A Quote by Georg C. Lichtenberg

A man always writes absolutely well whenever he writes in his own manner, but the wigmaker who tries to write like Gellert ... writes badly.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

Quote Topics

Absolutely Always Badly His Like Man Manner Own Tries Well Whenever Write Writes

Quote Author

Georg C. Lichtenberg
German - Scientist
July 1, 1742 - February 24, 1799

A man who writes well writes not as others write, but as he himself writes; it is often in speaking badly that he speaks well.

Baron de Montesquieu

One writes not to be read but to breathe...one writes to think, to pray, to analyze. One writes to clear one's mind, to dissipate one's fears, to face one's doubts, to look at one's mistakes--in order to retrieve them. One writes to capture and crystallize one's joy, but also to disperse one's gloom. Like prayer--you go to it in sorrow more than joy, for help, a road back to 'grace'.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

[Raymond Roussel] said that after his first book he expected that the next morning there would be a kind of aura around his person and that everyone in the street would be able to see that he had written a book. This is the obscure desire harboured by everyone who writes. It is true that the first text one writes is neither written for others, nor because one is what one is: one writes to become other than what one is. One tries to modify one's way of being through the act of writing.

Michel Foucault

A good journalist is not the one that writes what people say, but the one that writes what he is supposed to write.

Todor Zhivkov

The writer who aims at producing the platitudes which are "not for an age, but for all time" has his reward in being unreadable inall ages.... The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only sort of man who writes about all people and about all time.

George Bernard Shaw

No one writes anything worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Happy is he who looks only into his work to know if it will succeed, never into the times or the public opinion; and who writes from the love of imparting certain thoughts and not from the necessity of sale - who writes always to the unknown friend.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

George Bernard Shaw

I'll read anything Anne Carson writes, anything J. M. Coetzee writes, and anything Cormac McCarthy writes. I'll drop whatever I'm doing to read a new Mary Ruefle essay.

Anthony Doerr

One man writes a novel. One man writes a symphony. It is essential that one man make a film.

Stanley Kubrick

The writer trusts nothing she writes-it should be too reckless and alive for that, it should be beautiful and menacing and slightly out of control. . . . Good writing . . . explodes in the reader's face. Whenever the writer writes, it's always three or four or five o'clock in the morning in her head.

Joy Williams

All I have to do is keep my spirit, feelings and conscience like a sheet of blank paper, and let the Spirit and power of God write upon it what He pleases. When He writes, I will read; but if I read before He writes, I am very likely to be wrong

Brigham Young

Every man writes his manner. I just made poor decisions.

O. J. Mayo

He that writes to himself writes to an eternal public. That statement only is fit to be made public, which you have come at in attempting to satisfy your own curiosity.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

He who writes prose builds his temple to Fame in rubble; he who writes verses builds it in granite.