Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon Quotes

We speak naturally but spend all our lives trying to write naturally.

I think that I speak a lot like I write.

I like how I write better than how I speak.

Once the grammar has been learned, writing is simply talking on paper and in time learning what not to say.

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.

I try to make the voice in my head come out onto the page. I try to make it much more conversational than other writing. I speak everything, so if something sounds right I write it. It's more about sound and the rhythm of speech than written language.

A person who can write a long letter with ease, cannot write ill.

If you make yourself understood, you're always speaking well.

If you can talk, you can write.

Everything in writing begins with language. Language begins with listening.

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.

The way you write affects what you say.

I am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker. It has always been hard for me to say exactly what I mean in speech But if I have written a clumsiness, I may erase it.

I thought clarity of communication was the most important thing in writing, and if you really cared about getting your idea across, you would say it in the most straightforward way possible. Later, in college and grad school, I came to realize that language is a technology like any other, and that it's always evolving - clarity of expression is always evolving.

It has been said that good prose should resemble the conversation of a well-bred man.

We always speak well when we manage to be understood.

Exclamation points are the most irritating of all. Look! they say, look at what I just said! How amazing is my thought! It is like being forced to watch someone else's small child jumping up and down crazily in the center of the living room shouting to attract attention. If a sentence really has something of importance to say, something quite remarkable, it doesn't need a mark to point it out. And if it is really, after all, a banal sentence needing more zing, the exclamation point simply emphasizes its banality!

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

If you can't write clearly, you probably don't think nearly as well as you think you do.

Writing is always harder than talking.

There never was an age in which so many people were able to write badly.

Only write to me, write to me, I love to see the hop and skip and sudden starts of your ink.

Let us never underestimate the power of a well-written letter.

Generally speaking, an author's style is a faithful copy of his mind. If you would write a lucid style, let there first be light in your own mind; and if you would write a grand style, you ought to have a grand character.

Talking like touching. Writing like punching somebody.