A Quote by Baron de Montesquieu

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

Quote Topics

Badly Himself Man Often Others Speaking Speaks Well Write Writes

Quote Author

Baron de Montesquieu
French - Author
January 18, 1689 - February 10, 1755

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

Shakespeare often writes so ill that you hesitate to believe he could ever write supremely well; or, if this way of putting it seem indecorous and abominable, he very often writes so well that you are loth to believe he could ever have written thus extremely ill.

William Ernest Henley

Why does the writer write? The writer writes to serve--hopeless ly he writes in the hope that he might serve--not himself and not others, but that great cold elemental grace that knows us.

Joy Williams

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

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

He that writes to himself writes to an eternal public.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Joss Whedon writes beautiful drama. His sensitivity and his sense of drama and scenes are pretty exceptional. There's no one else writing like him, really, in sci-fi and TV. That's not to say there are no astonishing writers on TV. I was nervous about coming to America and playing an English person who speaks very English when all the writers are American, because it's a very particular thing to imitate, and if it's badly imitated, it sounds painfully contorted and silly. And he writes very well for English people. It was Joss Whedon who persuaded me.

Olivia Williams

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

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

From writing rapidly it does not result that one writes well, but from writing well it results that one writes rapidly.

Quintilian

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

Stanley Kubrick

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

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

Who speaks is not who writes, and who writes is not who is.

Roland Barthes

It's become fashionable these days to say that the writer writes because he is not whole, he has a wound, he writes to heal it, but who cares if the writer is not whole; of course the writer is not whole, or even particularly well.

Joy Williams

When a man writes a romance, the woman dies. When a woman writes one, it ends all tidy and sweet.