H. Jackson Brown Jr. Quotes

When you're writing, you are robbed of your delivery.

If You Do Not Write It, You Never Said It

... writing letters is thinking, just as talking to you is thinking.

We'd said we'd keep in touch. But touch is not something you can keep; as soon as it's gone, it's gone. We should have said we'd keep in words, because they are all we can string between us--words on a telephone line, words appearing on a screen.

Whatever I write in email, it doesn't mean anything. It is just words I write.

. . . Then anyone who leaves behind him a written manual, and likewise anyone who receives it, in the belief that such writing will be clear and certain, must be exceedingly simple-minded. . . .

I do get a little pissed at people who write me and want me to do things, and spell my name wrong.

The scope of what I have to say determines the length of what I write.

I am sorry for people who can't write letters. But I suspect also that you and I ... love to write them because it's kind of like working without really doing it.

I have now attained the true art of letter-writing, which we are always told, is to express on paper exactly what one would say to the same person by word of mouth.

In the long run, the quality of your work is all that matters. That is your only resumé. Be professional. Make sure your editor or publisher can always reach you. Do what's asked of you if your conscience can bear it.

You have to be able to communicate in life and probably schools underemphasize that. If you can't talk to people or write, you're giving up your potential.

There never was an age in which so many people were able to write badly.

Whatever you want to say, there is only one word to express it, only one verb to give it movement, only one adjective to qualify it.

For when all else is done, on­ly words re­main. Words en­dure.

letters are so much easier than living. One can give one's best.

I feel like if people are going to go to the effort to get a stamp and, you know, put it on an envelope that, you know, it's a big effort these days. So I often write back.

The quality of business communications has become poorer in recent years as people avoid phone calls and face-to-face meetings, I can only assume, in some misguided quest for efficiency.

How I love to get a letter! I can think of nothing better Than perusing an epistolary item. But deep is my despondence, For I've found that correspondence Means that if you want to get 'em, You must write 'em!

To read, write, and converse in due proportions, is, therefore, the business of a man of letters.

No one for a moment can pretend that printing is so great a discovery as writing, or algebra as a language.

Today we speak, but first we spoke; faucets leak, but never loke. Today we write, but first we wrote; we bite our tongues, but never bote.

A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called "leaves") imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time ― proof that humans can work magic.

You have to take the good with the bad. Some players only talk to the press when they are doing good. When you're doing bad you shouldn't shy away from them and when doing good, don't run up to them.

Only write to me, write to me, I love to see the hop and skip and sudden starts of your ink.