Quotes About Formal Writing

#1. I was a 'learn by doing' writer - I never took any formal writing classes. So it took a long time to figure things out and find my voice.

Sara Zarr

#2. One, something emotional has to be at stake. There has to be something important for me that I'm writing about. And then two, I have to have a formal idea. Something has to be being worked out in poetry.

Edward Hirsch

#3. The intricacy of plotting a thriller is akin to writing formal poetry.

Julianna Baggott

#4. Aren't faeries supposed to be, like, really tiny? With wings and a wand and faerie dust?"

"I'm not Tinker Bell!

Rachel Morgan

#5. I can't imagine a mental life, a spiritual existence, not inextricably bound up with language of a formal, mediated nature. Telling stories, choosing an appropriate language with which to tell the story: This seems to me quintessentially human, one of the great adventures of our species.

Joyce Carol Oates

#6. Don't do anything to anyone, and people will not make trouble for you.

Stephen Lawrence

#7. I began observing, making paintings of my surroundings, taking a vow of silence, listening, composing music, writing, and making time for formal education. Then I started telling stories.

John Francis

#8. Try - Takes the infinitive: "try to mend it," not "try and mend it." Students of the language will argue that 'try and' has won through and become idiom. Indeed it has, and it is relaxed and acceptable. But 'try to' is precise, and when you are writing formal prose, try and write 'try to.

William Strunk Jr.

#9. As we get older the muscle structure tends to atrophy at a faster and faster rate. The ideal remedy for this is bodybuilding.

Arnold Schwarzenegger

#10. People leave managers, not companies

Marcus Buckingham

#11. I never considered I might make a career out of writing as I was going to school, so when I did turn my attentions that way, I was very ill prepared, having only what I read as a guide, and no formal training whatsoever. I credit that very ignorance with a great deal of my success.

Kim Harrison

#12. He wouldn't write a letter because he couldn't without beginning it 'Dear Sylvia' and ending it 'Yours sincerely' or 'truly' or 'affectionately.' He's that sort of precise imbecile. I tell you he's so formal he can't do without all the conventions there are and so truthful he can't use half of them.

Ford Madox Ford

#13. Look at me being all optimistic and shit.
Remy would be so proud.

Jay Crownover

#14. I was an avid reader, but never thought seriously about writing a novel until I was in my thirties. I took no formal fiction-writing courses and never thought about these categories when I wrote my first novel.

M.J. Rose

#15. I am conscious of trying to stretch the boundaries of non-fiction writing. It's always surprised me how little attention many non-fiction writers pay to the formal aspects of their work.

Alain De Botton

#16. Blogging is to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive. It is, in many ways, writing out loud.

Andrew Sullivan

#17. What guarantees - or at least semi-guarantees - good ballets is good choreographers, and they are thin on the ground.

Robert Gottlieb

#18. You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. Things that we had postponed for too long, that were long-term, are now immediate and must be dealt with. [A] crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before.

Ryan Holiday

#19. There's something, I think, that gets lost when we write something - something gets lost in the translation. So I speak everything out, and it's more important how it sounds. And applying that to more formal aspects of writing.

James Frey

#20. When you're looking for a needle in a haystack, don't afraid to burn the haystack to save yourself from spending half your life picking through strands of straw.

A.J. Darkholme

#21. I've never taken any classes or had formal training in writing novels. At its most basic, I learned how to structure a novel.

Dennis Green

#22. The church was designed to proclaim God's love and forgiveness to all people and declare that Jesus Christ came to eradicate sin in people's hearts.

Billy Graham

#23. Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.

Doris Lessing

#24. I now knew a method of speaking and writing that - by means of a refined vocabulary, stately and thoughtful pacing, a determined arrangement of arguments, and a formal orderliness that wasn't supposed to fail - sought to annihilate the interlocutor to the point where he lost the will to object.

Elena Ferrante

#25. No formal course in fiction-writing can equal a close and observant perusal of the stories of Edgar Allan Poe or Ambrose Bierce.

H.P. Lovecraft

#26. Every new idea is impossibility until it is born.

Ron Brown

#27. Channing does a very good impersonation of men at female strip joints.

Channing Tatum

#28. I entered the literary world, really, from outside. My entire background has been in sciences; I was a biology major in college, then went to medical school. I've never had any formal training in writing.

Khaled Hosseini

#29. An intense temperament has convinced me to teach not only from books but from what I have learned from experience. So I try to impress upon young doctors and graduate students that tumultuousness, if coupled to discipline and a cool mind, is not such a bad sort of thing.

Kay Redfield Jamison

#30. I began to write what I called 'rhythms' ie unrhymed pieces with no formal metrical scheme where the rhythm was created by a kind if inner chant..Later I was told I was writing 'free verse' or Vers libre.

Richard Aldington

#31. I started writing poetry in high school because I wanted desperately to write, but somehow, writing stories didn't appeal to me, and I loved the flow and the feel and sense of poetry, especially that of what one might call formal verse.

L.E. Modesitt Jr.

#32. I haven't any formal schedule, but I love to write in the morning, before breakfast. Sometimes the writing goes so smoothly that I don't take a break for many hours - and consequently have breakfast at two or three in the afternoon on good days.

Joyce Carol Oates

#33. Legislative enactments proceed from men carrying their views a long time back; while judicial decisions are made off hand.

Aristotle.

#34. Primo Levi's - I mean, he's a very different kind of writer. He's a much more formal writer. He's a much more -almost detached. I mean, I wouldn't really say that he's detached ultimately. But he does write as a scientist, and so he describes things very - in great detail, very carefully.

Ann Goldstein