, and not vice versa.

Minae Mizumura

#22. Typography has one plain duty before it and that is to convey information in writing. No argument or consideration can absolve typography from this duty.

Emil Ruder

#23. When a guy says something like that, take it at face value. Long enough.

Kelly Moran

#24. Mann was profoundly influenced by two philosophers, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, who returned to the most ancient of all philosophical questions - "How to live?" - and whose writings offered novel perspectives for considering that question (much more perspective-offering than rigorous argument!)

Philip Kitcher

#25. People read legal writing differently. When you're at the crux of a legal argument, every step is a step in the argument. The judge will see any holes. If you do that in fiction, it's too long and boring.

William Lashner

#26. Each book is, in a sense, an argument with myself, and I would write it, whether it is ever published or not.

Patricia Highsmith

#27. I think the essence of the argument has always been, first of all, the Guild doesn't want writing on spec. And that's been a major problem over the years. But obviously, to the young writer that's unfair and it's discriminatory, and it can be very hurtful to one's career.

Rod Serling

#28. Then an argument would ensue because they were men with different ideas.

S.A. Tawks

#29. The writings of leading ID proponents reveal that the designer postulated by their argument is the God of Christianity.

John E. Jones III