Writing
Overview
 
Writing is the representation of language in a text
Text (literary theory)
A text, within literary theory, is a coherent set of symbols that transmits some kind of informative message. This set of symbols is considered in terms of the informative message's content, rather than in terms of its physical form or the medium in which it is represented...

ual medium
Media (arts)
In the arts, a media or medium is a material used by an artist or designer to create a work.-Architecture:In the art and science of architecture, the design and construction of buildings and interiors, infrastructure and other physical structures are created...

 through the use of a set of signs or symbols (known as a writing system
Writing system
A writing system is a symbolic system used to represent elements or statements expressible in language.-General properties:Writing systems are distinguished from other possible symbolic communication systems in that the reader must usually understand something of the associated spoken language to...

). It is distinguished from illustration
Illustration
An illustration is a displayed visualization form presented as a drawing, painting, photograph or other work of art that is created to elucidate or dictate sensual information by providing a visual representation graphically.- Early history :The earliest forms of illustration were prehistoric...

, such as cave drawing and painting
Painting
Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects can be used. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. However, painting is...

, and non-symbolic preservation of language via non-textual media, such as magnetic tape audio
Magnetic tape sound recording
The use of magnetic tape for sound recording originated around 1930. Magnetizable tape revolutionized both the radio broadcast and music recording industries. It did this by giving artists and producers the power to record and re-record audio with minimal loss in quality as well as edit and...

.

Writing most likely began as a consequence of political expansion in ancient cultures, which needed reliable means for transmitting information, maintaining financial accounts, keeping historical records, and similar activities.
Quotations

After being Turned Down by numerous Publishers, he had decided to write for Posterity.

George Ade, "Fables in Slang", 1899

Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.

Martin Amis, The Observer [London] (30 August 1987)

The aspiring writer must not merely be persistent, but relentless. If you are persistent and your manuscript is rejected, you send it out again. But if you are relentless, you make ten copies of the rejected manuscript and send them all out simultaneously.

Jacob M. Appel, address at Brown University, 2005

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent

James Baldwin "Autobiographical Notes" (1952); republished in Notes of a Native Son (1955)

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac letter to Madame Zulma Carraud, 2 July 1832

The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.

Robert Benchley, quoted by James Thurber in The Bermudian (November 1950).

It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.

Robert Benchley, quoted in Nathaniel Benchley|Nathaniel Benchley Robert Benchley, ch. 1 (1955).

The tendinous part of the mind, so to speak, is more developed in winter; the fleshy, in summer. I should say winter had given the bone and sinew to literature, summer the tissues and the blood.

John Burroughs, The Snow-Walkers

Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason; they made no such demand upon those who wrote them.

Charles Caleb Colton, Lacon, 1820

 
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