Quotes About The Invention Of Writing

#1. Following the invention of writing, the special form of heightened language, characteristic of the oral tradition and a collective society, gave way to private writing. Records and messages displaced the collective memory. Poetry was written and detached from the collective festival.

Harold Innis

#2. The Wright Brothers created the single greatest cultural force since the invention of writing. The airplane became the first World Wide Web, bringing people, languages, ideas, and values together.

Bill Gates

#3. The digital revolution is far more significant than the invention of writing or even of printing.

Douglas Engelbart

#4. Discovery's friend is creativity

Phillip Gary Smith

#5. Writing, the art of communicating thoughts to the mind through the eye, is the great invention of the world ... enabling us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn, at all distances of time and space.

Abraham Lincoln

#6. Memory is the friend of wit, but the treacherous ally of invention; there are many books that owe their success to two things; good memory of those who write them, and the bad memory of those who read them

Charles Caleb Colton

#7. Without writing, the literate mind would not and could not think as it does, not only when engaged in writing but normally even when it is composing its thoughts in oral form. More than any other single invention writing has transformed human consciousness.

Walter J. Ong

#8. Invention hovers always a little above the rules.

Mary Oliver

#9. Collaborative workshops and writers' peer groups hadn't been invented when I was young. They're a wonderful invention. They put the writer into a community of people all working at the same art, the kind of group musicians and painters and dancers have always had.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#10. Writing is more about discovery than invention.

Diane Setterfield

#11. Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both truth and art.

Vladimir Nabokov

#12. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos.

Mary Shelley

#13. We can never safely exceed the actual facts in our narratives. Of pure invention, such as some suppose, there is no instance. To write a true work of fiction even is only to take leisure and liberty to describe some things more exactly as they are.

Henry David Thoreau

#14. There is the happiness which comes from creative effort. The joy of dreaming, creating, building, whether in painting a picture, writing an epic, singing a song, composing a symphony, devising new invention, creating a vast industry.

Henry Miller

#15. Invention is almost the only literary labour which blindness cannot obstruct.

Samuel Johnson

#16. While what I write is always largely consistent with the records that remain I freely admit that where historical fact proves a barrier to invention, I simply move a detail a little one way or another.

Sara Sheridan

#17. I think it's really boring, from the point of view of the novelist, to write about yourself. Tedious. But that's very hard to explain to people who really don't believe in the possibility of invention.

Peter Carey

#18. We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.

Kurt Vonnegut

#19. Three words that still have meaning, that I think we can apply to all professional writing, are discovery, originality, invention.The professional writer discovers some aspect of the world and invents out of the speech of his time some particularly apt and original way of putting it down on paper.

John Dos Passos

#20. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. -Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer and philosopher (1803-1882)

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#21. Recollection, I have found, is usually about half invention ...

Wallace Stegner

#22. But I hate things all fiction ... there should always be some foundation of fact for the most airy fabric - and pure invention is but the talent of a liar.

Lord Byron

#23. What's interesting about writing is the invention, the creative thing. Writing about myself is a yawn.

Toni Morrison

#24. Not until Freud's writings became popular did descriptions of infants center on relationships with their mothers. The idea that children have feelings of any lasting importance for their development is a very recent invention (or insight if you wish).

Sandra Scarr

#25. The sign is determined at the moment I use it and for the object of which it must form a part. For this reason I cannot determine in advance signs which never change, and which would be like writing: that would paralyze the freedom of my invention.

Henri Matisse

#26. Invention comes about when we let it, when we don't mind feeling stupid as we do it - it feels like what children do, it is what children do - when we clear a place for it, become quiet, and wait.

Alice Mattison

#27. Take the whole range of imaginative literature, and we are all wholesale borrowers. In every matter that relates to invention, to use, or beauty or form, we are borrowers.

Wendell Phillips

#28. An exquisite invention this, Worthy of Love's most honeyed kiss,
This art of writing billet-doux
In buds, and odors, and bright hues! In saying all one feels and thinks In clever daffodils and pinks; In puns of tulips; and in phrases, Charming for their truth, of daisies.

Leigh Hunt

#29. The writing of fiction is a dance between truth and invention

Barbara Kingsolver

#30. The real writer is one who really writes. Talent is an invention like phlogiston after the fact of fire. Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved.

Marge Piercy

#31. You don't realize what a strain it is on the nerves to write or think-of-writing all day long, and to sleep full of nervous dreams, and to wake up not knowing who one is: this all stems from anxiety about finishing the book, about time 'growing short', etc., and the perpetual strain of invention.

Jack Kerouac

#32. 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

#33. Usually, I work every day, seven days a week. When I go three days without writing, my body aches with anxiety; my mood is irritable. My night dreams grow wild with unconscious invention.

Pete Hamill

#34. The process of self-invention is never-ending; writer, like children, are always growing into their gifts. (Susan Larson in a "Times-Picayune" book review.

Susan Larson

#35. Writing is the great invention of the world.

Abraham Lincoln

#36. I didn't study writing in school, I studied biology as an undergraduate and graduate student. So I think that I write fiction in the scientific way. I love invention, obviously; I love creation of character. But I do feel very rooted in the real world, even in the way that I create characters.

Barbara Kingsolver