Full oft have letters caused the writers
To curse the day they were inditers. [ Butler ]

Tailors and writers must mind the fashion. [ Proverb ]

The mind, relaxing into needful sport,
Should turn to writers of an abler sort.
Whose wit well managed, and whose classic style,
Give truth a lustre and make wisdom smile. [ Cowper ]

Great writers and orators are commonly economists in the use of words. [ Whipple ]

Prudence is one of the virtues which were called cardinal by the ancient ethical writers. [ William Fleming ]

Two sorts of writers possess genius; those who think, and those who cause others to think. [ J. Roux ]

Successful writers learn at last what they should learn at first, - to be intelligently simple. [ Henry Wheeler Shaw (pen name Josh Billings) ]

We have some writers so abstruse and deep that they drown themselves in their fathomless sentences. [ H. W. Shaw ]

Those authors who appear sometimes to forget they are writers, and remember they are men, will be our favorites. [ Disraeli ]

The history of literature abounds with examples of words used almost without meaning by whole classes of writers. [ William Mathews ]

The old prose writers wrote as if they were speaking to an audience; while, among us, prose is invariably written for the eye alone. [ Niebuhr ]

Fame, as a river, is narrowest where it is bred, and broadest afar off; so exemplary writers depend not upon the gratitude of the world. [ Sir W. Davenant ]

Those writers who lie on the watch for novelty can have little hope of greatness; for great things cannot have escaped former observation. [ Johnson ]

One of the amusements of idleness is reading without the fatigue of close attention; and the world, therefore, swarms with writers whose wish is not to be studied, but to be read. [ Johnson ]

Mediocrity is now, as formerly, dangerous, commonly fatal, to the poet; but among even the successful writers of prose, those who rise sensibly above it are the very rarest exceptions. [ Gladstone ]

As the air and manner of a gentleman can be acquired only by living habitually in the best society, so grace in composition must be attained by an habitual acquaintance with classical writers. [ Dugald Stewart ]

The censure of frequent and long parentheses has led writers into the preposterous expedient of leaving out the marks by which they are indicated. It is no cure to a lame man to take away his crutches. [ Whately ]

Among the writers of all ages, some deserve fame, and have it; others neither have nor deserve it; some have it, not deserving it; others, though deserving it, yet totally miss it,, or have it not equal to their deserts. [ Milton ]

O Truth! pure and sacred virgin, when wilt thou be worthily revered? O Goddess who instructs us, why didst thou put thy palace in a well? When will our learned writers, alike free from bitterness and from flattery, faithfully teach us life? [ Voltaire ]

The whole genius of an author consists in describing well, and delineating character well. Homer, Plato, Virgil, Horace only excel other writers by their expressions and images: we must indicate what is true if we mean to write naturally, forcibly and delicately. [ La Bruyere ]

Style! style, why, all writers will tell you that it is the very thing which can least of all be changed. A man's style is nearly as much a part of him as his physiognomy, his figure, the throbbing of his pulse, - in short, as any part of his being which is at least subjected to the action of the will. [ Fenelon ]

Writers of novels and romances in general bring a double loss on their readers, - they rob them both of their time and money; representing men, manners and things that never have been, nor are likely to be; either confounding or perverting history and truth, inflating the mind, or committing violence upon the understanding. [ Mary Wortley Montagu ]

Harmony of period and melody of style have greater weight than is generally imagined in the judgment we pass upon writing and writers. As a proof of this, let us reflect what texts of scripture, what lines in poetry, or what periods we most remember and quote, either in verse or prose, and we shall find them to be only musical ones. [ Shenstone ]

It is a mathematical demonstration, that these twenty-six letters admit of so many changes in their order, and make such a long roll of differently-ranged alphabets, not two of which are alike, that they could not all be exhausted though a million millions of writers should each write above a thousand alphabets a day for the space of a million millions of years. [ R. Bentley ]

If there were no readers there certainly would be no writers. Clearly, therefore, the existence of writers depends upon the existence of readers; and, of course, as the cause must be antecedent to the effect, readers existed before writers. Yet, on the other hand, if there were no writers there could be no readers, so it should appear that writers must be antecedent to readers. [ Paul Chatfield, M.D ]

What a place to be in is an old library! It seems as though all the souls of all the writers that have bequeathed their labors to these Bodleians were reposing here as in some dormitory, or middle state. I do not want to handle, to profane the leaves, their winding-sheets. I could as soon dislodge a shade. I seem to inhale learning, walking amid their foliage; and the odor of their old moth-scented coverings is fragrant as the first bloom of those sciential apples which grew amid the happy orchard. [ Charles Lamb ]