Reading and writing and the preservation of language and its forms and the kind of eloquence and the kind of beauty which the language is capable of is terribly important to the human beings because this is connected to thought.

Writing is the superpower of humankind. It is our truest form of magic.

Writing allows you to conjure up something of value where nothing previously existed. It costs little for you to write down the lessons of your life and yet those few minutes spent writing can be life-altering for the right reader. As I once saw it put: "there is someone out there with a wound in the exact shape of your words."

Furthermore, writing is the foundation of nearly every technology and innovation because we have to record what we know before we can build upon it. And these innovations are passed down from generation to generation, allowing our children to inherit a richer intellectual fortune than what we were born into. The world is richer because we write and nobody is made poorer in the process.

Writing engenders in us certain attitudes toward language. It encourages us to take words for granted. Writing has enabled us to store vast quantities of words indefinitely. This is advantageous on the one hand but dangerous on the other. The result is that we have developed a kind of false security where language is concerned, and our sensitivity to language has deteriorated. And we have become in proportion insensitive to silence.

Writing, the art of communicating thoughts to the mind through the eye, is the great invention of the world...enabling us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn, at all distances of time and space.

the awareness of how powerful the written word can be: how you can tap into that world that we are talking about and discover things that would have been impossible to know if you didn't have that connection to a collective knowledge that comes through the writing.

The broad standardisation of culture represented in nationalism would not have been possible without a modern mass medium such as the printed book (and, later, the newspaper). Thus it may be said that writing has not only influenced thought about the world, but also thought about who we are. It has made it technologically possible to imagine that you belong to the same people as millions of other persons whom you will never meet.

Language use is a curious behavior, but once the transition to language is made, literature is a likely consequence, since it is linked to the dynamic of the linguistic symbol through the functioning of the imagination.

Both are creative, imaginative artistic expressions that use words and language to communicate: one is spoken, or verbal; the other one is written. So, there is a direct connection.

In the world of words the imagination is one of the forces of nature.

In the world of words, the imagination is one of the forces of nature.

Writing and translating are part of the same miracle that is language—that which made us human.

Writing is nothing less than thought transference, the ability to send one's ideas out into the world, beyond time and distance, taken at the value of the words, unbound from the speaker.

Writing is not a searching about in the daily experience for apt similes and pretty thoughts and images… It is not a conscious recording of the day’s experiences ‘freshly and with the appearance of reality’… The writer of imagination would find himself released from observing things for the purpose of writing them down later. He would be there to enjoy, to taste, to engage the free world, not a world which he carries like a bag of food, always fearful lest he drop something or someone get more than he.

To be able to read and write, therefore, is to learn to profit by and take part in the greatest of human achievements -- that which makes all other achievements possible --namely, the pooling of our experiences in great cooperative stores of knowledge, available <span style="color:green" title="(except where special privileges, censorship, or suppression stand in the way)">[...] to all. From the warning cry of primitive man to the latest newsflash or scientific monograph, language is social. Cultural and intellectual cooperation is the great principle of human life. </SPAN>