Charles Caleb Colton Writing Quotations

Justice to my readers compels me to admit that I write because I have nothing to do; justice to myself induces me to add that I will cease to write the moment I have nothing to say.

He that knows himself, knows others; and he that is ignorant of himself, could not write a very profound lecture on other men's heads.

There are three difficulties in authorship: to write anything worth publishing, to find honest men to publish it, and to find sensible men to read it.

Our admiration of fine writing will always be in proportion to its real difficulty and its apparent ease.

The society of dead authors has this advantage over that of the living: they never flatter us to our faces, nor slander us behind our backs, nor intrude upon our privacy, nor quit their shelves until we take them down.

Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason; they made no such demand upon those who wrote them.

No men deserve the title of infidels so little as those to whom it has been usually applied; let any of those who renounce Christianity, write fairly down in a book all the absurdities that they believe instead of it, and they will find that it requires more faith to reject Christianity than to embrace it.

Genius, in one respect, is like gold; numbers of persons are constantly writing about both, who have neither.

Memory is the friend of wit, but the treacherous ally of invention; there are many books that owe their success to two things; good memory of those who write them, and the bad memory of those who read them

It is curious that some learned dunces, because they can write nonsense in languages that are dead, should despise those that talk sense in languages that are living.

Some read to think, these are rare; some to write, these are common; and some read to talk, and these form the great majority.

There are three difficulties in authorship;-to write any thing worth the publishing-to find honest men to publish it -and to get sensible men to read it. Literature has now become a game; in which the Booksellers are the Kings; The Critics the Knaves; the Public, the Pack; and the poor Author, the mere table, or the Thing played upon.

We should have a glorious conflagration, if all who cannot put fire into their works would only consent to put their works into the fire.

With books, as with companions, it is of more consequence to know which to avoid, than which to choose, for good books are as scarce as good companions, and in both instances, all that we can learn from baad ones is, that some much time has been worse than thrown away.

Men will wrangle for religion, write for it, fight for it, die for it; anything but live for it.

The awkwardness and embarrassment which all feel on beginning to write, when they themselves are the theme, ought to serve as a hint to author's that self is a subject they ought very rarely to descant upon.

When I meet with any persons who write obscurely or converse confusedly, I am apt to suspect two things; first, that such persons do not understand themselves; and secondly, that they are not worthy of being understood by others.

Some authors write nonsense in a clear style, and others sense in an obscure one; some can reason without being able to persuade, others can persuade without being able to reason; some dive so deep that they descend into darkness, and others soar so high that they give us no light; and some, in a vain attempt to be cutting and dry, give us only that which is cut and dried. We should labor, therefore, to treat with ease of things that are difficult; with familiarity, of things that are novel; and with perspicuity, of things that are profound.

Perhaps that is nearly the perfection of good writing which is original, but whose truth alone prevents the reader from suspecting that it is so; and which effects that for knowledge which the lens effects for the sunbeam, when it condenses its brightness in order to increase its force.

There are some who write, talk, and think, so much about vice and virtue, that they have no time to practice either the one or the other.

It may be observed of good writing, as of good blood, that it is much easier to say what it is composed of than to compose it.

That an author's work is the mirror of his mind is a position that has led to very false conclusions. If Satan himself were to write a book it would be in praise of virtue, because the good would purchase it for use, and the bad for ostentation.

All poets pretend to write for immortality, but the whole tribe have no objection to present pay, and present praise. Lord Burleigh is not the only statesman who has thought one hundred pounds too much for a song, though sung by Spenser; although Oliver Goldsmith is the only poet who ever considered himself to have been overpaid.

Ignorance is a blank sheet, on which we may write; but error is a scribbled one, on which we must first erase.