Top 100 Quotes About English Writing
#1. The story of the English writing system is so intriguing, and the histories behind individual words so fascinating, that anyone who dares to treat spelling as an adventure will find the journey rewarding.
David Crystal
#2. I mainly wanted non-english writing poets, because I loved the idea that I was translating translations.
Simone Muench
#3. The best models of English writing are Shakespeare and the Old Testament.
Aleister Crowley
#4. All the youth now in England of free men, who are rich enough to be able to devote themselves to it, be set to learn as long as they are not fit for any other occupation, until they are able to read English writing well.
Alfred The Great
#5. English writing tends to fall into two categories - the big, baggy epic novel or the fairly controlled, tidy novel. For a long time, I was a fan of the big, baggy novel, but there's definitely an advantage to having a little bit more control.
Zadie Smith
#6. Yeah, I know what your English Professor tried to tell you. But if your English Professor could make a living writing fiction, they would have been doing it.
Dean Wesley Smith
#7. People think I'm selling feminism in my books, but what I'm really doing is writing advertising copy for expensive private colleges that most women can't afford anyway. Oh, and try to find a job with a major in English literature. No luck? Joke's on you, sucker!
Mary Gordon
#8. I got a bit obsessed with the whole English language and was writing journals and poetry. I've always been intrigued about psychology and philosophy and how people's minds work.
Lara Pulver
#9. I went to Gettysburg College, where the famous Civil War battle was fought. I majored in English. I would've liked to major in writing, but they didn't offer a major in that.
Jerry Spinelli
#10. Nothing teaches great writing like the very best books do. Yet, good teachers often help students cross that bridge, and I have to say that I had a few extraordinary English teachers in high school whom I still credit for their guidance.
Julia Glass
#11. We who write in English are fortunate to have the richest and most versatile language in the world. Respect it.
P.D. James
#12. I write entirely in English; Tagalog chauvinists chide me for this. I feel no guilt in doing so. But I am sad that I cannot write in my native Ilokano. History demanded this; if it isn't English I am using now, I would most probably be writing in Spanish like Rizal, or even German or Japanese.
F. Sionil Jose
#13. Writing in English was a major challenge. I didn't want other songwriters to write for me. I wanted to preserve the spirit of my songs in Spanish. I am the same Shakira in English as I am in Spanish.
Shakira
#14. None of my English teachers in college were praising me or telling me I was anything special. But then in creative writing classes they were. And I enjoyed those more anyway.
John Brandon
#15. If the English language had been properly organized ... then there would be a word which meant both 'he' and 'she', and I could write, 'If John or Mary comes heesh will want to play tennis', which would save a lot of trouble.
A.A. Milne
#16. All my early books are written as if I were Indian. In England, I had started writing as if I were English; now I write as if I were American. You take other people's backgrounds and characters; Keats called it negative capability.
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
#17. Maybe you could be a great writer - maybe even good enough to write a book or articles in a newspaper - but you might not know it until you write that English paper - that English class paper that's assigned to you.
Barack Obama
#18. The English probably do that wordplay kind of humour and whimsy better than anyone, and I've always felt that my writing goes more to that than what I did when I came to Australia.
Graeme Base
#19. When I started writing seriously in high school, English was the language I had at my disposal - my Spanish was domestic, colloquial, and not particularly literary or sophisticated.
Daniel Alarcon
#20. If you turned in a paper with writing on it, you were guaranteed a hook from Jake Epping of the LHS English Department, and if the writing was organized into actual paragraphs, you got at least a B-minus.
Stephen King
#21. Now I am writing this diary in English, which for me is not the language of intimacy or love, but an attempt at distance and sanity, a means of recalling normality.
Jasmina Tesanovic
#22. When writing dialogue, I hear it in both Russian and English, and try to find a language that combines the two.
David Bezmozgis
#23. Writing is hard. I learned how to work hard from wrestling, not English courses.
John Irving
#24. In one particular chapter in Ulysses, James Joyce imitates every major writing style that's been used by English and American writers over the last 700 years - starting with Beowulf and Chaucer and working his way up through the Renaissance, the Victorian era and on into the 20th century.
Frederick Lenz
#25. Our sense of what American English is has upended our relationship to articulateness, our approach to writing, and how (and whether) we impart it to the young, our interest in poetry, and our conception of what it is, and even our response to music and how we judge it.
John McWhorter
#26. It takes a thorough knowledge of the English language to effectively abuse it.
Charlene Vermeulen
#27. I'm usually writing in English, and then I'll get the hankering to change channels. And usually I'll do that when I want to try a whole new set of keys, like musical keys.
Juan Felipe Herrera
#28. in the writing of good English is indispensable to any learned man who expects to make his learning count for what it ought to count in the effect on his fellow men.
Theodore Roosevelt
#29. When it comes to the college essay, feel free to break some rules. Many still apply, of course: you need to watch your grammar and spell everything correctly. Sentence structure still matters. But the formula that got you A's in English can be a straitjacket when you're writing your college essay.
Cassie Nichols
#30. The first English settlers of North America knew they were making history. New Englanders in particular were so sure of it that they started writing their own accounts of themselves as soon as they got here.
Edmund Morgan
#31. I've taken every writing class I've had available. I took classes in high school, and I took English and writing classes in community college, but I dropped out of college. I also attended a local writing workshop two years ago.
Amanda Hocking
#32. We have a host of English teachers in the family. My mum is an English teacher, and so are my dad, my aunt and my uncle. I have grown up with family writing competitions, and I can't remember a birthday or Christmas present that didn't include books.
Alexandra Adornetto
#33. I'm older than my sister so I started writing first. I started writing at school. I was always top of my class in composition, essays, English Lit and all of that.
Joan Collins
#34. If you can describe clearly without a diagram the proper way of making this or that knot, then you are a master of the English language.
Hilaire Belloc
#35. I write in English first, and then I translate to Spanish. I've always felt more comfortable with the English side of things first.
Jon Secada
#36. English is like a poetic extension of myself. It holds my creativity and imagination in blissful and inspiring captivity. Though I consider myself not a prisoner, but rather a valued guest of honor.
Storm Princeholm
#37. I think I'm an American writer writing about Latin America, and I'm a Latin American writer who happens to write in English.
Daniel Alarcon
#38. Of the authors writing in English, I'd mention Shakespeare and Milton. But all this is terribly high-hat and makes me sound very po-faced, I'm afraid; however, I just happen to like these enormous, swinging, great creatures.
William Golding
#39. I don't procrastinate because I love the English language and the process of storytelling, and I'm always curious to see what will come to me next. If you procrastinate a lot, you might be one who loves having written, but doesn't so much like writing.
Dean Koontz
#40. I went to graduate school with zero expectation. I kind of backed into it. I wanted to go back to school because I felt gaps in my literary background. I studied mostly twentieth-century English literature in college, so I thought, 'Maybe I'll go back for my writing.'
Susan Minot
#41. The fact that I
am writing to you
in English
already falsifies what I
wanted to tell you.
My subject:
how to explain to you that I
don't belong to English
though I belong nowhere else
Gustavo Perez Firmat
#42. I cannot write in English, because of the treacherous spelling. When I am reading, I only hear it and am unable to remember what the written word looks like.
Albert Einstein
#43. I am an English major in school with an emphasis in creative writing. I think hearing Maya Angelou speak at school last year was one of the best moments Stanford, at least, intellectually, had to offer.
Fred Savage
#44. When I first came over to the States, I started writing, I think, as a way to help myself learn English. I would start stapling together little booklets for myself.
Marie Lu
#45. And so we went. And so it went. And, slowly, I began to learn: speaking in the same language does not equal communication, especially when there is a cultural divide.
Gerry Abbey
#46. I had a high school English teacher who made me really work at writing. And once, when I got an assignment back, she'd written: 'This is so good, Andrew. This should be published!' That made a big impression on me.
Andrew Clements
#47. I wasn't particularly good at school so always found essay writing hard, so I didn't do that well at English or history, even though I enjoyed it.
Ruby Bentall
#48. No one can write perfect English and keep it up through a stretch of ten chapters. It has never been done.
Mark Twain
#49. The New York Times is the worst in that hardly anybody can write English over there. Most of it reads like slight translations from the German.
Gore Vidal
#50. Brilliant. [Lasdun] seems to me certainly among the most gifted, vivid, and deft poets now writing in English, and far better than many who are more famous. His capacities are solidly established; his promise is nearly infinite.
Anthony Hecht
#51. Fantastic writing in English is kind of disreputable, but fantastic writing in translation is the summit.
Jonathan Lethem
#52. When I'm writing poetry, 99.9% of my writing begins in English. I spent most of my life in English, although I am bilingual.
Pat Mora
#53. door, something neither English nor American. "What do you think!" she exclaimed, coming in one morning as I was busy writing. "She's got a little iron grate on legs, and there's charcoal burning in it." "Who? Where?" I asked, coming out
William McFee
#54. Bad books on writing tell you to "WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW", a solemn and totally false adage that is the reason there exist so many mediocre novels about English professors contemplating adultery.
Joe Haldeman
#55. Writing about our gods in English is unnatural, but I believe language is just a carrier - a means to an end.
Amish Tripathi
#56. Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.
James Joyce
#57. I realized that my life of late had consisted of far too much dialogue and not enough exposition. I imagined an angry, bespectacled English teacher slashing his pen through the transcript of my life, wondering how someone could possibly say so much and think so little.
Catherine Lowell
#58. I pretty much spent my twenties as a musician and taking acting classes. I loved it. I was at UCLA getting As and Bs in English and creative writing, basically trying to stay out of the Army. All I really wanted to do was play music.
Robert David Hall
#59. Women writers should write a lot if they want to write. Take the English women, for example. What amazing workers.
Anton Chekhov
#60. Writing was something I have always been interested in. I've grown up in a household full of books, with both my parents English teachers and very booky.
Alexandra Adornetto
#62. George Bernard Shaw writes like a Pakistani who has learned English when he was twelve years old in order to become an accountant.
John Osborne
#63. The true bureaucrat is a man of really remarkable talents. He writes a kind of English that is unknown elsewhere in the world, and an almost infinite capacity for forming complicated and unworkable rules.
H.L. Mencken
#64. I was an English major in college, took a ton of creative writing courses, and was a newspaper reporter for 10 years.
Jennifer Weiner
#65. Those who sniff decay in every shift of sense or alteration of usage do the language no service. Too often for such people the notion of good English has less to do with expressing ideas clearly than with making words conform to some arbitrary pattern.
Bill Bryson
#66. Writing became an obsessive compulsive habit but I had almost no money so I thought about being an urban firefighter and having lots of free time in which to write or becoming an English teacher and thinking about books and writers on a daily basis. That swayed me.
David Guterson
#67. By its very looseness, by its way of evoking rather than defining, suggesting rather than saying, English is a magnificent vehicle for emotional poetry.
Max Beerbohm
#68. Verse comedy is interesting to me because of the challenge of writing in rhymed couplets, which is not a form that's usually amenable to English, yet to me it gives great possibility for comedy.
David Ives
#69. There even are places where English completely disappears. In America, they haven't used it for years! Why can't the English teach their children how to speak?
Alan Jay Lerner
#70. I had stopped writing plays set in villages because they were not relevant to my experiences and I knew my English classmates wouldn't appreciate them.
Sefi Atta
#71. My freshman English professor at Kent State University in 1984 told me I was a good writer, and she loved all the silly pictures I drew in my notebook. She said I should try writing children's books, and so I did.
Dav Pilkey
#72. I like English, and I like writing essays, and that kind of stuff.
Abigail Breslin
#73. They wanted to manipulate our songs - our fantastic, well-written songs with a soulful drive - beautiful English R&B - and turn them into pop rubbish. We might as well have been writing children's lullabies for all that did for me. We had to get away from that asshole.
Diane Rinella
#74. BLANK-VERSE, n. Unrhymed iambic pentameters - the most difficult kind of English verse to write acceptably; a kind, therefore, much affected by those who cannot acceptably write any kind.
Ambrose Bierce
#75. An English journalist called Michael Viney told me when I was 25, that I would write well if I cared a lot what I was writing about. That worked. I went home that day and wrote about parents not understanding their children as well as we teachers did, and it was published the very next week.
Maeve Binchy
#76. Assuming you can write clear English sentences, give up all worry about communication. If you want to communicate, use the telephone.
Richard Hugo
#77. He was keen to use English as well as French in daily conversation, writing letters in English and commissioning translations of French and Latin books.
Ian Mortimer
#78. That is one more reason why I write in English only right now. I prefer writing in the language I hear around me for the people by whom I am surrounded.
Yuriy Tarnawsky
#79. Nowadays people write English as if a rat were caught in the typewriter and they were trying to hit the keys which wouldn't disturb it.
Lillian Hellman
#80. I was also a good writer, by the way. My, you know, my English teacher and writing teacher loved my writing. You know, I wrote short stories and things like that. And they liked them very much.
Robert Barry
#81. What I'm interested in is how people are reading and writing English.
Erin McKean
#82. It is almost possible to measure a writer's skill by the dexterity with which he repeats, and yet avoids monotony.
George G. Williams
#83. I know grammar by ear only, not by note, not by the rules.
Mark Twain
#84. When I began my career as a flight attendant, I was a 21-year-old with a B.A. in English and stars in her eyes. I wanted to see every city in the world. I wanted to have adventures that, I hoped, would fuel a writing career some day.
Ann Hood
#85. In writing 'The Satanic Verses,' I think I was writing for the first time from the whole of myself. The English part, the Indian part. The part of me that loves London, and the part that longs for Bombay. And at my typewriter, alone, I could indulge this.
Salman Rushdie
#86. In an idealized world, we would all be able to do what our English teachers told us to do, which is to write beautiful prose where enthusiasm is conveyed by word choice and grammar.
Will Schwalbe
#87. The translators of the Bible were masters of an English style much fitter for that work than any we see in our present writings; the which is owing to the simplicity that runs through the whole.
Jonathan Swift
#88. The physical business of writing is unpleasant to me, but the psychic satisfaction of discharging bad ideas in worse English makes me forget it.
H.L. Mencken
#89. An English poet writes, I think, just for people who are interested in poetry. An American poet writes, and feels that everyone ought to appreciate this. Then he has a deep sense of grievance ...
Stephen Spender
#90. When I started writing comics, 'comics writer' was the most obscure job in the world! If I wanted to be a celebrity, I would have become a moody English screen actor.
Alan Moore
#91. One of the less vaunted joys of Austen is that she is one of the greatest writers in the English language who also happened to write witty romance novels. Women enjoy the love stories in Austen the same way men read Hemingway for the hunting and fishing: it provides guiltless pleasure.
Alessandra Stanley
#92. There's a lot of rage in my head. I like the friction that means there is nothing relaxing about writing a poem. I can't afford to relax in any area of life. You have to keep your senses awake to all the complacency that kicks in - particularly for the English.
Alice Oswald
#93. Simple English is no one's mother tongue. It has to be worked for.
Jacques Barzun
#94. Yes I am aware of the rules.
Yes I can totally see how I err the Queen.
Yes it is this very fact of slaying her language.
That gives my soul its melodies.
Malebo Sephodi
#95. But I am a storyteller, and that involves language, for me the English language, that wonderfully rich, complex, and ofttimes confusing tongue. When language is limited, I am thereby diminished, too.
Madeleine L'Engle
#96. As a writer, I like the list of "things to strive for" that Richard Yates kept above his typewriter:
genuine clarity
genuine feeling
the right word
the exact English sentence
the eloquent detail
the rigorous dramatization of story
Richard Yates
#98. [Doing a bilingual album] helped artistically because whenever I got bored of writing in English, I would write in Spanish. It's always cool when you have the choice.
Enrique Iglesias
#100. Never use the word, 'very.' It is the weakest word in the English language; doesn't mean anything. If you feel the urge of 'very' coming on, just write the word, 'damn,' in the place of 'very.' The editor will strike out the word, 'damn,' and you will have a good sentence.
William Allen White
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