Top 100 The Written Word Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. The spoken word is nothing. It hardly lives longer than an insect! Only the written word is eternal. - Balbulus
Cornelia Funke
#7. 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
#8. -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
#9. 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
#10. The written word still enjoyed a certain prestige here. It was a sluggish country.
William Gibson
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. What a strange world it is, where prisoners are left their weapons and the written word is a mortal danger.
Megan Whalen Turner
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. I believe in a visual language that should be as strong as the written word.
David LaChapelle
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. The written word offered subversive possibilities in a dictatorship, offered some hope of freedom.
Anjan Sundaram
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. The written word is all that stands between memory and oblivion. Without books as our anchors, we are cast adrift, neither teaching nor learning. They are windows on the past, mirrors on the present, and prisms reflected all possible futures. Books are lighthouses erected on the dark sea of time.
Greg Weisman
#24. When it comes to casting, I've been so lucky. I've worked with unbelievable actors who make me look better than I am and take the written word and make it honest.
Jason Reitman
#25. Photography speaks a universal language that does not need translation, and with an immediacy that the written word lacks. It freezes a moment in time, leaving an indelible image.
Bianca Jagger
#26. While journalists cannot right every wrong, champion every cause or fix every problem, they can - through the written word - lift someone's burden for a day, make some elderly woman on a bus smile or let them know they are noticed by someone.
Regina Brett
#27. What good are laws that cannot be read or understood, or a tongue that spews only hatred or ignorance? What good is the written word to an illiterate man?
Delores Phillips
#28. The best advice I can give you: Look unto Jesus, beholding his beauty in the written word.
John Newton
#29. The written word is the basic of everything. Most important, the idea, and after that, the dialogue. You can rehash the dialogue as you go along, it 's disgraceful to have to do this, but now and again you have no choice.
Terence Fisher
#30. Generally, old media don't die. They just have to grow old gracefully. Guess what, we still have stone masons. They haven't been the primary purveyors of the written word for a while now of course, but they still have a role because you wouldn't want a TV screen on your headstone.
Douglas Adams
#31. There is no greater weapon than knowledge and no greater source of knowledge than the written word.
Malala Yousafzai
#32. The disciplined Christian will be very careful what sort of counsel he seeks from others. Counsel that contradicts the written Word is ungodly counsel. Blessed is the man that walketh not in that.
Elisabeth Elliot
#33. As long as people believe in the written word and a good story.. They will believe in me.
Solange Nicole
#34. If loving the written word is wrong ... I don't want to be right!
Junnita Jackson
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. The written word is assumed to have been reflected upon and revised by its author, reviewed by authorities and editors.
Neil Postman
#38. I am exploiting the written word with the utmost ease. This alarms me, for I am afraid of losing my sense of order and of plunging into an abyss resounding with cries and shrieks: The Hell of human freedom. But I shall continue
Clarice Lispector
#39. Unless you're doing Shakespeare or Chekhov ... the written word is not sacrosanct.
Alan Arkin
#40. When the Holy Spirit is in full control of our lives, He will expect our obedience to the written Word of God. But it is part of our human problem that we would like to be full of the Spirit and yet go on and do as we please!
Aiden Wilson Tozer
#41. Acknowledgements
With grateful thanks to the three least-appreciated and hardest-working proselytizers of the written word: independent bookstores, librarians, and teachers.
Gail Carriger
#42. The spoken word is ephemeral. The written word, eternal. A symphony, timeless.
A.E. Samaan
#43. 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
#44. [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
#45. how tragic it was that the written word was immortal while people were not,
Katarina Bivald
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. 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
#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. 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
#53. 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
#55. The written word is redundant on the high seas. Why? Because paper gets wet too easily.
Walter Moers
#56. 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
#57. The written word endures, the spoken word disappears
Neil Postman
#58. Typefaces are to the written word what different dialects are to different languages.
Steven Heller
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. To me, there's no better way to stir the soul than through the power of the written word.
Jake Parent
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. The beauty of the written word is that it can be held close to the heart and read over and over again.
Florence Littauer
#74. It all comes down to the written word and just how comfortable I am writing them.
C.F. Heller
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. I love the written word; I love when someone takes the time or leaves you a note or sends a letter.
Sandra Bullock
#80. 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
#81. The written word is so much like evidence - like something that can be used against you later.
Margaret Atwood
#82. 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.
#83. If we once get above our Bibles and cease making the written Word of God our sole rule both as to faith and practice, we shall soon lie open to all manner of delusion and be in great danger of making shipwreck of faith and a good conscience.
George Whitefield
#84. A few letter-writers had taken refuge in doorways, their old voiceprinters wrapped in sheets of clear plastic, evidence that the written word still enjoyed a certain prestige here.
William Gibson
#85. He'd no time for reports. He suspected that about 95% of the written word was never read by anyone anyway.
Colin Dexter
#86. Success in TV-showmaking is just a matter of being authentic and doing the best you can, and you hope that people watch it and like it. For us [showmakers], we know where our bread is buttered, and we live by the written word of the critic. That's how shows build a critical mass on cable.
Walton Goggins
#87. The written word can be powerful and beautiful - but films transport us to another place in a way that even the most evocative words never can.
Saoirse Ronan
#88. The written word has taught me to listen to the human voice, much as the great unchanging statues have taught me to appreciate bodily motions. On the other hand, but more slowly, life has thrown light for me on the meaning of books.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#89. I don't think you can write - at least not well - if you don't love stories, love the written word.
Nora Roberts
#90. I cannot write in English, because of the treacherous spelling. When I am reading, I only hear it and am unable to remember what the written word looks like.
Albert Einstein
#91. The written word held a power she almost revered: to be able to write so as to influence the hearts and minds of other readers seemed nothing short of a miracle.
Patti Callahan Henry
#92. I've always found it easy and natural and, more importantly, necessary to articulate thoughts and feelings, and fierce emotions, through the written word. Fantasy and horror came to me when I was very young.
Kim Elizabeth
#93. But for me, really, the written word is always stronger than film.
Terri Windling
#94. The written word can make one pause and contemplate. It can make a reader sigh to dream or question a belief in considerable depth. But all of that is nothing if those words fail to touch the heart and make one feel.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#95. Through the written Word we discover the Living Word - Jesus Christ.
Billy Graham
#96. I was sophisticated enough to know that the written word is no mirror of the writer's character, that the amateur, though a selfless angel, may show himself a pompous ass, while the professional, a monster of ego, can convince you in a phrase that he has the innocence of a child. I
Louis Auchincloss
#97. The principles of spiritual kingdom has been packaged in the written word of God
Sunday Adelaja
#98. The picture alone, without the written word, leaves half the story untold.
James Lafferty
#99. Calvaryites are sometimes a little too heavily oriented to the written Word.
John Wimber
#100. Mysteries are fine things, but the written word should be preserved, intact, and free of extraneous error.
Sandra Staas
