The Written Word Quotes

As long as people believe in the written word and a good story.. They will believe in me. ~ Solange Nicole

Becoming a writer is a lifelong journey. It cannot be learned in a day or even a month or a year. We will never fully learn all there is to know about our craft, and even if we did we wouldn't realize it. We are filled with self-doubt by nature, and many of us will work our entire lives to master the art of the written word without ever recognizing the true talent we possess. Writing is a personal journey of self-discovery and growth, and should be honored as such. If you wonder about my best writing, I would say it came without warning, in moments when I was most vulnerable - with the door shut and my heart split wide open. ~ Shanda Trofe Write From The Heart

I love the written word so much, I know it's gonna flow naturally. ~ Alicia Keys

The written word is so much like evidence - like something that can be used against you later. ~ Margaret Atwood

how tragic it was that the written word was immortal while people were not, ~ Katarina Bivald

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

The written word is the best thing that mankind has ever done. I'm glad to be a part of it! ~ Christie Amory

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

Designers provide ways into - and out of - the flood of words by breaking up text into pieces and offering shortcuts and alternate routes through masses of information. ( ... ) Although many books define the purpose of typography as enhancing the readability of the written word, one of design's most humane functions is, in actuality, to help readers avoid reading. ~ Ellen Lupton

Everyone wanted to create his own history. There was nothing as powerful as the written word; history had taught them all that much. ~ Ted Dekker

The act of writing bears something in common with the act of love. The writer, at his most productive moments, just flows. He gives of that which is uniquely himself. He makes himself naked, recording his nakedness in the written word. Herein lies some of the terror which frequently freezes a writer, preventing him from producing. Herein, too, lies some of the courage that must be entailed in letting others learn how one has experienced or is experiencing the world. ~ Sidney Jourard

My education and that of my Black associates were quite different from the education of our white schoolmates. In the classroom we all learned past participles, but in the streets and in our homes the Blacks learned to drop s's from plurals and suffixes from past-tense verbs. We were alert to the gap separating the written word from the colloquial. We learned to slide out of one language and into another without being conscious of the effort. At school, in a given situation, we might respond with "That's not unusual." But in the street, meeting the same situation, we easily said, "It be's like that sometimes. ~ Maya Angelou

Remember that for all the books we have in print, are as many that have never reached print, have never been written down-even now, in this age of compulsive reverence for the written word, history, even social ethic, are taught by means of stories, and the people who have been conditioned into thinking only in terms of what is written-and unfortunately nearly all the products of our educational system can do no more than this-are missing what is before their eyes. For instance, the real history of Africa is still in the custody of black storytellers and wise men, black historians, medicine men: it is a verbal history, still kept safe from the white man and his predations. Everywhere, if you keep your mind open, you will find the words not written down. So never let the printed page be your master. Above all, you should know that the fact that you have to spend one year, or two years, on one book, or one author means that you are badly taught-you should have been taught to read your way from one sympathy to another, you should be learning to follow you own intuitive feeling about what you need; that is what you should have been developing, not the way to quote from other people. ~ Doris Lessing

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

I don't belong to a church or political party or a group of any kind. I feel that Amnesty International is the most civilized organization in history. Its currency is the written word. Its weapon is the letter; that's why I am a member. I believe in its non-violence; I believe in its effectiveness. Its dignity and its sense of commitment. Its focus on individuals and the concentration and tenacity with which they defend those imprisoned for their ideas has earned it the cautious respect of repressive governments throughout the world. ~ Sting

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

Through the written Word we discover the Living Word - Jesus Christ. ~ Billy Graham

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

The wisdom that sleeps
In the written word
Is overcome by a despair
That lurks within ~ Sui Ishida

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

And even if something had once been committed to paper, did it mean that it was still true? Always true? Unlike the relative permanence of paint, words were temporal. You uttered them and they evanesced, but if you wrote them, they remained, though whether the written word was any more truthful than the spoken was a mystery to her. Only paint was honest. ~ Robin Oliveira

As with ... even the written word, the remote overview is one more wrenched perspective that developing civilization has glued, collagelike, to the once unified experience of life. ~ Bruce Berger

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

To me, there's no better way to stir the soul than through the power of the written word. ~ Jake Parent

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

I believe the Bible to be the written Word of God and to contain in it the whole rule of faith and manners. ~ Robert Treat Paine

Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do. ~ Italo Calvino

That was the problem ... with trusting to the written word ... We were human, mortal and fallible. We forgot, we made errors, argued ambiguities, and twisted meanings to suit our own ends.
And in doing so, mayhap we reshaped the gods themselves. ~ Jacqueline Carey

Prophets do not bring new truth. Revelation is simply a revealing of what is already true and bringing it to bear upon our heart and soul. Revelation is based upon insight into the written Word of God, not into visions and dreams and prophecies. These other things are simply tools for expressing the Word, they are not the Word; no more than the water hose is water, it simply delivers the water. ~ Chip Brogden

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

The written word is everything. ~ John Drinkwater

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

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

I speak as an unregenerate reader, one who still believes that language and not technology is the true evolutionary miracle. I have not yet given up on the idea that the experience of literature offers a kind of wisdom that cannot be discovered elsewhere; that there is profundity in the verbal encounter itself, never mind what further profundities that author has to offer; and that for a host of reasons the bound book is the ideal vehicle for the written word. ~ Sven Birkerts

Artistry is the dance of color & form, whether visual, musical, or sparked in the imagination by the written word. ~ Cathryn Louis

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

My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel
it is, before all, to make you see. ~ Joseph Conrad

The written word is redundant on the high seas. Why? Because paper gets wet too easily. ~ Walter Moers

The most difficult thing to do after a life well lived is to sit down and type it all out. To start with, your fingers are old and gnarled. You can see the skin crinkled up like paper, the knobby knuckles, the veins standing up blue and aggressive and you wonder, when did your hands change, when did they stop being young and firm and definite, when did the hesitancy creep in, when did the trembling begin. Your mind sieves through memories as thick as molasses and as bitterly sweet. The words trip on your tongue but hesitate to make their way onto the page because you debate endlessly in your head about which of them you should put down in print, terrified of the permanency of the written word. Memories are the kind of elusiveness that shift, change form, and remodel themselves by the second. It is a challenge to wrestle with them, to get them to agree to be analysed, to be put down in words and encapsulated into sentences, moulded into paragraphs. As long as they are shifting, morphing into different things as the moment suits them, they aren't bound by one person's recollection of how things were, of how they happened. These are my memories.
And this was my life. And so I try to write this. I am already half way through what I am trying to put down. I have no idea who would want to read the story of my life. But I write it out, more for myself, than for anyone else who would care to read. ~ Kiran Manral

Typefaces are to the written word what different dialects are to different languages. ~ Steven Heller

For a while, Criticism travels side by side with the Work, then Criticism vanishes and it's the Readers who keep pace. The journey may be long or short. Then the Readers die one by one and the Work continues on alone, although a new Criticism and new Readers gradually fall into step with it along its path. Then Criticism dies again and the Readers die again and the Work passes over a trail of bones on its journey toward solitude. To come near the work, to sail in her wake, is a sign of certain death, but new Criticism and new Readers approach her tirelessly and relentlessly and are devoured by time and speed. Finally the Work journeys irremediably alone in the Great Vastness. And one day the Work dies, as all things must die and come to an end: the Sun and the Earth and the Solar System and the Galaxy and the farthest reaches of man's memory. Everything that begins as comedy ends in tragedy. ~ Roberto Bolano

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

A man who writes a story is forced to put into it the best of his knowledge and the best of his feeling. The discipline of the written word punishes stupidity and dishonesty. A writer lives in awe of words for they can be cruel or kind, and they can change their meanings right in front of you. ~ John Steinbeck

The words and lives of Christian men must be in continual process of reformation by the written Word of their God. This means that ecclesiastical traditions and private theological speculations may never be identified with the word which God speaks, but are to be classed among the words of men which the Word of God must reform. ~ J.I. Packer

I think the written word is probably the best medium of communication because you have time to reflect, you have time to choose your words, to get your sentences exactly right. Whereas when you're being interviewed, say, you have to talk on the fly, you have to improvise, you can change sentences around, and they're not exactly right. ~ Richard Dawkins

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

People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist. We can rediscover them. Their humor, their tone of voice, their moods. Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort you. They can perplex you. They can alter you. All this, even though they are dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in the ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic. ~ Diane Setterfield

What a strange world it is, where prisoners are left their weapons and the written word is a mortal danger. ~ Megan Whalen Turner

Whenever we read a line of the Bible, we must say, Lord Jesus, let me contact You in the divine Word. Lord, You are the living Word. Without You as the living Word I can receive nothing as life from the written Word. Lord, I must contact You. Although You are so mysterious, I praise You that You have given me such a tangible Word. This Word is solid, concrete, and substantial. I thank You for the Word that I can read and pray with. Yet, Lord, what I need is not the letter in black and white, but You, the living Spirit. ~ Witness Lee

The best advice I can give you: Look unto Jesus, beholding his beauty in the written word. ~ John Newton

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

I know that one is able to win people far more by the spoken that by the written word, and that every great movement on this globe owes its rise to the great speakers and not to the great writers. ~ Adolf Hitler

The great storehouse of truth is the word of God - the written word, the book of nature, and the book of experience in God's dealing with human life. Here are the treasures from which Christ's workers are to draw. In the search after truth they are to depend upon God, not upon human intelligences, the great men whose wisdom is foolishness with God. Through His own appointed channels the Lord will impart a knowledge of Himself to every seeker. ~ Ellen G. White

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

[John Clare's] father was a casual farm labourer, his family never more than a few days' wages from the poorhouse. Clare himself, from early childhood, scraped a living in the fields. He was schooled capriciously, and only until the age of 12, but from his first bare contact fell wildly in love with the written word. His early poems are remarkable not only for the way in which everything he sees flares into life, but also for his ability to pour his mingled thoughts and observations on to the page as they occur, allowing you, as perhaps no other poet has done, to watch the world from inside his head. Read The Nightingale's Nest, one of the finest poems in the English language, and you will see what I mean.
("John Clare, poet of the environmental crisis 200 years ago" in The Guardian.) ~ George Monbiot

The written word is far more powerful than simply a reminder: it recreates the past in the present, and gives us, not the familiar remembered thing, but the glittering intensity of the summoned-up hallucination. ~ Northrop Frye

Plato used the dialogue format because the exchange of views, the posing and answering of questions, showed that understanding is a living, dynamic process. He distrusted writing because the settled character of the written word makes it look as if truth can be fixed and made to stand still. It is worth remembering that this greatest advocate of the objective reality of truth also believed that our access to that truth was sustained in reasoned discussion. ~ John Churchill, 1st Duke Of Marlborough

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

There can be no more thrilling idea of intimacy that connecting with someone through the agency of the written word. Here we meet, on the page, naked and unadorned: shorn of class, race, gender, sexual identity, age and nationality. The reader I seek is a tautology, for he/she is simply ... the person who wants to read what I have written. ~ Will Self

Simply put: I am an Author with deep passion for the written word.
When I read: I want to feel...
When I write: I want you to feel...
©2014 Suzanne Steele ~ Suzanne Steele

So, what do you go for in a girl?"
He crows, lifting a lager to his lips
Gestures where his mate sits
Downs his glass
"He prefers tits I prefer ass. What do you go for in a girl?"
I don't feel comfortable
The air left the room a long time ago
All eyes are on me
Well, if you must know I want a girl who reads
Yeah. Reads.
I'm not trying to call you a chauvinist
Cos I know you're not alone in this but…
I want a girl who reads
Who needs the written word & uses the added vocabulary
She gleans from novels and poetry
To hold lively conversation In a range of social situations
I want a girl who reads
Who's heart bleeds at the words of Graham Greene Or even Heat magazine
Who'll tie back her hair while reading Jane Eyre
And goes cover to cover with each water stones three for two offer but
I want a girl who doesn't stop there
I want a girl who reads
Who feeds her addiction for fiction
With unusual poems and plays
That she hunts out in crooked bookshops for days and days and days
She'll sit addicted at breakfast, soaking up the back of the cornflakes box
And the information she gets from what she reads makes her a total fox
Cos she's interesting & unique & her theories make me go weak at the knees
I want a girl who reads
A girl who's eyes will analyze
The menu over dinner
Who'll use what she learn ~ Mark Grist

Reading is a solitary pursuit, even a lone passage to a separate world. Yet to read in public, amid strangers, gives it another dimension. Sometimes the city speaks to the page, or the page seems to open up to people passing by. An outdoor reader shares the pulse of a timeless urban conversation between the world and the written word. ~ Nina Bernstein

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty. ~ John Steinbeck

It all comes down to the written word and just how comfortable I am writing them. ~ C.F. Heller

It starts with the writer-it's a familiar dictum, but somehow it keeps getting forgotten along the way. No film-maker, irrespective of his electronic bag of tricks, can ever afford to forget his commitment to the written word. ~ Steven Spielberg

Let us think of a Christian believer in whose life the twin wonders of repentance and the new birth have been wrought. He is now living according to the will of God as he understands it from the written Word. Of such a one it may be said that every act of his life is or can be as truly sacred as prayer or baptism or the Lord's Supper. To say this is not to bring all acts down to one dead level; it is rather to lift every act up into a living kingdom and turn the whole of life into a sacrament. ~ Aiden Wilson Tozer

The written word is weak. Many people prefer life to it. Life gets your blood going, & it smells good. Writing is mere writing, literature is mere. It appeals only to the subtlest senses - the imagination's vision, & the imagination's hearing - & the moral sense, & the intellect. This writing that you do, that so thrills you, that so rocks & exhilarates you, as if you were dancing next to the band, is barely audible to anyone else. ~ Annie Dillard

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. The true writer, the born writer, will scribble words on scraps of litter, the back of a bus tickets, on the wall of a cell .Emma is lost on anything less than 120gsm. ~ David Nicholls

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

Sometimes what-if fantasies are useful. Imagine that the entirety of Western civilisation's coding for computer systems or prints of all films ever made or all copies of Shakespeare and the Bible and the Qur'an were encrypted and held on one tablet device. And if that tablet was lost, stolen, burnt or corrupted, then our knowledge, use and understanding of that content, those words and ideas, would be gone for ever – only, perhaps, lingering in the minds of a very few men of memory whose job it had been to keep ideas alive. This little thought-experiment can help us to comprehend the totemic power of manuscripts. This is the great weight of responsibility for the past, the present and the future that the manuscripts of Constantinople carried. Much of our global cultural heritage – philosophies, dramas, epic poems – survive only because they were preserved in the city's libraries and scriptoria. Just as Alexandria and Pergamon too had amassed vast libraries, Constantinople understood that a physical accumulation of knowledge worked as a lode-stone – drawing in respect, talent and sheer awe. These texts contained both the possibilities and the fact of empire and had a quasi-magical status. This was a time when the written word was considered so potent – and so precious – that documents were thought to be objects with spiritual significance. (...)

It was in Constantinople that the book review was invented. Scholars seem to have had access to books within a proto-lendi ~ Bettany Hughes

There is no greater weapon than knowledge and no greater source of knowledge than the written word. ~ Malala Yousafzai

[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

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

The final product in a play is not just the written word. It's the production, the performance. The script is, of course, a very important piece; but it's only one element. Ultimately, yours is one of several voices. People can change your work in a play for better or worse. ~ Jesse Kellerman

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

All of my books are about researching. I do all the research and I give it to a writer who can put it in the written word better than I could. ~ Bill Wyman

"So we'd get in a horse and buggy and we would go and park under a tree and we'd read poetry to each other." And my grandfather told me all the stories. I mean, their way of communicating ... They didn't have telephones, either, so they communicated with the written word. And I really ... That's how old [Bill] Clinton has become to me [ speaking of how he met Hillary Clinton]. ~ Rush Limbaugh

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

My task is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel
it is, before all, to make you see. That
and no more, and it is everything. ~ Joseph Conrad

The Written Word is a Fairy, as mocking and elusive as Willy Wisp, speaking lying words to us in a feigned voice. So let all readers of books take warning! ~ Hope Mirrlees

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

-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

The written word still enjoyed a certain prestige here. It was a sluggish country. ~ William Gibson

The written word is assumed to have been reflected upon and revised by its author, reviewed by authorities and editors. ~ Neil Postman

Between the covers a book can be a sin. I have spent many hours in search of a waking dream. And once having learned to read, I couldn't imagine my life otherwise. The indifferent children around me didn't share my enthusiasm for the written word. Some might sit for a good story while told, but if a book had no pictures they showed scant interest. ~ Keith Donohue

What (Ada asks) are eyes anyway? Two holes in the mask of life. What (she asks) would they mean to a creature from another corpuscle or milk bubble whose organ of sight was (say) an internal parasite resembling the written word "deified"? What, indeed, would a pair of beautiful (human, lemurian, owlish) eyes mean to anybody if found lying on the seat of a taxi? ~ Vladimir Nabokov

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

Love of the written word. Nurture yet disseminate. ‪Accept and respect‬ people with a different viewpoint. Laugh if you must but spare the flint! ~ Deeba Salim Irfan

The written word isn't necessarily a chore but can be a window into new worlds ~ Wes Moore

Humans are conversant in many media (music, dance, painting), but all of them are analog except for the written word, which is naturally expressed in digital form (i.e. it is a series of discrete symbols - every letter in every book is a member of a certain character set, every "a" is the same as every other "a," and so on). As any communications engineer can tell you, digital signals are much better to work with than analog ones because they are easily copied, transmitted, and error-checked. Unlike analog signals, they are not doomed to degradation over time and distance. That ~ Neal Stephenson

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

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

If God ever commands the spirit of wisdom to depart from me, well, I reckon that I'll never be able to compose the written word again. Not in music, and not in literature. If there is a blank page before me, it wouldn't matter if my right hand held a thousand dollar ink pen from the House of Montblanc, or an ink pen branded Paper Mate, not one word would be jotted from the ink of either or, and the page would remain blank. ("Primary Blog: The Final Post at the Boutique Domain," 2015) ~ Cat Ellington

I still have enough faith in language to believe that if I place enough words next to each other on the page, they will start to speak with sounds of their own. ~ Dexter Palmer

Ignorance is king. Many would not profit by his abdication. Many enrich themselves by means of his dark monarchy. They are his Court, and in his name they defraud and govern, enrich themselves and perpetuate their power. Even literacy they fear, for the written word is another channel of communication that might cause their enemies to become united. Their weapons are keen-honed, and they use them with skill. They will press the battle upon the world when their interests are threatened, and the violence which follows will last until the structure of society as it now exists is leveled to rubble, and a new society emerges. I am sorry. But that is how I see it. ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.

The written word might as well have been my veins, and ink my blood. ~ Ronnell D. Porter

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

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

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

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