Thoughts and words borrowed from great writers and speakers—may fitly be used anywhere and by any one. One’s discourse should not be a patchwork to which others have contributed as much as he has, but the occasional and happy use of quotations betrays an acquaintance with authors that is grateful to reader or hearer. Arraying behind his thought names greater than his own, these quotations give to what he says authority which without such re-enforcement it could not have.

A Text-Book on Rhetoric, Supplementing the Development of the Science with Exhaustive Practice in Composition, 1892, p. 170

To revise a sentence a writer must have a way, a place, a strategy for breaking into it, but beginning writers tend to experience their sentences as unmanageable streams of words which, once set in motion, cannot be turned back. Thus injunctions to revise or reword or even proofread passages often produce merely neater copies of the same sentences, not because the student is recalcitrant but because he does not "see" the parts within his sentences that need re-working. He sees no seams nor joints nor points of intersection--only irrevocable wholes.

[. . . ]

As an extension of speech, writing does, of course, draw heavily upon a writer's competencies as a speaker--his grammatical intuitions, his vocabulary, his strategies for making and ordering statements, etc., but it also demands new competencies, namely the skills of the encoding process (handwriting, spelling, punctuation) and the skill of objectifying a statement, of looking at it, changing it by additions, subtractions, substitutions, or inversions, taking the time to get as close a fit as possible between what he means and what he says on paper.

Errors and Expectations, 1977, p. 78-79

In his improvisation, the "bricoleur" is perforce a creative recycler who uses or rather re-uses bits and pieces, odds and ends, discarded elements, all of which have been disengaged from their actual function. The "bricoleur's" rearrangement instills in them a new life. To that extent, no need of fancy projects: jotting, at lunch, a phone number on a paper napkin or using, on one's desk, a yogurt pot as a pencil holder are already akin to bricolage. In fact, knowingly or not, by taste or perforce, with more or less success, willy-nilly, we are all "bricoleurs" and thus all of us participate in savage thought...

"Who Are the Bricoleurs?" in American Journal of Semiotics 3.3 (1985), p. 30