These written word quotes will inspire you.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging written word quotes, written word sayings, and written word proverbs.
Famous Written Word Quotes
- “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.” ~ Mark Twain
- “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
- “The beauty of the written word is that it can be held close to the heart and read over and over again.” ~ Florence Littauer
- “Words – so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.” ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne
-
“The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.” ~ John Steinbeck
- “To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it’s about, but the inner music that words make.” ~ Truman Capote
- “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
- “A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” ~ Thomas Mann
- “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.” ~ George Orwell
-
“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” ~ Anton Chekhov
- “We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.” ~ Ernest Hemingway
- “Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say ‘infinitely’ when you mean ‘very’; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.” ~ C. S. Lewis
- “The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is you really want to say.” ~ Mark Twain
- “One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment.” ~ Hart Crane
-
“It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.” ~ Robert Benchley
- “The maker of a sentence launches out into the infinite and builds a road into Chaos and old Night, and is followed by those who hear him with something of wild, creative delight.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “I love being a writer. What I can’t stand is the paperwork.” ~ Peter De Vries
- “No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.” ~ Henry Adams
- “He that uses many words for explaining any subject, doth, like the cuttlefish, hide himself for the most part in his own ink.” ~ John Ray
-
“If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write, because our culture has no use for it.” ~ Anais Nin
- “The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.” ~ Thomas Jefferson
- “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.
- “I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.” ~ James A. Michener
- “Great is the art of beginning, but greater is the art of ending.” ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
-
“Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality.” ~ Joseph Conrad
- “I try to leave out the parts readers skip.” ~ Elmore Leonard
- “The maker of a sentence launches out into the infinite.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “Flowers have spoken to me more than I can tell in written words. They are the hieroglyphics of angels, loved by all men for the beauty of their character, though few can decipher even fragments of their meaning.” ~ Lydia M. Child
- “Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.” ~ E. L. Doctorow
-
“If there’s a book you really want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” ~ Toni Morrison
- “Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.” ~ William Wordsworth
- “The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar things new.” ~ William Makepeace Thackeray
- “One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them.” ~ Hart Crane
- “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
-
“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
- “The written word may be man’s greatest invention. It allows us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn.” ~ Abraham Lincoln
- “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
- “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 written word has this advantage, that it lasts and can await the time when it is allowed to take effect.” ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
-
“It seems inevitable that the magic of the written word will fade.” ~ Hugh Mackay
- “Written words differ from spoken words in being material structures. A spoken word is a process in the physical world, having an essential time-order; a written word is a series of pieces of matter, having an essential space-order.” ~ Bertrand Russell
- “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
- “Acknowledgements With grateful thanks to the three least-appreciated and hardest-working proselytizers of the written word: independent bookstores, librarians, and teachers.” ~ Gail Carriger
- “I am a dreamer of words, of written words. I think I am reading; a word stops me. I leave the page. The syllables of the word begin to move around. Stressed accents begin to invert. The word abandons its meaning like an overload which is too heavy and prevents dreaming. Then words take on other meanings as if they had the right to be young. And the words wander away, looking in the nooks and crannies of vocabulary for new company, bad company.” ~ Gaston Bachelard
-
“The written word is the link between the past and the future.” ~ Lincoln Barnett
- “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 Tozer4
- “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
- “It is much, much worse to receive bad news through the written word than by somebody simply telling you, and I’m sure you understand why. When somebody simply tells you bad news, you hear it once, and that’s the end of it. But when bad news is written down, whether in a letter or a newspaper or on your arm in felt tip pen, each time you read it, you feel as if you are receiving the bad news again and again.” ~ Daniel Handler
- “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
-
“The written word endures, the spoken word disappears” ~ Neil Postman
- “The written word endures, the spoken word disappears” ~ Neil Postman
- “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
- “This suspension of one’s own reality, this being entirely alone in a strange city (at times I wondered if I had lost the power of speech) is an enriching state for a writer. Then the written word … takes on an intensity of its own. Nothing gets exteriorized or dissipated; all is concentrated within.” ~ May Sarton
- “It will be practicable to blot written words which you do not publish; but the spoken word it is not possible to recall.
[Lat., Delere licebit
Quod non edideris; nescit vox missa reverti.]” ~ Horace -
“The fixation of the theater in one language–written words, music, lights, noises–betokens its imminent ruin.” ~ Antonin Artaud
- “When the first emperor wanted to unify the country, one of the major policies was to create one system of written signs. By force, brutal force, he eliminated all the other scripts. One script became the official script. All the others were banned. And those who used other scripts were punished severely. And then the meanings of all the characters, over the centuries, had to be kept uniform as a part of the political apparatus. So from the very beginning the written word was a powerful political tool.” ~ Ha Jin
- “I love the written word; I love when someone takes the time or leaves you a note or sends a letter.” ~ Sandra Bullock
- “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 exactly the person who wants to read what I have written…” ~ Will Self
- “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
-
“The written word is everything.” ~ John Drinkwater
- “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
- “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
-
“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
- “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
- “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
