The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, the black man’s right to his body, or woman’s right to her soul.

History is written by winners.

The greater amount of truth is impulsively uttered; thus the greater amount is spoken, not written.

Without the basis in written law, and without the basis in our Constitution ratified by the people, judges can’t make laws. And if we accept the notion that their dictates are law, then we have not only submitted to tyranny, we have abandoned a republican form of government.

People with clear, written goals, accomplish far more in a shorter period of time than people without them could ever imagine.

I walked slowly out on the beach. A few yards below high-water mark I stopped and read the words again: WRITE YOUR WORRIES ON THE SAND. I let the paper blow away, reached down and picked up a fragment of shell. Kneeling there under the vault of the sky, I wrote several words, one above the other. Then I walked away, and I did not look back. I had written my troubles on the sand. The tide was coming in.

The words of language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The physical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images.

The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes.

We have so many different options now and ways to communicate digitally. But I don’t think anything is more meaningful or powerful than a hand-written letter.

When history is written as it ought to be written, it is the moderation and long patience of the masses at which men will wonder, not their ferocity.

Rock music was never written for or performed for conservative tastes.

What is Fortune, what is Fame? Futile gold and phantom name. Riches buried in a cave, Glory written on a grave.

Most of my recent plays were written in the railway train between Hatfield and Kings Cross. I write anywhere, on the top of omnibuses or wherever I may be; it is all the same to me.

Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own unorthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.

When anything important has to be written … I think your hand concentrates for you.

Our destiny is not written for us, but by us.

I have written things that Republicans and Democrats and all kinds of figures have either hated or felt very uncomfortable about. Because in doing these long projects and books, you get close to the bone. And they’re not calling me up and asking me for dinner.

The story of a poor man’s life is written on his body, in a sharp pen.

The best way to prepare [to be a programmer] is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and I fished out listings of their operating systems.

We improv-ed scenes that didn’t happen in the movie. We improv-ed the scenes that are written in the movie without the dialogue as written. We played around a lot to try and figure out just how we could flow with what was already written in the story and how we could highlight those imbalances and those points at which we came to loggerheads.

Everything I have ever written has been in the same chair, in the same room.

I’m late to everything. I’ve always wanted to have it written in my will that when I die, the coffin shows up a half hour late and says on the side, like in gold, ‘Sorry I’m Late’.

I don’t care who likes it or buys it. Because if you use that criterion, Mozart would have never written Don Giovanni, Charlie Parker never would have played anything but swing music. There comes a point at which you have to stand up and say, this is what I have to do.

If you lead a simple life, and that story is written, then that story will not satisfy. It needs an angle. Suppose there is no angle?

I’d written songs with lots of people, from one spectrum to the other.

We believe in humility and integrity, the spirit of one people, bound together under God. We understand that the Constitution was written to control and regulate the government, not the people.

In general, what is written must be easy to read and easy to speak; which is the same.

Oh, my God. What if you wake up some day, and you’re 65 or 75, and you never got your novel or memoir written; or you didn’t go swimming in warm pools or oceans because your thighs were jiggly or you had a nice big comfortable tummy; or you were just so strung out on perfectionism and people-pleasing that you forgot to have a big juicy creative life, of imagination and radical silliness and staring off into space like when you were a kid? It’s going to break your heart. Don’t let this happen.

You learn the values that are inherent in the scene that the writer has written. You learn about who you as a character are in relation to those others who are working with you within that scene.

Language also encodes our past. We want to know who we are. To know who we are, we have to know who we used to be. Consequently, our literature, written in the past, anchors us in that past.

I never could have written the screenplay because I would have been forced to learn new software and I can’t learn one more thing.

I have never, for a single moment, been aware of pressure from anyone in television about how I dress, what my shape is or how I speak. I’ve always written my own scripts. I’ve always been the first to point out that I need to be fit. I need to look good.

People will always be tempted to wipe their feet on anything with ‘welcome’ written on it.

You just have to keep getting out of your own way so that whatever it is that wants to be written can use you to write it.

All songs are already perfectly written. It is the writer’s job to find it and get it on paper.