Writing As Power Quotes

#1. The problem in society is not kids not knowing science. The problem is adults not knowing science. They outnumber kids 5 to 1, they wield power, they write legislation. When you have scientifically illiterate adults, you have undermined the very fabric of what makes a nation wealthy and strong.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson

#2. Writing with a simplified alphabet checked the power of custom of an oral tradition but implied a decline in the power of expression and the creation of grooves which determined the channels of thought of readers and later writers.

Harold Innis

#3. Love and ruin are explained with letters of the alphabet.
The power of the word can describe the glory of the universe. It only requires an open mind and heart.

J.R. Ortiz

#4. It is important to take the seriousness out of things that do not deserve it. Take the seriousness out of it, and the thing loses its power.

S.A. Tawks

#5. I write poems for myself and I write poetry that gets torn apart and becomes songs. I have a lot of respect for words, the power of words.

Kurt Cobain

#6. Not many people were speaking truth to power in the '80s. I had a really good time doing it - I found it gratifying. It was a joy to have an opportunity to say what you believed. It's challenging to do it in fiction, but I liked writing the novels. I liked writing 'Democracy' particularly.

Joan Didion

#7. One has to work very carefully with what is in between the words. What is not said. Which is measure, which is rhythm and so on. So, it is what you don't write that frequently gives what you do write its power.

Toni Morrison

#8. Nature herself seems, I say, to take the pen out of his hand, and to write for him with her own bare, sheer, penetrating power.

Matthew Arnold

#9. Writing stories has given me the power to change things I could not change as a child. I can make boys into doctors. I can make fathers stop drinking. I can make mothers stay.

Cynthia Rylant

#10. My father told me when I first started that standup is exciting and I should pursue it, but that writing would be the thing that would give me power over my career. I never have to take a road gig or a writing gig I don't want because I always have the ability to play one against the other.

Greg Fitzsimmons

#11. Learn to write by doing it. Read widely and wisely. Increase your word power. Find your own individual voice though practicing constantly. Go through the world with your eyes and ears open and learn to express that experience in words.

P.D. James

#12. I hope there is something worthy in my writings and not merely the novelty of a black face associated with the power to rhyme that has attracted attention.

Paul Laurence Dunbar

#13. I don't really go out and do too much like networking and Hollywood events kind of thing. But I do some writing, and I find it helps me as an actor in terms of giving yourself back the power and feeling a bit of strength in that respect.

Scottie Thompson

#14. Writing is both an act of power and surrender. Passion and discovery. It is a tug at your soul that continues to pull you forward, even as you go kicking and screaming. (p.18)

Laraine Herring

#15. The Italian historian Armando Petrucci has done more than anyone else to revive interest in public writing. His groundbreaking Public Lettering: Script, Power, and Culture surveys the forms and uses of epigraphic writing from classical antiquity to the twentieth century.

Geoffrey Nunberg

#16. Punctuation is a fabulous tool for controlling your reader - you even get to control where they breathe. That's what I call power!

Nicola Morgan

#17. When you have something meaningful to say, you lose your desire for much grammar; for only in the incompetence of words does one seek the redeeming power of vocabulary.

King Samuel Benson

#18. I'm not patient at all. I avoid writer's block by writing. I power through with a bad version, so I can move on, and usually once I've gotten to the next scene, I'll discover what was missing from the bad version scene. Then I can easily rewrite it to get back on the right path.

Anders Holm

#19. The jaws of power are always open to devour, and her arm is always stretched out, if possible, to destroy the freedom of thinking, speaking, and writing.

John Adams

#20. You always had the power, my dear. You just had to learn it for yourself. Glinda the Good Witch

Susan Boles

#21. You have to have an eye and a feeling for where things go. Writing visually, writing textually, writing sonically. Text is visual for me and images are textual. There is power in the way ideas are arranged, not just developed rhetorically. Form is everything.

Masha Tupitsyn

#22. The power of fictitious writing, for good as well as for evil, is a thing which ought most seriously to be reflected upon.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

#23. Could a literary life be referred to with the iambic pentameter of, say, harnessing wind power, transplanting hearts or saving the whales. Or did it necessitate the sombre and monotonous dirge of software, priority banking or turbine building.

Anita Nair

#24. A great book is a thing of mystery and beauty; it has the power to move you.

Neil Leckman

#25. What I like about writing is the sense of godlike power it gives you.

Wilbur Smith

#26. Writing is my drug of choice. Everyday, I write. It eases out the pressure in my head and it all lands on a blank piece of paper. It has its own healing power and it gives me a feeling of contentment. Very addictive, yet it is not a criminal act.

Sonnia Kemmer

#27. If you do everything in your power to avoid writing and still can't, then you must be a writer.

Fannie Flagg

#28. The basic rule [of writing] given us was simple and heartbreaking. A story to be effective had to convey something from the writer to the reader, and the power of its offering was the measure of its excellence. Outside of that, there were no rules.

John Steinbeck

#29. I have never been able to write with anything more than the left hand of my mind; the right hand has always been engaged in something to do with personal relationships. I don't complain, because I think my left hand's power, as much as it has, is due to its knowledge of what my right hand is doing.

Rebecca West

#30. Why bother with fictional characters and plots when the world was full of more marvelous stories that were true, with characters so fresh, so powerful, so new, that they stepped from into the narratives under their own power?

Doris Kearns Goodwin

#31. He was intrigued by the power of words, not the literary words that filled the books in the library but the sharp, staccato words that went into the writing of news stories. Words that went for the jugular. Active verbs that danced and raced on the page.

Robert Cormier

#32. There is a fine line I have to walk throughout the writing process in a novel. It is this line between drama and melodrama, and it is this line between evoking genuine emotional power and being manipulative.

Nicholas Sparks

#33. Imagination is manifest of thoughts by divine force.

Lailah Gifty Akita

#34. When writing becomes too dominant, it gets leached of its own power. We spend more and more time writing, and we have less and less to write about.

Julia Cameron

#35. Donald Trump is writing a different theme, which is it's midnight in America and that things are bad, and they're bleak, and they're gloomy and they're doomy, and the only thing that is going to save you is someone with the authority and power of somebody like me.

Mark Shields

#36. To care about words, to have a stake in what is written, to believe in the power of books - this overwhelms the rest, and beside it one's life becomes very small.

Paul Auster

#37. I was a political journalist; I came to writing novels through an interest in politics and power.

Robert Harris

#38. The fact that companies are getting into building power plants that collect their own CO2 on-site shows there's some leadership in that industry. Some industries have seen the writing on the wall: that carbon will have to be managed.

Klaus Lackner

#39. Both reading and writing are experiences
lifelong
in the course of which we who encounter words used in certain ways are persuaded by them to be brought mind and heart within the presence, the power, of the imagination.

Eudora Welty

#40. A blank page has more power than a full page with blind thoughts.

Debasish Mridha

#41. A writer's tragedy: to know all the words and nothing else.

Marty Rubin

#42. Language is power ... Language can be used as a means of changing reality.

Adrienne Rich

#43. The best ending ever, for a science fiction book - or any novel, now that I think about it - was in Rendezvous With Rama. You know that you're at the end of the book and yet, there is no resolution. Then he hits you with those last six words. Better yet, the power is in the very last word. Wow!

John Gaver

#44. Imagination is a divine mind.

Lailah Gifty Akita

#45. Images are not quite ideas, they are stiller than that, with less implication outside themselves. And they are not myth, they do not have the explanatory power; they are nearer to pure story. Nor are they always metaphors; they do not say this is that, they say this is.

Robert Hass

#46. I like to write about women who are talented and capable, but most important, retain their femininity. Women have tremendous power - their femininity, because men can't do without it.

Sidney Sheldon

#47. The joy of writing.
The power of preserving.
Revenge of a mortal hand.

Wislawa Szymborska

#48. Basically, unless you're willing to write down debts and save the economy, you're going to have deflation and a steady drain in purchasing power - that is, shrinking markets.

Michael Hudson

#49. The good writer, the great writer, has what I have called the three S's: the power to see, to sense, and to say. That is, he is perceptive, he is feeling, and he has the power to express in language what he observes and reacts to.

Lawrence Clark Powell

#50. I love and enjoy writing.
Writing is a form of daily communication.
It a communication to higher divine power.

Lailah Gifty Akita

#51. The advice would be the same for any kind of fiction. Keep writing, and keep sending things out, not to friends and relatives, but to people who have the power to buy. A lot of additional, useful tips could be added, but this is fundamental.

Fred Saberhagen

#52. I learned the enormous power of writing for yourself, especially now that people seem to be receptive to the fact that women can write.

Maya Rudolph

#53. All we are doing are self-portraits. As simple that. We accumulate knowledge and wisdom and power, and we get our hearts broken, and we write. We write for others to absorb what took us so long to understand.

Cristian Mihai

#54. If I were to choose between the power of writing a poem and the ecstasy of a poem unwritten, I would choose the ecstasy. It is better poetry.

Kahlil Gibran

#55. To withhold words is power. But to share our words with others, openly and honestly, is also power.

Terry Tempest Williams

#56. It did not prepare me for writing or 'Power of Attorney.' However, what it did is that it forced me out of the DA's office. I stopped getting that county check.

Christopher Darden

#57. Writing is praying with me. You know a child would look up at every sentence and say, 'And what shall I say next?' That is just what I do; I ask Him that at every line He would give me not merely thoughts and power, but also every word, even the very rhymes.

Frances Ridley Havergal

#58. The inspired words, which flush my mind, come from a higher power!

Lailah Gifty Akita

#59. The power of classical music turns my words into fire.

A.D. Posey

#60. The real power of comics is writing as you draw.

Chris Ware

#61. From a writing point of view, you now have teams of screenwriters working with a director. What's lost in the process is the power of that one heart, brain, gut and soul that makes something an original piece of writing.

Joe Eszterhas

#62. When you're writing about superpowers, you're writing about power. When you're writing about immortals, you're writing about mortality.

Margaret Stohl

#63. This is where I think the writing started. The "righting," if you will. The righting of circumstances, the shaping of the world the way it should have been, had God not had crossed eyes and buck teeth. In the real world I had no power; in my world I was Hercules unchained.

Robert McCammon

#64. People ask me: "Why do you write about food, and eating, and drinking? Why don't you write about the struggle for power and security, and about love, the way the others do?" ... The easiest answer is to say that, like most other humans, I am hungry.

M.F.K. Fisher

#65. Writing is a lifelong disease.

Once contracted, the only prescription is to write constantly in whatever form to express your condition, in whatever construction to carry your words beyond you.

J.R. Tompkins

#66. Although many of his other novels are brilliant there is a power in 'Oliver Twist' that I believe Dickens never managed to retrieve. It is as if he was sent to this earth with the sole purpose of writing this book.

Henning Mankell

#67. I never set out to write a book to change women's lives, to change history. It's like, 'Who, me?' Yes, me. I did it. And I'm not that different from other women. Maybe my power and glory was that I could speak my truth as a woman and it was the truth of every woman.

Betty Friedan

#68. I knew from my years of writing about NSA abuses that it can be hard to generate serious concern about secret state surveillance: invasion of privacy and abuse of power can be viewed as abstractions, ones that are difficult to get people to care about viscerally.

Glenn Greenwald

#69. And the reason I am so nervous is that everything I do now is leading me to one of three possible futures ... Which one will it be? Time alone will tell. But still I know that writing this diary can perhaps provide the answer; it may even help produce the right future.

Adolfo Bioy Casares

#70. What might happen if writing were a shared endeavor, meant t connect people instead of being hoarded as a tool of power and privilege.

Kathy MacMillan

#71. As a writer, I can't really take days off. Writing is like creating an art. Once you stop writing, you can lose your rhythm and context, meaning that your writing may lose its power.

Andrea Hirata

#72. Style in painting is the same as in writing,-a power over materials, whether words or colors.

James Ellis

#73. Acting is the most pure fun as far as jobs go, but it can be limiting in terms of freedom of expression. You are never the master of the story, just a part of it. But writing and directing give you the power of the gods.

David Hayter

#74. Sarah Palin and her virtual burqa have me and my friends retching into our handbags. She's such a power-mad, backwater beauty-pageant casualty, it's easy to write her off and make fun of her. But in reality I feel as horrified as a ghetto Jew watching the rise of National Socialism.

Cintra Wilson

#75. There's power in stories, though. That's all history is: the best tales. The ones that last. Might as well be mine.

Varric Tethras

#76. There is just too much cruelty, selfishness and corruption in the world not to want to crush the poisonous will of those who cause it by writing about it as powerfully as I can.

Carla H. Krueger

#77. I always wanted to write a book about LA, a big ambitious book. Nobody had ever really done it with LA- treating the city seriously as a major economic and cultural power, as the embodiment of 21st century America.

James Frey

#78. Elegance of language may not be in the power of all of us; but simplicity and straight forwardness are. Write much as you would speak; speak as you think. If with your inferior, speak no coarser than usual; if with your superiors, no finer.

William P. Alford

#79. It was very lucky for me as a writer that I studied the physical sciences rather than English. I wrote for my own amusement. There was no kindly English professor to tell me for my own good how awful my writing really was. And there was no professor with the power to order me what to read, either.

Kurt Vonnegut

#80. Think of yourself as an incandescent power, illuminated and perhaps forever talked to by God and his messengers.

Brenda Ueland

#81. Tortured Soul 101: The depth of despair one experiences during the creative process (as experienced say, in an abysmally blank page or canvas) is directly proportional to the scope and power of the work that emerges when it breaks.

F.T. McKinstry

#82. After a long time spent learning how to write as a woman instead of as an honorary man, I was able to come back to Earthsea and write the next three books in another and newer tradition: that of questioning, rather than accepting, the gendering of power as male.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#83. You have a great advantage as a writer, Monsieur,' said Poirot. 'You can relieve your feelings by expedient of the printed word. You have the power of the pen over your enemies.

Agatha Christie

#84. I tell people to write the stories that you're afraid to talk about, the stories you wish you'd forget, because those have the most power. Those are the ones that have the most strength when you give them as a testimony.

Sandra Cisneros

#85. Lily Brown writes with and against things in poems that are coiled up tight as springs (or snakes). A believer in the power of the line, she writes, 'I think the plastics/and sink them' then 'Where is the sand/man hiding the dirt.' These terse, biting poems will make you look around and wonder.

Rae Armantrout

#86. The art of writing history is the art of emphasizing the significant facts at the expense of the insignificant. And it is the same in every field of knowledge. Knowledge is power only if a man knows what facts not to bother about.

Robert Wilson Lynd