A Quote by Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon

Those who write as they speak, even though they speak well, write badly.

Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon

Quote Topics

Badly Even Speak Those Though Well Write

Quote Author

Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon
French - Naturalist
September 7, 1707 - April 16, 1788

Like, even when I speak, I think I speak the same way I write. I kind of see it a certain way, and it leads me to write it exactly how I'm seeing it.

Anthony Hamilton

I write and speak about personal and spiritual growth. One week I write about illness and another week I speak about relationships and another week I write about work and money and another week I speak to people with obesity issues. I write about whatever wounds seem to cry out for more enlightened solutions, and the love that heals them all.

Marianne Williamson

There are some who speak well and write badly. For the place and the audience warm them, and draw from their minds more than they think of without that warmth.

Blaise Pascal

For the only way one can speak of nothing is to speak of it as though it were something, just as the only way one can speak of God is to speak of him as though he were a man, which to be sure he was, in a sense, for a time, and as the only way one can speak of man, even our anthropologists have realized that, is to speak of him as though he were a termite.

Samuel Beckett

Great authors, when they write about causes, adduce not only those they think are true but also those they do not believe in, provided they have some originality and beauty. They speak truly and usefully enough if they speak ingeniously.

Michel de Montaigne

I could never write about the sort of people John Cheever or John Updike or even Margaret Atwood write about. I don't mean I couldn't write as well as they do, which of course I couldn't; they're great writers, and I'm no writer at all. But I couldn't even write badly about normal, neurotic people. I don't know that world from the inside. That's just not my orientation.

Jim Woodring

Language the most forcible proceeds from the man who is most sincere. The way to speak with power, or to write words that pierce mankind to the quick, is to speak and write honestly.

Elias Lyman Magoon

Men must speak English who can write Sanskrit; they must speak a modern language who write, perchance, an ancient and universal one.

Henry David Thoreau

For those of us who write, it is necessary to scrutinize not only the truth of what we speak, but the truth of that language by which we speak it.

Audre Lorde

What we call the freedom of the individual is not just the luxury of one intellectual to write what he likes to write but his being a voice which can speak for those who are silent.

Stephen Spender

Write against patterns. Go against the devils. Write what you never write. Lie. Validate what you don’t validate. Indulge what you don’t like. Wallow in it. Write the opposite of what you always write, think, speak. Do everything against the grain!

Deena Metzger

I feel now that the time is come when even a woman or a child who can speak a word for freedom and humanity is bound to speak... I hope every woman who can write will not be silent.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Elegance of language may not be in the power of all of us; but simplicity and straight forwardness are. Write much as you would speak; speak as you think. If with your inferior, speak no coarser than usual; if with your superiors, no finer.

William P. Alford

When I write, I actually hear the characters speak. Almost like an actor - even though I'm not an actor at all - getting into their truth and to justify what they do.