The writer is an explorer. Every step
is an advance into a new land.
Writing is not the expression of thought but the actual process of thinking. It’s not the record of your journey but the vehicle.
I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being conscious of living. –Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Real thought is about the destruction of the false, and in the dreamstate, everything is false. Writing is demolition. It is the hardest thing to do because the thing being demolished is you.
If you can’t write clearly, you probably don’t think
nearly as well as you think you do. –Kurt Vonnegut
Mind is your secret weapon and thought is your superpower. Most people go to their grave having never even taken their brain out of the box to see what it can do. This is the one place where you can go a different way and do what so few have ever done.
Writing is thinking and thinking is hard work. –Lewis Black
Paradoxically, counterintuitively, your brain is no place for serious thinking. Your brain is totally under the control of your heart. In order to use your brain, you must allow it to work free of emotional influence and encumbrance.
If people cannot write well, they cannot think well,
and if they cannot think well, others will do their
thinking for them. –George Orwell
You have to get your thoughts out where you can see them and walk around them and attack them from all angles, make them defend themselves or die trying. This cannot be done in your head any more than those blackboards full of arcane physics equations could be done in someone’s head.
I write to understand as much as to be understood. –Elie Wiesel
Thoughts inside your head are merely feelings, beliefs and opinions, and do not even resemble the product of actual thinking. Until you externalize them, there is no actual process of thought.
Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way. –Ray Bradbury
This kind of writing is aggressive and hostile, and must remain private. It is not intended to be read, not even by you. The benefit of writing is in the writing, not the reading or the sharing.
Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly.
That’s why it’s so hard. –David McCullough
Not writing but rewriting is the process of bringing focus and illumination to your thoughts. Rewrite and rewrite until you feel you’ve achieved around 95% lucidity, then burn and delete everything and await the next eruption. (Don’t hold out for 100%, you’ll just make yourself crazy.)
All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write
the truest sentence that you know. –Ernest Hemingway
This is not about journaling or blogging or sharing your reflections. It must be strictly shielded from public view so you can write solely for clarity of thought with no concern for the opinion of others.
Nothing goes by luck in composition. The best you
can write will be the best you are. –Henry David Thoreau
The ability to think effectively is not a function of intelligence but of technique. Externalize your thoughts and you can be the equal of the greatest and most intelligent thinkers of all time. You will be able to confirm this for yourself when you reach that most unexpected of all places; the end of thought.
