Walter Kaufmann Quotes

... writing had become an essential element of the process of thinking. Not until I had put my thoughts down on paper could I examine them with objectivity.

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

Having each some shingles of thought well dried, we sat and whittled them.

Reflective thinking is like the crock pot of the mind. It encourages your thoughts to simmer until they're done.

Many novice writers, students in particular, think that writing is little more than copying down their self-talk, the palaver of the voices they hear in their heads. Of course, self-talk is thinking, and writing begins with thinking.

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.

I write a lot in my head. I've never been driven to write things down.

If you want to understand what you're thinking, you kind of have to work it through and write it. And the only way to work it through, for me, is to write it.

You can't learn to play the piano without playing the piano, you can't learn to write without writing, and, in many ways, you can't learn to think without thinking. Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so hard.

Writing is always a way, for me, of coming to some sort of understanding that I can't reach otherwise.It forces you to think. It forces you to work the thing through. Nothing comes to us out of the blue, very easily.

To write is to think, and to write well is to think well.

I'm one of those people who doesn't really know what he thinks until he writes it down.

I write to discover what I think.

All there is to writing is having ideas. To learn to write is to learn to have ideas.

Without a pen in my hand I can't think.

I really think that reading is just as important as writing when you're trying to be a writer because it's the only apprenticeship we have, it's the only way of learning how to write a story.

There is nothing like writing to force you to think and get your thoughts straight.

Thinking visually is my starting point, and then the writing happens.

First Sight means you can see what really is there, and Second Thoughts mean thinking about what you are thinking. And in Tiffany's case, there were sometimes Third Thoughts and Fourth Thoughts although these...sometimes led her to walk into doors.

Thinking nurseth thinking.

Good writing is the hardest form of thinking.

For me, writing is a concentrated form of thinking.

Reading taught me how to write.

Writing is thought crystalized on a piece of paper, which can then be reviewed.

Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a book.