Legal Writing Quotes

Why I find Louis Brandeis so exciting and inspiring because he's teaching us - good legal writing is not a matter of taste, it's a matter of connection with fellow citizens and of democratic education. ~ Jeffrey Rosen

If my opinion runs more than twenty pages," she said, "I am disturbed that I couldn't do it shorter." The mantra in her chambers is "Get it right and keep it tight." She disdains legal Latin, and demands extra clarity in an opinion's opening lines, which she hopes the public will understand. "If you can say it in plain English, you should," RBG says. Going through "innumerable drafts," the goal is to write an opinion where no sentence should need to be read twice. "I think that law should be a literary profession," RBG says, "and the best legal practitioners regard law as an art as well as a craft. ~ Irin Carmon

There are two things wrong with almost all legal writing. One is its style. The other is its content. ~ Fred Rodell

ood legal writing does not sound as though it was written by a lawyer. Good legal writing, like good writing in general, is writing that keeps the readers' interests foremost.13 ~ Ross Guberman

My resting pulse as a writer is writing idealistically and romantically; aspirationally. My taste lies in quixotic heroes. ~ Aaron Sorkin

P.S. If you do not receive this, of course it must have been miscarried; therefore I beg you to write and let me know. ~ Boyle Roche

The element of craftsmanship in poetry is obscured by the fact that all men are taught to speak and most to read and write, while very few men are taught to draw or paint or write music. ~ W. H. Auden

I am a writer, and I will write what I want to write. ~ J.K. Rowling

I have made three rules of writing for myself that are absolutes: Never take advice. Never show or discuss work in progress. Never answer a critic. ~ Raymond Chandler

We need to boost each other to get to the top. It is much more effective than stepping on each other. ~ Teresa Mummert

Whenever you talk about writing I think you have to remember that it all has a big question mark over it - every word has a big question mark over it. ~ George Saunders

However, there is no legal and legitimate state called Israel. ~ Hassan Nasrallah

There is no greater hiding place for a secret than within the mind of a madman. ~ Alexander Ferrick

When I said I wasn't with another girl

the January after we fell in love for the 3rd time,
it's because it wasn't actual sex.
In the February that began our radio silence,
it was actual sex. I hate the tight shirts
that go below your waistline.
Not only do they make you look too young,
but then your torso is a giraffe's neck attached to tiny legs.
I screamed at myself in the subway
for writing poems about you still.
I made a scene. I think about you almost
each morning, and roughly every five days, I still
believe you're there.
I still masturbate to you.
When we got really bad,
I would put another coat of mop water on the floor of the bar
to make sure you were asleep when I got to my side of the bed.
You are the only person to whom I've lied, knowing
I was telling the truth. I miss the way your neck
wraps around my face like a cave we are both lost in.
I remember when you said being with me
is like being alone with company.
My friend Sarah wrote a poem about pink ponies.
I'm scared you're my pink pony.
Hers is dead. It is really sad. You're not dead.
You live in Ohio, or Washington, or Wherever.
You are a shadow my body leaves on other girls.
I have a growing queue of things I know
will make you laugh and I don't know where to put them.
I mourn like you're dead. If you had asked me to stay,
I would not have said no.
I ~ Jon Sands

I have often believed the pen to be a needle, and ink to be a thread. Each story is an intricately woven tapestry and with each word I invariably sew a piece of myself into the page. ~ Shaun Hick

Imagine you are trying to lose weight and attempting to concentrate on writing an article, but there is a bowl with your favorite chocolate cookies in your field of vision, a permanent immoral offer. If we are capable of rejecting such offers or to postpone them into the future, then we can also concentrate on that which we currently want to do. ~ Thomas Metzinger

The thing with videogame characters is that they tend to be really undercooked, and people don't take the time to really flesh them out. They don't treat them with the respect that a writer writing characters in any other medium would treat their character. ~ Rhianna Pratchett

Every English village seems to have a particular day when some local tradition is celebrated - and the celebratory food is often pie. ~ Janet Clarkson

I like the physical action of writing down by hand, and I don't just use it for writing my fiction. ~ Joe Haldeman

For me, writing for kids is harder because they're a more discriminating audience. While adults might stay with you, if you lose your pacing or if you have pages of extraneous description, a kid's not going to do that. They will drop the book. ~ Rick Riordan

Good evening," said the barman. "Why is a raven like a writing desk?" "Because Poe wrote on both? ~ Jasper Fforde

Mythology, science and space exploration are subjects that have fascinated me since my early childhood. And they were always connected somehow with the music I write. ~ Vangelis

The zionist argument to justify Israel's present occupation of Arab Palestine has no intelligent or legal basis in history. ~ Malcolm X

The people whose necks hurt when I write about the Middle East tend to live in Brooklyn or Boca Raton: the kind of Zionist who pays another man to live in Israel for him. I have nothing but contempt for such people. ~ Tony Judt

Great Literature is help for humans. It is medicine of the highest order. In a more aware culture, writers would be considered priests. And, in fact, I have approached writing in a distinctly priestess frame of mind. I know what The Color Purple can mean to people, women and men, who have no voice. Who believe they have few choices in life. It can open to them, to their view, the full abundance of this amazing journey we are all on. It can lift them into a new realization of their own power, beauty, love, courage. It is a book that unites the present with the past, therefore giving people a sense of history and of timelessness they might never achieve otherwise. And even were it not 'great' literature, it has the best interests of all of us humans at heart. That we grow, change, challenge, encourage, love fiercely in the awareness that real love can never be incorrect. ~ Alice Walker

For it is not Histories that I am writing, but Lives; and in the most illustrious deeds there is not always a manifestation of virtue or vice, nay, a slight thing like a phrase or a jest often makes a greater revelation of character than battles where thousands fall, or the greatest armaments, or sieges of cities. ~ Plutarch

Writing is the witness to myself about myself. Whatever others say of me or how they interpret me is a simulacrum of their own devising. ~ Amy Tan

It's rather disconcerting to sit around a table in a critique of someone else's work, only to realize that the antagonist in the story is none other than yourself, and no one present thinks you're a very likable character. ~ Michelle Richmond

When woman has a newspaper which fear and favor cannot touch, then it will be that she can freely write her own thoughts. ~ Susan B. Anthony

Stationery is addictive. I get mine made in Paris at Benetton, and writing on it gives me a strange thrill. ~ Graydon Carter

You should make it hard on yourself to write so you're easier to read. ~ Fran Lebowitz

A pathological business, writing, don't you think? Just look what a writer actually does: all that unnatural tense squatting and hunching, all those rituals: pathological! ~ Hans Magnus Enzensberger

Recollection is the only paradise from which we cannot be turned out. ~ Jean Paul

Most beginning writers - and I was the same - are like chefs trying to cook great dishes that they've never tasted themselves. How can you make a great - or even an adequate - bouillabaisse if you've never had any? If you don't really understand why people read mysteries - or romances or literary novels or thrillers or whatever - then there's no way in the world you're going to write one that anyone wants to publish. This is the meaning of the well-known expression "Write what you know." ~ Daniel Quinn

The public like to insult poets because they are individual, but once they have insulted them, they leave them alone. In the case of the novel and the drama, arts in which the public do take an interest, the result of the exercise of popular authority has been absolutely ridiculous. No country produces such badly-written fiction, such tedious, common work in the novel form, such silly, vulgar plays as England. It must necessarily be so. The popular standard is of such a character that no artist can get to it. It is at once too easy and too difficult to be a popular novelist. It is too easy, because the requirements of the public as far as plot, style, psychology, treatment of life, and treatment of literature are concerned are within the reach of the very meanest capacity and the most uncultivated mind. It is too difficult, because to meet such requirements the artist would have to do violence to his temperament, would have to write not for the artistic joy of writing, but for the amusement of half-educated people, and so would have to suppress his individualism, forget his culture, annihilate his style, and surrender everything that is valuable in him. ~ Oscar Wilde

And as to experience-well, think how little some good poets have had, or how much some bad ones have. ~ Elizabeth Bishop

If I had a nickel for every time someone told me apologetically "I don't read fiction," I wouldn't have to write fiction anymore. And I share that fascination with the truth. I'm not looking down my nose at it. ~ Ron Currie Jr.

For me, writing is a kind of coping mechanism. ~ Chuck Palahniuk