Quotes About Proper Writing

#1. Proper writing ink comes in a bottle, can be swirled like brandy in a glass, and smells like apple blossom after rain.

Fennel Hudson

#2. It's no good looking to writers for definitions of what constitutes proper writing, because you will drive yourself crazy, and you won't find anything that you can build into a coherent whole.

Nick Hornby

#3. Text talk? How can the art of writing, once performed by monastic scribes, have degenerated into little more than creative candyfloss?

Fennel Hudson

#4. You see, calling things by their proper names is the beginning of wisdom. That's a Chinese proverb and they invented writing. The wisdom, in case you're wondering, is that when you get names right, you narrow the gap between you and the thing.

Zia Haider Rahman

#5. The great art in writing advertisements is the finding out of a proper method to catch the reader's eye; without which, a good thing may pass over unobserved, or lost among commissions of bankrupt.

Joseph Addison

#6. [Y]ou cannot mention everything in its proper place, you must choose, between the things not worth mentioning and those and those even less so.

Samuel Beckett

#7. Books in the YA genre, in particular, should use proper grammar because they're more of an example to young people than adults books are.

Laura Kreitzer

#8. Unlike F. Scott Fitzgerald and Tom Wolfe, I don't like proper dress while working. I like writing in pajama-like clothing, which eases and relaxes me and allows me to connect with the decidedly improper.

Chang-rae Lee

#9. The whole idea is that the combination of tight activity and slack activity allows me to be both productive and creative at the same time. In the four years that I am actually working in a proper job, I am earning money and I'm also writing with a lot of discipline on the side.

Karan Bajaj

#10. I was super brainy and a proper geek at school, but there would always be a boy. But that sort of obsession did turn me into a songwriter. My writing has always come from that feeling of infatuation.

Ellie Goulding

#11. I shall write a book some day about the appropriateness of names. Geoffrey Chaucer has a ribald ring, as is proper and correct, and Alexander Pope was inevitably Alexander Pope. Colley Cibber was a silly little man without much elegance and Shelley was very Percy and very Bysshe.

James Joyce

#12. In moments of exhaustion, I think for some reason of writing an autobiography
proper work for tired artists
but every autobiographer must secretly believe he has triumphed in life. Maybe, incidentally, this accounts for the paucity of women's autobiographies
they know better.

Arthur Miller

#13. The proper ending for any story about people it seems to me, since life is now a polymer in which the Earth is wrapped so tightly, should be the same abbreviation, which I now write large because I feel like it, which is this one:
ETC.

Kurt Vonnegut

#14. I have concluded that Literature is no proper pursuit for a gentleman and that Writing ought never to be consider'd but as an elegant Accomplishment to be indulg'd in with infrequency and Discrimination.

H.P. Lovecraft

#15. Once you are a proper, serious law-maker, you can't break the laws you're writing.

Louise Mensch

#16. It was not, of course, a proper thing to do. But then I have never pretended, nor will ever pretend, that Emily was a proper child. Books are not written about proper children. They would be so dull nobody would read them.

L.M. Montgomery

#17. As they say, it's possible to kill and to revive someone using a proper speech. I agree with the statement because I know for sure it is true.

Sahara Sanders

#18. Personally, I think so-called "common language" is more interesting and apropos than "proper English"; it's passionate and powerful in ways that "wherefore art thou ass and thy elbow" just isn't.

J.R. Ward

#19. Were I to write what I know, the book would be too sensational to print, but were I to write what I think proper, it would be too dull to read.

Ina Coolbrith

#20. But my way of writing is rather to think aloud, and follow my own humours, than much to consider who is listening to me; and, if I stop to consider what is proper to be said to this or that person, I shall soon come to doubt whether any part at all is proper.

Thomas De Quincey

#21. I can play the guitar and the keys and the drums. I'm not brilliant at any of them. I can sing too. Some of my friends are proper musicians but I'm a song-writer. I write songs.

Jim Sturgess

#22. "Good" people are those who don't hold in the thoughts, but find proper outlets like writing, painting, music, etc.

Matthew Carter

#23. But I account the use that a man should seek of the publishing of his own writings before his death, to be but an untimely anticipation of that which is proper to follow a man, and not to go along with him.

Francis Bacon

#24. When we've decided to tell the truth in a story, we should tell good, strong versions of it, proper versions that kids can do something with.

Celine Kiernan

#25. Very often we write down a sentence too early, then another too late; what we have to do is write it down at the proper time, otherwise it's lost.

Thomas Bernhard

#26. I want to write a score for a film. It can be a proper film, maybe for a film kind of like ... I saw that movie 'Drive', or a bit of a 'Blade Runner' vibe. A little bit sci-fi, but I don't know. I've just always wanted to write a score for a film.

Flume

#27. I really like the Observer. I think I'd love to have a column with a broad reach that would enable me to do some proper reporting, but keep it on sort of a humorous level. I've always had a very happy experience writing for them.

Toby Young

#28. 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

#29. There are few cases in which mere popularity should be considered a proper test of merit; but the case of song-writing is, I think, one of the few.

Edgar Allan Poe

#30. Since I met Starsmith, my producer, I really feel like I'm making music because we write it together and produce it together. I've got a proper involvement in the end product as opposed to just writing a song and finding someone else to produce it.

Ellie Goulding

#31. To write anything tolerable, the mind must be in a natural, proper disposition; provocatives, in that case, as well as in another,will only produce miserable, abortive performances.

Lord Chesterfield

#32. If you're still wondering about details - how am I going to get these two to meet, or whatever - when you're writing, you can't pay proper attention to the sentences themselves.

John Irving

#33. They fuck you up, your mum and dad', and if you're planning on writing that's probably a good thing. But if you are planning on writing and they haven't fucked you up, well, you've got nothing to go on, so then they've fucked you up good and proper.

Alan Bennett

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

Lewis Carroll

#35. Each sentence should have proper meaning, details should not be needlessly repeated, and every sentence should add to the entertainment value in one way or another.

A.J. Flowers

#36. Starting a new chapter is much like composing the perfect photograph. You must ensure the proper components are there. You may throw out the extra, but with out the key elements the story goes untold.

Faith Tilley Johnson

#37. You never forget where you were when you write a song; it's a very proper memory, so I knew exactly where I was and what I was doing for each track. It was like going into a time machine.

Dido Armstrong