Top 100 The Written Quotes
#1. Cadus spoke the local Greek better than I did; they stretch the vowels here, and round them off, so that words that look the same on the written page sound as if they are spoken by a goat with catarrh.
M.C. Scott
#2. While the spoken word can travel faster, you can't take it home in your hand. Only the written word can be absorbed wholly at the convenience of the reader.
Kingman Brewster Jr.
#3. The written word is so much like evidence - like something that can be used against you later.
Margaret Atwood
#4. For me archaeology is not a source of illustrations for written texts, but an independent source of historical information, with no less value and importance, sometimes more importance, that the written sources.
Michael Rostovtzeff
#5. The mixture of the oral and the written traditions in the writings of Plato enabled him to dominate the history of the West.
Harold Innis
#6. The sea has had Conrad and Stevenson and Masefield, but the mountains continue to defy the written word. We have climbed their highest peaks and crossed their most difficult passes, but still they keep their secrets and their reserve; they remain remote, mysterious, spirit-haunted.
Ruskin Bond
#7. I love the written word; I love when someone takes the time or leaves you a note or sends a letter.
Sandra Bullock
#8. I was learning book-keeping at the age of 12, but it never stopped me from pursuing literature. Over the years, I grew to love the written word.
Ashwin Sanghi
#9. Fiction is a branch of neurology: the scenarios of nerve and blood vessels are the written mythologies of memory and desire.
J.G. Ballard
#10. I do not need the written code of a spiritual belief to act like a decent human being.
Jim Butcher
#11. Only as the written text began to speak would the voices of the forest, and of the river, begin to fade. And only then would language loosen its ancient association with the invisible breath, the spirit sever itself from the wind, the psyche dissociate itself from the environing air.
David Abram
#12. I believe that anyone who doesn't read remains dumb. Even if they know how, failing to regularly ingest the written word dooms them to ignorance, no matter what else they have or do
Edward Bunker
#13. In contrast to the written account-which, depending on its complexity of thought, reference, and vocabulary, is pitched at a larger or smaller readership-a photograph has only one language and is destined potentially for all.
Susan Sontag
#14. I appreciate the written word and spoken word more, but Atonement sort of established so much of me. It was a character that didn't really speak, and I found that a lot of the roles I was gravitating toward after that were kind of nonverbal.
Saoirse Ronan
#15. These latter institutions [the civil service, trade unions, media of all kinds], notably of course television, but more subtly the written press, are quite spectacular powers of unreason and ignorance.
Alain Badiou
#16. And sometimes you have to go above the written law, I believe.
Fawn Hall
#17. In seeking for justice men seek for the mean or neutral, for the law is the mean. Again, customary laws have more weight, and relate to more important matters, than written laws, and a man may be a safer ruler than the written law, but not safer than the customary law.
Aristotle.
#18. After the advent of the written word, the masses who could not - or were not permitted to - read, were given sermons by the few who could.
Theodore Bikel
#19. It all comes down to the written word and just how comfortable I am writing them.
C.F. Heller
#20. The beauty of the written word is that it can be held close to the heart and read over and over again.
Florence Littauer
#21. The great thing about books was the solidity of the written word. You might change and your reading might change as a result, but the book remained whatever it had always been. A good book was surprising the first time through, less so the second.
Karen Joy Fowler
#22. I wonder if Socrates would have appreciated the flagrant irony: It's only because his pupils Plato and Xenophon put his disdain for the written word into written words that we have any knowledge of it today
Joshua Foer
#23. When the child begins to think and to make use of the written language to express his rudimentary thinking, he is ready for elementary work; and this fitness is a question not of age or other incidental circumstance but of mental maturity.
Maria Montessori
#24. Superheroes are best imagined in comic books. The union between the written word, the image, and then what your imagination has to do to connect those allows for so much.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#25. The western nations of Europe, who now so immeasurably surpass their former savage progenitors, and stand at the summit of civilization, owe little or none of their superiority to direct inheritance from the old Greeks, though they owe much to the written works of that wonderful people.
Charles Darwin
#26. What a major mistake, having rejected pretty much all of the great talented female artists that have lived throughout the ages, art history is left incomplete. The validity of the written art history is as absent as those women left out.
Siren Waroe
#27. The written tone and the spoken tone change and the reporters' disbelief in the veracity of the government spreads to the readers and the viewers.
Roger Mudd
#28. The book should be the written counterpart of the unwritten world; its subject should be what does not exist and cannot exist except when written, but whose absence is obscurely felt by that which exists, in its own incompleteness.
Italo Calvino
#29. The written word is the only anchor we have in life. How extraordinary would it be if we had even three or four paragraphs written honestly about their lives by our ancestors?
Randy Wayne White
#30. Indian sages avoided the written word as they realized ideas were never definitive; they were transformed depending on the intellectual and emotional abilities of the giver as well as the receiver.
Devdutt Pattanaik
#31. The written word Should be clean as bone, Clear as light, Firm as stone. Two words are not As good as one. I
Madeleine L'Engle
#32. Ah, that is the miracle of the written word. It beckons our unconscious out of hiding. It tells us things we need to know, sometimes things we don't want to know.
Amy Gail Hansen
#33. It cannot be said often enough that science fiction as a genre is incredibly educational - and I'm speaking the written science fiction, not 'Star Trek.' Science fiction writers tend to fill their books if they're clever with little bits of interesting stuff and real stuff.
Terry Pratchett
#34. To me, there's no better way to stir the soul than through the power of the written word.
Jake Parent
#35. The library serves as a gathering place for friends who
share the love of books. It further serves as a resource for those who escape the pressure of everyday
life, doing it by losing themselves in the written word.
Kristen Ashley
#36. The art of writing was independently born in these four regions and I do not think it a coincidence that the advent of the written word was nourished by river water.
Olivia Laing
#37. The reader's ear must adjust down from loud life to the subtle, imaginary sounds of the written word. An ordinary reader picking up a book can't yet hear a thing; it will take half an hour to pick up the writing's modulations, its ups and downs and louds and softs.
Annie Dillard
#38. I long ago abandoned myself to a blind lust for the written word. Literature is my sandbox. In it I play, build my forts and castles, spend glorious time.
Rabih Alameddine
#39. Our connection to the teachings of Socrates, for instance, is through the written word of Plato, because Socrates was vehemently against the written word. Socrates thought that the book would do terrible things to our memories.
Clay A. Johnson
#40. Few things are better in the world than a room full of librarians. I consider them literary heroes. The keepers and defenders of the written word.
Louise Penny
#41. Typefaces are to the written word what different dialects are to different languages.
Steven Heller
#42. The written word endures, the spoken word disappears
Neil Postman
#43. If the written word has contributed anything at all to our developing species and our half developed culture, it is this: Great writing has been a staff to lean on, a mother to consult, a wisdom to pick up stumbling folly, a strength in weakness and a courage to support sick cowardice.
John Steinbeck
#44. If the portraits of our absent friends are pleasant to us, which renew our memory of them and relieve our regret for their absence by a false and empty consolation, how much more pleasant are letters which bring us the written characters of the absent friend.
Heloise D'Argenteuil
#45. When I go into the editing process, I re-look at the original intuitive thoughts and then it becomes the written performance or text work. Because they look quite big there's this assumption that there isn't much editing, but that's a huge part of it.
Sue Tompkins
#46. The written word is redundant on the high seas. Why? Because paper gets wet too easily.
Walter Moers
#48. He lives at Balbec? crooned the Baron in a tone so far from interrogatory that it is regrettable that the written language does not possess a sign other than the question mark to end such apparently unquestioning remarks. It is true that such a sign would be of little use except to M. de Charlus.
Marcel Proust
#49. A writer writes knowing that nothing else will elicit the same kind of satisfaction and personal triumph as molding the written word into a reader's great experience.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#50. As a writer, I am an intellectual. I believe in the ideals of the Enlightenment, I believe in the written word, in dialogue and in truth. I hate lies more than anything else. Most of the time I react by writing.
Henning Mankell
#51. Try all things by the written word, and let all bow down before it. You are in danger of [fanaticism] every hour, if you depart ever so little from Scripture; yea, or from the plain, literal meaning of an text, taken in connection with the context.
John Wesley
#52. Books are the building blocks of civilization, for without the written word, a man knows nothing beyond what occurs during his own brief years and, perhaps, in a few tales his parents tell him.
Louis L'Amour
#53. Television doesn't make stars. It's the written media, the press, that makes stars.
Chevy Chase
#54. Nowadays I find so many 'evidences' in the manuscripts, it seems authors are colluding to wipe out the evidence from the written form.
James Oinam
#55. I'm not a standup. I didn't start off as a writer, I learned to write through improvisation, and so that's the part of the show that can most surprise me. The written part of the show, I know I can get wrong. You can't really get the interview "wrong."
Stephen Colbert
#56. Skaz is a rather appealing Russian word (suggesting "jazz" and "scat", as in "scat-singing", to the English ear) used to designate a type of first-person narration that has the characteristics of the spoken rather than the written word.
David Lodge
#57. The reason is that till date, in spite of advances in information technology and strategies of information, the written word in the form of books still remains one of humanity's most enduring legacies.
Ibrahim Babangida
#58. When the code of laws is once fixed, it should be observed in the literal sense, and nothing more is left to the judge than to determine whether an action is or is not conformable to the written law.
Cesare Beccaria
#59. So it was that neither for the first time nor the last my verbal mojo, my knack for the written word, served to save my reckless ass.
Tom Robbins
#60. Why fantasize about what you already experience? I go to the written word for places and faces that I don't get at home. Hot people in hot climates. Sex acts I can hardly imagine. Porn is about the unachievable ... and, therefore, the inherently desirable.
Belle De Jour
#61. how tragic it was that the written word was immortal while people were not,
Katarina Bivald
#62. [M]ake much of the written word, and pray to God to copy his Bible in your conscience, and write a new book of his doctrine in your hearts.
Samuel Rutherford
#63. If a director can find the exact combination between the written word as a guideline and improvisational input from his actors, I think that's where you'll find the most successful work being done.
Alan Thicke
#64. Sometimes, when it is going badly, she wonders if what she believes to be a love of the written word is really just a fetish for stationary.
David Nicholls
#65. The written history of the world is largely a history of warfare, because the states within which we live came into existence largely through conquest, civil strife, or struggles for independence.
John Keegan
#66. It is not deeds or acts that last: it is the written record of those deeds and acts.
Elbert Hubbard
#67. Every spoken word double-crosses us. The only tolerable form of communication is the written word, since it isn't a stone in a bridge between souls but a ray of light between stars.
Fernando Pessoa
#68. When you are mute, you become a good listener - it's all one-way. You appreciate the written word. You appreciate the sound.
James Earl Jones
#69. The written word has this advantage, that it lasts and can await the time when it is allowed to take effect.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#70. I feel the written word, poetry and literature is just one of the most beautiful things that human beings do. So we have to fight for it.
Helen Mirren
#71. The spoken word is nothing. It hardly lives longer than an insect! Only the written word is eternal. - Balbulus
Cornelia Funke
#72. But I have long loved the written word, and come to see in it the power of the sleeping lion. This is my name. This is who I am. This is how I got here. In the absence of an audience, I will write down my story so that it waits like a restful beast with lungs breathing and heart beating.
Lawrence Hill
#73. That, if the Gentiles, (whom no Law inspir'd,)
By Nature did what was by Law requir'd;
They, who the written Rule and never known,
Were to themselves both Rule and Law alone:
To Natures plain Indictment they shall plead;
And, by their Conscience, be condemn'd or freed.
John Dryden
#74. -to judge us all through the machine of the Commandant's monstrous fictions! As though they were the truth! As though history & the written word were friends, rather than adversaries!
Richard Flanagan
#75. Things spoken can be forgotten and forgiven, but the written word has the power to change the course of history, to alter our lives.
Teresa Mummert
#76. The written word still enjoyed a certain prestige here. It was a sluggish country.
William Gibson
#77. The written revelation of God is in the world, but men heed it not. Instead, they look for knowledge where it is not to be found.
Edward J. Young
#78. You must not pay too much attention to opinions. The written word is unalterable, and opinions are often only an expression of despair.
Franz Kafka
#79. But a piece of paper can be a powerful presence. I have always had enormous respect for the written word and invariably find a letter more revealing than a face-to-face conversation. In a strange way I suspect I will get to know you better at a distance than I would if you had stayed at home ...
Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey
#80. I think the written word is my first love. I was just a very imagination - centered child and a big part of that imaginary life came from reading.
Zoe Kazan
#81. What a strange world it is, where prisoners are left their weapons and the written word is a mortal danger.
Megan Whalen Turner
#82. A writer who takes political, social or literary positions must act only with the means that are his. These means are the written words.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#83. To build a digital media company, you have to focus equally on content and technology. In content, you have to focus equally on the written word and video.
Raghav Bahl
#84. I think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.
John Banville
#85. The spoken word and the written - there is an astonishing gulf between them. There is a way of turning sentences that completely reverses the meaning.
Agatha Christie
#86. No poet will ever take the written word as a substitute for the spoken word; he knows that it is on the spoken word, and the spoken word only, that his art is founded.
Lascelles Abercrombie
#87. I believe in a visual language that should be as strong as the written word.
David LaChapelle
#88. Words played an important part in my growing up. Not only the written word ... but words that flew through the air: jokes, riddles, puns.
James Howe
#89. She drinks pints of coffee and writes little observations and ideas for stories with her best fountain pen on the linen-white pages of expensive notebooks. Sometimes, when it's going badly, she wonders if what she believes to be a love of the written word is really just a fetish for stationery.
David Nicholls
#90. The written word offered subversive possibilities in a dictatorship, offered some hope of freedom.
Anjan Sundaram
#91. The alphabet will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls. They will trust the written characters and not remember themselves.
Socrates
#92. Stupid Ape: I had to quantify this with the word "stupid" so as not to offend the ape community. Large of limb, impotent of intellect, he was the kind of guy who lettered in leg-breaking at thug school but flunked the written exam because he didn't know which end of the e-pencil to use.
John Zakour
#93. When you get back into the editing suite in the cold light of day, the written stuff is better.
Ricky Gervais
#94. The attitude of the actor is his interpretation of what he reads, and the written word is what creates the role in the actor's mind, and I guess in reading the things that were given to me, I reacted as you guys saw me, you know.
Gene Barry
#95. Few children learn to read books by themselves. Someone has to lure them into the wonderful world of the written word; Someone has to show them the way.
Orville Prescott
#96. The written word is assumed to have been reflected upon and revised by its author, reviewed by authorities and editors.
Neil Postman
#97. Reading asks that you bring your whole life experience and your ability to decode the written word and your creative imagination to the page and be a co-author with the writer, because the story is just squiggles on the page unless you have a reader.
Katherine Paterson
#98. I believe in the time when we shall be able to create works of art in the Theatre without the use of the written play, without the use of actors.
Edward Gordon Craig
#99. If loving the written word is wrong ... I don't want to be right!
Junnita Jackson
#100. As long as people believe in the written word and a good story.. They will believe in me.
Solange Nicole
