Roaming South America

The Problem With Unverified Quotes

September 25, 2025

We’ve all seen them: quotes that zip across social media, tucked into memes or writing blogs, attributed to some famous thinker. They’re catchy, clever, and often ring true. But here’s the rub - many of them can’t actually be traced back to their supposed author.

Take this one, often linked to Simone de Beauvoir:

“Écrire est un métier… qui s’apprend en écrivant” (“Writing is a trade… which is learned by writing”)

It appears on French quote sites and is usually pinned to her memoir La Force de l’âge (1960). But try to find a verifiable page reference, and the trail goes cold. Without access to the original French text in full, or a scholarly reference citing it, we’re left with a phrase that may be a paraphrase or simply an invention passed around as truth.

The Steinem Example

Or consider this quip attributed to Gloria Steinem:

“I don’t like writing. I like having written.”

It’s sharp, funny, and perfectly in line with what we know about writers’ love-hate relationship with their craft. But after searching through her published works, interviews, and archives - nothing. It’s everywhere online, but nowhere in her verified words. Best guess? It’s either a paraphrase of something she once said casually, or it’s one of those “floater quotes” that gets stuck to a famous name because it sounds like something they’d say.

Two more Examples

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
— Attributed to Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
Status: Misattributed (no verified source)

“Once I’ve got the first draft down on paper, then I do five or six more drafts, the last two of which will be polishing drafts. The ones in between will flesh out the characters, and maybe I’ll check my research.”
— Attributed to Colleen McCullough (1937–2015)
no verifiable source

Why This Happens

Unverified quotes live in a strange middle ground. Sometimes they start as paraphrases in a review or article and later get flattened into “direct quotes.” Other times, they’re simply invented, then spread online until they feel real. And once a quote fits an author’s public persona, people stop questioning it. Hemingway, for instance, is burdened with dozens of apocryphal lines about writing and life simply because his tough-guy image makes them sound plausible.

What Writers (and Readers) Can Do

First, before trusting any "quote" with no proper source cited (only a person's name), do a little research - ask a search engine, or better yet, one of the AI chatbots (they can dig much deeper than Google). Find out if it's a real quote, a paraphrase, a misattribution, or simply made up.

So what do we do with these orphans of attribution? We treat them with care. There’s no harm in using them if we clearly label them as “attributed” or “unverified.” Doing so preserves the wisdom in the words without cementing false history. More importantly, we learn to value not just the pithy punch of a quote, but the context that surrounds it - where it came from, how it was used, and whether it reflects the author’s actual voice.

For writers, there’s also a lesson here: clarity is its own authority. If we want our words to endure, we need to make them unmistakably ours, rooted in a record that others can find. Until then, unverified quotes will keep circulating, half-truths waiting for someone to pump the well a little deeper.