Top 100 The Written Quotes
#1. There is only one expert who is qualified to examine the souls and the life of a people and make a valuable report - the native novelist ... And when a thousand able novels have been written, there you have the soul of the people; and not anywhere else can these be had.
Mark Twain
#2. You hear mothers say all the time that they would die for their children, but my mom never said shit like that. She didn't have to. When it came to my brother, it was written across her face in 112-point Tupac Gothic.
Junot Diaz
#3. I have read only the first 'Harry Potter' book. I thought it excellent, perhaps the best thing written for older children since The Hobbit. I wish the books had been around when my kids were the right age for them.
Gene Wolfe
#4. Queen Latifah was the first time I had ever professionally written with another woman of any color.
Robin Thede
#5. The fall of the Berlin Wall did more for the progress of freedom than all of the books written by myself or Friedrich Hayek or others.
Milton Friedman
#6. I've had offers to sign a record deal, but the people I've talked to have wanted to package me and have me meet with songwriters who've written stuff for Whitney Houston, that sort of thing. That's not at all my style.
Lukas Haas
#7. It is very annoying - things have been written by people who didn't know me at all or Princess Diana. They were written by people who never knew me or met me. It did make me angry. I just stopped reading the papers.
Hasnat Khan
#8. If only I were articulate to paint in the frail medium of words what I see and know and possess incorporated in my consciousness of the mighty driftage of the races in the times before our present written history began!
Jack London
#9. 'Killing Pablo' to me - as much as I love 'The Grey's script - 'Killing Pablo' to me is the best thing I've ever written.
Joe Carnahan
#10. It is often written that, during his presidency, the General was not a politician. Of course, he was a great politician in large part because he was not perceived as a politician. It
John Ripin Miller
#11. My husband is old-fashioned and kind, he does the greatest Sinatra impression, and I'd never have written anything if he hadn't read all those bedtime stories and unloaded the dishwasher while I slaved over chapters.
Allison Pearson
#12. The Bible was not written for entertainment purposes, so it's a real hodgepodge and a compendium of all kinds of stuff.
Robert Crumb
#13. Ultimately you're trying to reach across and find some other person, some other human warmth. But it is, especially in written poetry, it is inscribed in a text and the text can't do that work by itself and you as a poet can only do your best.
Edward Hirsch
#14. The first step to finding a God-written love story is handing the pen to the true Author of romance.
Leslie Ludy
#15. I am no fan of books. And chances are, if you're reading this, you and I share a healthy skepticism about the printed word. Well, I want you to know that this is the first book I've ever written, and I hope it's the first book you've ever read. Don't make a habit of it.
Stephen Colbert
#16. The story of Genesis could only be a poorly written misconception that put needless blame on women. Estella
Ira Smith
#17. Most books reviews aren't very well-written. They tend to be more about the reviewer than the book.
Tibor Fischer
#18. Once you've written a book, it belongs to everyone, and they are all allowed to have opinions, and the spectrum of opinions is the spectrum of humanity.
Neil Gaiman
#19. I verily believe that the kingdom of God advances more on spoken words than it does on essays written and read; on words, that is, in which the present feeling and thought of the teaching mind break into natural and forceful expression.
Richard Salter Storrs
#20. The nations which have received and in any way dealt fairly and mercifully with the Jew have prospered, and the nations that have tortured and oppressed him have written out their own curse.
Olive Schreiner
#21. It's very common for people to recommend something to me because they're going on what I've already written, when, what really is the case, is that you want to write about something you haven't written about, in ways that you haven't done before.
Tom Stoppard
#22. The service in L.A. is the best. You don't get sarcastic, surly, fed-up waiters and waitresses like you do in England. They're good at their job and they're there for the customer. The only depressing thing is a lot of them have written more screenplays than me.
Ricky Gervais
#23. What I have written is but a fleeting intimation of the outside of what one man sees and may tell about the path he walks. No one shares the secret of a life; no one enters into the heart of the mystery.
Howard Thurman
#24. After 'Nikki' and 'Steve Harvey,' I had written on a show called 'The Oblongs,' which was pretty well respected and had a lot of 'Simpsons' writers on it. So I was a TV writer with an interesting voice at that moment.
Jill Soloway
#26. Sometimes I'll read a book and feel it was written just for me. Then I'll flip the book over to look at the cover to see who wrote it, only to discover that it feels like it was written for me because it was written by me.
Jarod Kintz
#27. Only those works which are well-written will pass to posterity: the amount of knowledge, the uniqueness of the facts, even the novelty of the discoveries are no guarantees of immortality ... These things are exterior to a man but style is the man himself.
Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte De Buffon
#28. The Church was spread throughout the entire Roman Empire before a single book of the New Testament was written.
Fulton J. Sheen
#29. I know that if I have been working on one paragraph and I have written it three times, it goes in the bin. Unless it comes straight out, it is wrong, it is awkward, it does not fit.
Robert Rankin
#30. Instead of noting down things I'm unlikely to forget, I will write a poem. Even if I have never written one before and even if I never do so again, I will at least know that I once had the courage to put my feelings into words.
Paulo Coelho
#31. Whatever was written in the media was beyond me. The only thing I could control was getting fit.
Andrew Flintoff
#32. I feel that a book is never written by the writer alone
it's written by him and everyone around him be it directly or indirectly
Subhasis Das
#33. Both dreams and myths are important communications from ourselves to ourselves. If we do not understand the language in which they are written, we miss a great deal of what we know and tell ourselves in those hours when we are not busy manipulating the outside world.
Erich Fromm
#34. It is the sincerest thing I have written, caught by the drama of a soul struggling in the contrary toils of love and religion - death brought them into harmony.
Laurence Housman
#35. Truth is often better seized and louder in the silence of the written word.
Ina Catrinescu
#36. I know that books I have written will still resonate in 50 years - particularly 'My Sister's Keeper.' It has sold three million copies in the States alone. I strongly feel that, as a novelist, you have a platform and the ability to change people's minds.
Jodi Picoult
#37. I'd written songs with lots of people, from one spectrum to the other.
Billy Sherwood
#38. Some Christians see the biblical teaching on homosexuality as reflecting the culture and times in which the Bible was written and not reflecting God's eternal perspective on homosexual people. Others believe these scriptures represent God's timeless will for how human beings practice intimacy.
Adam Hamilton
#39. I do not know but thoughts written down thus in a journal might be printed in the same form with greater advantage than if the related ones were brought together into separate essays.
Henry David Thoreau
#40. Give me six lines written by the most honorable person alive, and I shall find enough in them to condemn them to the gallows.
Cardinal Richelieu
#41. Writing is not about ideas, it is about the expression of ideas - a written expression.
Paul Raymond Martin
#42. the fundamentally paradoxical ways that our very subjectivities are constituted: as cultural scripts, as texts written before us as us. It is confusing being a novel, a piece of fiction that considers itself a simple fact.
Whitley Strieber
#43. Possibly the strangest book ever made, the 'Codex Seraphinianus' is an encyclopedia of an imaginary world, with illegible calligraphy - it is written in an alphabet no one can understand - and surreal drawings of odd beasts and machines.
Russell Smith
#44. Because I am in love with you. Because I cannot be around you for fear you will finally see what is written across my heart. Because the pain of you is one I cannot bear
Kiersten White
#45. Low comedies are written for the drawing-room, the kitchen and the stable, and if you cut out the kitchen and the stable the drawing-room can't support the play by itself.
Mark Twain
#46. My family, the support of my friends, the amount of people that have written and come up to me on the street and said, 'Thank you for representing us,' and Adam Lambert, and Lady Gaga, that's been amazing.
Johnny Weir
#47. I've left the Church - for many reasons that I've written about publicly - but it's still a large part of my identity, and I still have my faith, if not my Church.
Julianna Baggott
#48. Curiouser and curiouser, he says. I smile at the reference. Carroll was totally a witch. The secrets of our world are written into that book.
Danielle Ellison
#49. In an ancient and dead language, any recognition of living nature attracts us. These are such sentences as were written while grass grew and water ran. It is no small recommendation when a book will stand the test of mere unobstructed sunshine and daylight.
Henry David Thoreau
#50. The anxiety around such work [vulnerably written ethnographies] is that it will prove to be beyond criticism, that it will be undiscussable.
Ruth Behar
#51. The screenplay is so well-written in a scruffy, fanzine way that you want to rub noses in it - the noses of those zombie writers who take 'screenwriting' classes that teach them the formulas for 'hit films.'
Roger Ebert
#52. I haven't written in a week. It's like holding your breath under water. You feel an awful constriction and then the instinct to propel yourself.
D.A. Botta
#53. I think about how no one in the car would come out and say it. We all know about these laws, we live here, but we don't talk about them. This is the first time I've ever seen them written down.
Kathryn Stockett
#54. Oftentimes what happens is that the writer understands one character, but they don't understand the other one, and the other one ends up not being written as well.
Jennifer Beals
#55. Few people have written significant books about San Francisco. Robert Duncan was, in my opinion, often in the clouds. If he walked the streets a lot he didn't write about as such.
Stephen Vincent Benet
#56. Once we visit death, once we see the beauty waiting for us, our fear's gone. Used to be never a book written, of our experience with dying. Now there are shelves, waiting to be read. The beliefs, the experiences of so many others, now.
Richard Bach
#57. Travel for me is all about transformation, and I'm fascinated by those people who really do come back from a trip unrecognizable to themselves and perhaps open to the same possibilities they'd have written off not a month before.
Pico Iyer
#58. It's a supernatural library filled with unfinished ghost stories, written by ghosts, where time has no meaning , and the Boogeyman wants to blow it all up. What exactly is it you think I can handle about any of that ?
D.J. MacHale
#59. A good style should show no signs of effort. What is written should seem a happy accident.
W. Somerset Maugham
#60. The earliest language was body language and, since this language is the language of questions, if we limit the questions, and if we only pay attention to or place values on spoken or written language, then we are ruling out a large area of human language.
Paulo Freire
#61. The spouses of authors ought to really read their better halves books. What is found amidst those pages may enlighten them to knowing a side of their partner that can only be seen on the written page.
Sai Marie Johnson
#62. Speech recognition is utterly crap for writing fiction. If you try reading a novel aloud you'll soon figure out why - written prose style is utterly unlike the spoken word.
Charles Stross
#64. For there is but one essential justice which cements society, and one law which establishes this justice. This law is right reason, which is the true rule of all commandments and prohibitions. Whoever neglects this law, whether written or unwritten, is necessarily unjust and wicked.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#65. History is written by the victors,' she said, 'but the truth has a way of revealing itself.
Sebastien De Castell
#66. Historians turning their hands to fiction are all the rage. Since Alison Weir led the way in 2006, an ever-growing number of established non-fiction writers - Giles Milton, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Harry Sidebottom, Patrick Bishop, Ian Mortimer and myself included - have written historical novels.
Saul David
#67. Writing should not be routine; writing should actually be the opposite of procedural because otherwise the written word would become a routine word.
Elie Wiesel
#68. Much has been written about the loyalty of dogs, but what I love about them isn't their devotion to me so much as their devotion to being alive.
Steven Bauer
#69. The unfolding of a story is both as exciting and as difficult for each and every novel I've written, regardless of time and place.
Rose Tremain
#70. I'm not like some other writers: I have no actual urgent need or desire to add to what's written. You write it; if you're lucky, it's performed, and that's the end of the whole thing.
Tom Stoppard
#71. Do you believe that our stories were written from before that we are but actors performing on the stage called life with neither rehearsals nor retakes, the dialogues of our own and a fleeting audience or are you someone who pens down his own story?
Chirag Tulsiani
#72. What the fuck are you talking about?" I asked, wondering if I was in some crazy surrealist movie, wandering from telepathic sheriffs to homosexual assassins, to nympho lady Masons, to psychotic pirates, according to a script written in advance by two acid-heads and a Martian humorist.
Robert Shea
#73. What worthwhile book after the Pentateuch has been written by a committee?
George Steiner
#74. You don't need to know the purpose as you write, but when you read over something you've written, you should be able to point to any given element - be that a line of dialogue, a descriptive phrase, a plot point - and say why it's there.
Diana Gabaldon
#75. People wanted me to do a CD-ROM of 'Hitchhiker's,' and I thought, 'No, no.' I didn't want to just sort of reverse-engineer yet another thing from a book I'd already written. I think that the digital media are interesting enough in their own right to be worth originating something in.
Douglas Adams
#76. Music can minister to minds diseased, pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, raze out the written troubles of the brain, and with its sweet oblivious antidote, cleanse the full bosom of all perilous stuff that weighs upon the heart.
William Shakespeare
#77. The papers say we're married, but it's the heart that writes the love story.
Anthony Liccione
#78. Stories, as much as we like to talk about them, retrospectively, as emanations of theme or worldview or intention, occur primarily as technical objects when they're being written. Or at least they do for me. They're the result of thousands of decisions made at speed during revision.
George Saunders
#79. Our constitutional ban on religious tests for public office is worth less to the non-religious than the sheepskin parchment it was written on was worth to the sheep.
Unknown
#80. Honesty of thought and speech and written word is a jewel, and they who curb prejudice and seek honorably to know and speak the truth are the only builders of a better life.
John Galsworthy
#81. The task of understanding a culture built on the oral tradition is impossible to students steeped in the written tradition. p.55
Harold A. Innis
#82. When I start, I have a feeling for the characters, and maybe the shape of the story. Sometimes I might even have the last sentence in mind. But, no book I've ever written has ever ended the way I thought it would. Characters disappear, others come forward. Once you start writing, everything changes.
Paul Auster
#83. If we believe terrorists are past redemption, we should just rip up like 1/2 the New Testament because it was written by one.
Shane Claiborne
#84. I don't know if kids still read it, I just know that for me - as a boarding school kid - the book had a lot of resonance. It was a well written book. I was honored to play a part in that movie version.
Parker Stevenson
#85. There is no doubt that the loftiest written wisdom is either rhymed or in some way musically measured,
is, in form as well as substance, poetry; and a volume which should contain the condensed wisdom of mankind need not have one rhythmless line.
Henry David Thoreau
#86. I don't think that I would go into the writers' room because they work really hard and I feel like I'm already working really hard to shoot my part of the show. Also, I haven't written in a writers' room before, it's kinda intimidating to walk in there.
Mary Elizabeth Ellis
#87. Sigmund Freud was a half baked Viennese quack. Our literature, culture, and the films of Woody Allen would be better today if Freud had never written a word.
Ian Shoales
#88. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express
verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner
the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.
Andre Breton
#89. The real history does not get written, because it is not in people's brains but in their nerves and vitals.
Alfred North Whitehead
#90. Deep within the human constitution lie written laws of nature that should guide man in the conduct of his life.
Herbert M. Shelton
#91. There is a tradition that sees journalism as the dark side of literature, with book writing at its zenith. I don't agree. I think that all written work constitutes literature, even graffiti.
Eduardo Galeano
#92. It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.
Robert Hass
#93. I have always thought, the secret purpose of the book tour is to make the writer hate the book he's written. And, as a result, drive him to write another book.
Salman Rushdie
#94. Some days I feel good about my work, and sometimes I feel I've never written anything worthwhile. That's par for the course.
Donald Hall
#95. The thing that I like about the way characters are written on the show these days is that nobody's perfect. Everyone has made a lot of mistakes and bad choices.
Crystal Chappell
#96. Every once in awhile you find a novel so magical that there is no escaping its spell. The Night Circus is one of these rarities - engrossing, beautifully written and utterly enchanting. If you choose to read just one novel this year, this is it
Danielle Trussoni
#97. Anything John Stott says is worth listening to. Anything he writes is worth reading. Basic Christianity is not only a classic must-read for every believer; it is truly a blessing preserved on the written page for the enrichment of this generation and those to come.
Anne Graham Lotz
#98. I think that fiction writers can write about anyone. If you are writing a character, and the only thing they are to you is their otherness, then you haven't written a character.
Hanya Yanagihara
#99. I think the tradition of well-written history hasn't been squashed out of the academic world as much in Britain as it has in the United States.
Adam Hochschild
#100. Great is repentance, because for the sake of one that truly repenteth the whole world is pardoned; as it is written (Hosea xiv. 4), 'I will heal their backsliding, I will love them freely, for mine anger is turned away from him.'" It is not said, "from them," but "from him.
Various
