Quotes About Letter Writing

#1. Letter writing is an excellent way of slowing down this lunatic helterskelter universe long enough to gather one's thoughts

Nick Bantock

#2. Letter writing is the only device combining solitude with good company.

George Gordon Byron

#3. Letter-writing on the part of a busy man or woman is the quintessence of generosity.

Agnes Repplier

#4. I like writing letters and receiving letters. It's a shame that we've lost the art of letter-writing and saving correspondence. I mourn that.

Elizabeth McGovern

#5. As far as I have had opportunity of judging, it appears to me that the usual style of letter-writing among women is faultless, except in three particulars." "And what are they?" "A general deficiency of subject, a total inattention to stops, and a very frequent ignorance of grammar.

Jane Austen

#6. NEXT LIFE. My embroidery studio on the main street of Bayeux will be just one part of my Institute of Slow Information. I will also teach letter writing, listening, miniature portrait painting, and the art of doing one thing at a time.

Vivian Swift

#7. Every body at all addicted to letter writing, without having much to say, which will include a large proportion of the female world at least ...

Jane Austen

#8. This at least should be a rule through the letter-writing world: that no angry letter be posted till four-and-twenty hours will have elapsed since it was written.

Anthony Trollope

#9. Letter writing was clearly important to Reagan. Even as president he kept dashing off letters to friends, pen pals, media people, statesmen, critics, and the kind of people who write to presidents never expecting a reply.

Russell Baker

#10. The Malays, like the Japanese, have a most rigid epistolary etiquette and set forms for letter writing. Letters must consist of six parts and are so highly elaborate that the scribes who indite them are almost looked upon as litterateurs.

Isabella Bird

#11. Letter writing can be seen as a gift because someone has taken his/her time to write and think and express love.

Soraya Diase Coffelt

#12. I have a Sharpie. I love Sharpies. You know what they say on them? Not for letter writing. That sucks. Now I have to communicate with my dad using numbers.

Mitch Hedberg

#13. A letter is never ill-timed; it never interrupts. Instead it waits for us to find the opportune minute, the quiet moment to savor the message. There is an element of timelessness about letter writing ...

Lois Wyse

#14. Letter writing is a habit that allows us to explore new trails all our lives. Each day is a fresh new adventure when we regularly send and receive letters.

Alexandra Stoddard

#15. If you are in doubt whether to write a letter or not, don't. And the advice applies to many doubts in life besides that of letter writing.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

#16. Life is too precious to be spent in this weaving and unweaving of false impressions, and it is better to live quietly under some degree of misrepresentation than to attempt to remove it by the uncertain process of letter-writing.

George Eliot

#17. We've been texting for weeks. Surely it's rather like in Jane Austen's day when they did letter-writing for months and months and then just, like, immediately got married?'
'Bridget. Sleeping with a twenty-nine-year-old off Twitter on the second date is not "rather like Jane Austen's day".

Helen Fielding

#18. Letter-writing I imagine is counted as 'work' from which you must abstain, and I scribble this letter simply from the self-satisfied notion that you will like to hear from me. You see, I have asked no questions, which are the torture-screws of correspondence. Hence you have nothing to answer.

George Eliot

#19. And I refuse to feel guilty about not letter-writing either. There are times when one can, times when one can't. In the times when an enormous amount of living is going on, one can't.

May Sarton

#20. Real letter-writing ... is founded on a need as old and as young as humanity itself, the need that one human being has of another.

Agnes Repplier

#21. I wish there were some photographic process by which one's mind could be struck off and transferred to that of the friend we wish to know it, without the medium of this confounded letter-writing!

Geraldine Jewsbury

#22. I have now attained the true art of letter-writing, which we are always told, is to express on paper exactly what one would say to the same person by word of mouth.

Jane Austen

#23. Henceforth letter-writing had to take the place of all the affection that could not be lived.

Thornton Wilder

#24. I'm the old-school, letter-writing romantic. I know it's out of style, and not a lot of women go for that these days, but that's what I go for.

Andre Holland

#25. You have a touch in letter writing that is beyond me. Something unexpected, like coming round a corner in a rose garden and finding it still daylight.

Virginia Woolf

#26. I consider it a good rule for letter-writing to leave unmentioned what the recipient already knows, and instead tell him something new.

Sigmund Freud

#27. Yes, letter writing is antiquated - though there remain a few renegades who still so treasure the luxury of contemplating their lives in letters that they would rather write than call.

Joan Frank

#28. Letter writing allows us to be alone yet connected. We need a certain amount of solitude in order to have true ideas to communicate. But few of us desire solitude all the time ... Yet solitude is what makes us contemplative and receptive, more aware of life's gifts and our own special blessings.

Alexandra Stoddard

#29. Letter-writing too often degenerates into a communicating of facts, and not of truths; of other men's deeds and not our thoughts.What are the convulsions of a planet, compared with the emotions of the soul? or the rising of a thousand suns, if that is not enlightened by a ray?

Henry David Thoreau

#30. Here in California, we passed a law against texting while driving. But there's no law preventing you from writing a letter while driving.

Craig Ferguson

#31. Schiller writes in a letter [to Goethe, 17 December 1795] of a 'poetic mood'. I think I know what he means, I think I am familiar with it myself. It is the mood of receptivity to nature and one in which one's thoughts seem as vivid as nature itself.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

#32. I folded Lizzie into small pieces. But the letters did not stop.

Sarah Schmidt

#33. There are lots of ways of answering a letter - and writing doesn't happen to be mine.

Edith Wharton

#34. I'm a little pencil in the hand of a writing God, who is sending a love letter to the world.

Mother Teresa

#35. If there's something that I really need to say that I can't say by speaking to someone, I usually write it in a song or a letter to someone.

Joshua Radin

#36. For authors, the shortest distance between two points is a straight line only if you are writing the letter I.

Michael A. Arnzen

#37. It's entirely possible to base an entire book on a long-forgotten letter.

Sara Sheridan

#38. Emma thought of Julian, sitting here, in this office. Year after year, from the time he was twelve and all scraped elbows and torn jeans. He would sit patiently with pen and ink, writing his letter to the Clave, petitioning them to let his sister Helen come home from Wrangel Island.

Cassandra Clare

#39. One professor in college told me flat out I wasn't good enough to enter the creative writing program. I saved that letter and promised myself I would send it back to her when my first book came out.

Ellen Potter

#40. I think one of the dullest things in the world is a letter filled with apologies for not writing sooner.

Dorothy Wordsworth

#41. To this day George Sr. is the soft touch and I'm the enforcer. I'm the one who writes them a letter and says 'Shape up!' He writes, 'You're marvelous.'

Barbara Bush

#42. Put a chair against the door, and turn the lights down low Write a letter to yourself, no one will ever know

Jann Arden

#43. Research material can turn up anywhere - in a dusty old letter in an archive, a journal or some old photographs you find in a charity shop.

Sara Sheridan

#44. My thought for today: Writing a letter to a friend today has helped clear a lot in my mind. It has taught me not to go on the defensive, instead to poke two fingers up to my critics who have no idea what restrictions there are when it comes to writing about a cold case".

Monica Weller

#45. Write every day. Even if it's only a letter.

Julia Bell

#46. One single letter cures the blank page.

Stephanie Ayers

#47. A letter is always better than a phone call. People write things in letters they would never say in person. They permit themselves to write down feelings and observations using emotional syntax far more intimate and powerful than speech will allow.

Alice Steinbach

#48. It takes two to write a letter as much as it takes two to make a quarrel.

Elizabeth Drew

#49. In my experience, I've noticed that waiting on tables is one of two things that almost everyone thinks they can do. The other is writing. Perhaps it's no accident that there is only one letter of difference between waiter and writer.

Debra Ginsberg

#50. I have just received your letter, and shall devote this whole morning to answering it, as I foresee that a little writing will not comprise what I have to tell you.

Jane Austen

#51. O why do I ever let anyone read what I write! Every time I have to go through a breakfast with a letter of criticism I swear I will write for my own praise or blame in future. It is a misery.

Virginia Woolf

#52. Writing this letter is like putting a note in a bottle
And hoping
It will reach Japan.

Alice Munro

#53. Talk of solitude (...). It is the last resort of the civilised: our souls are so creased and soured in meaning we can only unfold them when we are alone. (5/4/1927 - From a Letter to Vita Sackville-West)

Virginia Woolf

#54. So research is a terribly imperfect science, and you learn an awful lot more after you've published a book, because people keep writing to you and saying, 'Oh, gosh, I was related to such and such a character and I have a letter in my possession.'

Simon Winchester

#55. In a moment, when I'm ready, I will turn off this computer and that will be it. This letter will be finished. A part of me doesn't want to stop writing to you, but I need to. For both of us.

Lucy Christopher

#56. The walls are covered -crammed- with writing. No. Not writing. They are covered with a single four-letter word that has been inscribed over and over, on every available surface.
Love.

Lauren Oliver

#57. A man who publishes his letters becomes a nudist - nothing shields him from the world's gaze except his bare skin. A writer, writing away, can always fix things up to make himself more presentable, but a man who has written a letter is stuck with it for all time.

E.B. White

#58. Alongside my 'no email' policy, I resolve to make better use of the wonderful Royal Mail, and send letters and postcards to people. There is a huge pleasure in writing a letter, putting it in an envelope and sticking the stamp on it. And huge pleasure in receiving real letters, too.

Tom Hodgkinson

#59. To write is human, to receive a letter: Devine!

Susan Lendroth

#60. Each letter has a shape, she told them, one shape in the world and no other, and it is your responsibility to make it perfect.

Kim Edwards

#61. I don't have time to write you a short letter, so I'm writing you a long one instead.

Mark Twain

#62. Do not address your readers as though they were gathered together in a stadium. When people read your copy, they are alone. Pretend you are writing to each of them a letter on behalf of your client.

David Ogilvy

#63. I spent every night until four in the morning on my dissertation, until I came to the point when I could not write another word, not even the next letter. I went to bed. Eight o'clock the next morning I was up writing again.

Abraham Pais

#64. The letter of application ... should be a masterpiece of fiction, papering over all the cracks. Get it properly typed on decent writing paper. Never let it run over the page, people get bored with reading.

Jilly Cooper

#65. I do apologize for writing by hand - and so badly. I shall soon be like Helen Thomas, notoriously illegible. In her last letter only two words stood out plain: 'Blood pressure.' Subsequent research demonstrated that what she had actually written was 'Beloved friends.

Sylvia Townsend Warner

#66. In every letter, in every line, she saw him. He hadn't changed - he'd only grown into the man he'd meant to be.

Diana Peterfreund

#67. I wasn't writing home. I wasn't writing a death letter, either. I was writing a death journal, a piece of fiction meant for my family and my fiancee, Sara.

Clint Van Winkle

#68. Please forgive the long letter; I didn't have time to write a short one.

Blaise Pascal

#69. Harper Collins gave me a letter of intent saying that they want me to pen down my autobiography. When I was recollecting the incidents of my life for that, I selected only those incidents which were turning points in my life. I staged it instead of writing it.

Anupam Kher

#70. The only quality needed for an MP is the ability to write a good letter.

Harold Macmillan

#71. Good traders trade. Good letter writers write letters.

Ed Seykota

#72. A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity.
[Letter to Max Brod, July 5, 1922]

Franz Kafka

#73. Be sure not to discuss your hero's state of mind. Make it clear from his actions.
(Letter to Alexander Chekhov, May 10, 1886)

Anton Chekhov

#74. A story is a letter that the author writes to himself, to tell himself things that he would be unable to discover otherwise.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

#75. Writing is, in the end, that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger.

Pico Iyer

#76. This letter gives me a tongue; and were I not allowed to write, I should be dumb.
[Lat., Praebet mihi littera linguam:
Et, si non liceat scribere, mutus ero.]

Ovid

#77. Where was I? in remarking that me is the envelopes and not nearly so much so, the often foolish letters inside.

Edward Gorey

#78. My writing partner, Nicki, and I became obsessed with a monologist who performs unscripted shows equipped with nothing more than scribbled bullet points and a glass of water. We wrote him a fan letter and found ourselves sharing lunch and eventually a friendship.

Emma McLaughlin

#79. I'll write to you. A super-long letter, like in an old-fashioned novel

Haruki Murakami

#80. The proper definition of a man is an animal that writes letters.

Lewis Carroll

#81. You don't really know a woman until she writes you a letter.

Ada Leverson

#82. Oh, also, if Mr. Ortega catches me writing you this letter, I am committed to shoving it in my mouth and swallowing. I hope I can count on the same commitment from you.

Kasie West

#83. And no one ever told me about the laziness of grief. Except at my job
where the machine seems to run on much as usual
I loath the slightest effort. Not only writing but even reading a letter is too much.

C.S. Lewis

#84. The calligraphic letter is not entirely a letter,
but something that sits between writing and music

Abdelkebir Khatibi

#85. If I could only write, I'd write a nasty letter to the mayor, if he could only read.

Walt Kelly

#86. Everyone who is human has something to express. Try not expressing yourself for twenty-four hours and see what happens. You will nearly burst. You will want to write a long letter, or draw a picture, or sing, or make a dress or a garden.

Brenda Ueland

#87. If I had more time I would write a shorter letter.

Blaise Pascal

#88. And if I had not a letter to write myself, I might sit by you and admire the evenness of your writing, as another young lady once did. But I have an aunt too, who must not be longer neglected.

Jane Austen

#89. I do not pretend to write much of a letter. You know under what circumstances I am writing.

Joshua Chamberlain

#90. Here I am, sitting at a little oak table where in old times possibly some fair lady sat to pen, with much thought and many blushes, her ill-spelt love-letter, and writing in my diary in shorthand all that has happened since I closed it last.

Bram Stoker

#91. To make a deliberate falsification for personal gain is the last, worst depth to which either scholar or artist can descend in work or life.
(Letter to Muriel St. Clare Byrne, 8 September 1935)

Dorothy L. Sayers

#92. Never so long as you live, write a letter to a man - no matter who he is - that you would be ashamed to see in a newspaper above your signature.

Emily Post

#93. Never write a letter and never destroy one.

Cardinal Richelieu

#94. I'd rather sit down and write a letter than call someone up. I hate the telephone.

Henry Miller

#95. I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.
(Letter 16, 1657)

Blaise Pascal

#96. This is a stamina game, so don't despair if you run down a blind alley and have to start over, or if you get another rejection letter. Every successful writer has gone through that, but they kept writing and didn't quit until they made it happen.

Tim Maleeny

#97. It has long been a theory of mine and I am known, if I do say so, for my long theories that authors, generally speaking, are rotten letter writers.

Cleveland Amory

#98. Every time I write these words they become a taboo,
Making sure my punctuation curve, every letter here's true,
Living my life in the margin, and that metaphor was proof.

Kendrick Lamar

#99. ...but for the Girl Writing A Letter these things don't matter, she's got a beer in her free hand, she's on the road, she's real and she's in love.

William Carpenter

#100. With respect to the distribution of your time the following is what I should approve. from 8. to 10 o'clock practise music. from 10. to 1. dance one day & draw another. from 1. to 2. draw on the day you dance, and write a letter next day. from 3. to 4. read French. from 4. to 5. exercise ...

Thomas Jefferson