#writ

I never think about poetry except when I'm writing it. I mean my poetry. ↗

— Norman MacCaig

#except #i #mean #never #poetry

We writers, as we work our way deeper into our craft, learn to drop more and more personal clues. Like burglars who secretly wish to be caught, we leave our fingerprints on broken locks, our voiceprints in bugged rooms, our footprints in the wet concrete. ↗

— Ross MacDonald

#bugged #burglars #caught #clues #concrete

The only joy I had was writing what was. That book was. It no longer amuses me to be all the things I was when I wrote that. But it is my story as I was then. ↗

— Mary MacLane

#book #had #i #joy #longer

Universal literacy was a 20th-century goal. Before then, reading and writing were skills largely confined to a small, highly educated class of professional people. ↗

— Hugh Mackay

#before #class #confined #educated #goal

Writing for young children I find I often use particular jokes with words and exaggerated, funny events, but some of these haunt the more complex stories for older children too. ↗

— Margaret Mahy

#complex #events #exaggerated #find #funny

The ancient codes were doubtless originally suggested by the discovery and diffusion of the art of writing. ↗

— Henry James Sumner Maine

#art #codes #diffusion #discovery #doubtless

Dobie was so well written and so ahead of its time. ↗

— Dwayne Hickman

#time #well #written

The most evocative thing to me is probably when a writer and a group of performers can collectively put together something compelling that asks the really simple question: 'How do we live?' ↗

— John Malkovich

#collectively #compelling #evocative #group #how

A writer may tell me that he thinks man will ultimately become an ostrich. I cannot properly contradict him. ↗

— Thomas Malthus

#cannot #contradict #him #i #man

Listen, here's the thing about an English degree - if you sat somebody down and asked them to make a list of the writers they admire over the last hundred years, see how many of them got a degree in English. ↗

— David Mamet

#admire #asked #degree #down #english