The Saturday Writing Quote

“A real writer learns from earlier writers the way a boy learns from an apple orchard — by stealing what he has a taste for and can carry off.”

Garner

 

— Archibald MacLeish, “On the Teaching of Writing,” in Writing in America 88, 90 (John Fischer & Robert B. Silvers eds., 1960). (Quoted by Bryan Garner, author of Garner’s Modern American Usage, in his weekly blog on usage.)

One thought on “The Saturday Writing Quote

  1. How true! And somehow in the carrying off of another’s word treasure, the real writer may manage to breathe her own self into the ideas and the resulting writing becomes hers. Ummmm and Idon’t mean plagiarism!

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