Listening
and Writing
It is insight into human nature that is the key to the communicator's
skill. For whereas the writer is concerned with what he puts into his
writings, the communicator is concerned with what the reader gets out
of it. He therefore becomes a student of how people read or listen. —
William Bernbach
The discipline of the writer is to learn to be still and listen to what
his subject has to tell him. — Rachel Louise Carson
Many people hear voices when no-one is there. Some of them are called
mad and are shut up on rooms where they stare at the walls all day.
Others are called writers and they do pretty much the same thing. — Meg
Chittenden
I have learned as much about writing about my people by listening to
blues and jazz and spirituals as I have by reading novels. — Ernest
Gaines
If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to
writers talking about writing or themselves. — Lillian Hellman
I learned to write by listening to people talk. I still feel that the
best of my writing comes from having heard rather than having read. —
Gayl Jones
Between the writing of plays, in the vast middle of the night, when our
children and their mother slept, I sat alone, and my thoughts drifted
back in time, murmuring the remembrance of things past into the
listening ear of silence; fashioning thoughts to unspoken words, and
setting them down upon the sensitive tablets of the mind. — Sean O'Casey
All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared listener. — Robert Louis Stevenson
Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them
is something more acute than listening to them. When their elders sit
and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out,
like a mouse from its hole. — Eudora Welty
The discipline of the writer is to learn to be still and listen to what his subject has to tell him. — Anonymous
