Motivational Quotes

Writing

It's not enough to create magic. You have to create a price for magic, too. You have to create rules.

- Eric A. Burns

Best Quotes about Writing

The key to non-anxious sermon-writing is that itÆs not about me. ItÆs about the congregation. I honor the fact that the listeners bring more to the sermon than I do. I remind myself of the hundreds of times someone says,'I loved how you saidà'and then tell me things that they heard that were nowhere in my text and that I never said. But they heard what they needed to hear.

Reverend Sean Parker Dennison

Typos are very important to all written form. It gives the reader something to look for so they aren't distracted by the total lack of content in your writing.

Randy K. Milholland

You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you're working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success - but only if you persist.

Isaac Asimov

Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a book.

Edward Gibbon

I have made this [letter] longer, because I have not had the time to make it shorter.

Blaise Pascal

Literature is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none.

Jules Renard

This is the sixth book I've written, which isn't bad for a guy who's only read two.

George Burns

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne du Maurier

You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance.

Ray Bradbury

10.

It is not a bad idea to get in the habit of writing down one's thoughts. It saves one having to bother anyone else with them.

Isabel Colegate

11.

Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography, but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility.

Katherine Paterson

12.

I always wrote with the idea that what I put out there is going to stay there. Once I publish something, it has been published. I've never deleted more than one or two posts from my site. I don't think that there are takebacks. I don't feel right about it.

Alison Headley

13.

There are a lot of people who can't write and maybe shouldn't write.

Sarah Hepola

14.

People do tell a writer things that they don't tell others. I don't know why, unless it is that having read one or two of his books they feel on peculiarly intimate terms with him; or it may be that they dramatize themselves and, seeing themselves as it were as characters in a novel, are ready to be as open with him as they imagine the characters of his invention are.

W. Somerset Maugham

15.

At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable.

Raymond Chandler

16.

Be generous, be delicate, and always pursue the prize.

Henry James

17.

If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time or the tools to write.

Stephen King

18.

There is nothing to write about, you say. Well then, write and let me know just this - that there is nothing to write about; or tell me in the good old style if you are well. That's right. I am quite well.

Pliny the Younger

19.

The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.

Edwin Schlossberg

20.

Maybe that's just what happens; you start out wanting to change the world through language, and end up thinking it's enough to tell a few jokes.

David Nicholls

21.

All a good letter has to do is make you feel special.

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

22.

We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to.

W. Somerset Maugham

23.

Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.

Sir Francis Bacon

24.

When you write things down, they sometimes take you places you hadn't planned.

Melanie Benjamin

25.

Why do writers write? Because it isn't there.

Thomas Berger

26.

It's not enough to create magic. You have to create a price for magic, too. You have to create rules.

Eric A. Burns

27.

Your manuscript is both good and original, but the part that is good is not original and the part that is original is not good.

Samuel Johnson

28.

Advice to writers: Sometimes you just have to stop writing. Even before you begin.

Stanislaw J. Lec

29.

Write something to suit yourself and many people will like it; write something to suit everybody and scarcely anyone will care for it.

Jesse Stuart

30.

An author is a fool who, not content with boring those he lives with, insists on boring future generations.

Charles de Montesquieu

31.

In comparing various authors with one another, I have discovered that some of the gravest and latest writers have transcribed, word for word, from former works, without making acknowledgment.

Pliny the Elder

32.

I never feel that I have comprehended an emotion, or fully lived even the smallest events, until I have reflected upon it in my journal; my pen is my truest confidant, holding in check the passions and disappointments that I dare not share even with my beloved.

Stephanie Barron

33.

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

George Ade

34.

Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.

Robert Heinlein

35.

I think people want their illusions and writers are mostly illusion. When you read their words, you read a flattened, incomplete version of the writer.

Real Live Preacher

36.

Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time... The wait is simply too long.

Leonard Bernstein

37.

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

C. S. Lewis

38.

A writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view, a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway.

Junot Diaz

39.

The best way to become acquainted with a subject is to write a book about it.

Benjamin Disraeli

40.

Good writing takes more than just time; it wants your best moments and the best of you.

Real Live Preacher

41.

The cure for writer's cramp is writer's block.

Inigo DeLeon

42.

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

George Orwell

43.

Writing well mean never having to say,'I guess you had to be there.'

Jef Mallett

44.

If you want to write you must have faith in yourself. Faith enough to believe that if a thing is true about you, it is likely true about many people. And if you can have faith in your integrity and your motives, then you can write about yourself without fear.

Real Live Preacher

45.

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

46.

If a writer wrote merely for his time, I would have to break my pen and throw it away.

Victor Hugo

47.

This is pretty much what journals are all about, at least to me. I knew as I wrote them that even though they provided an excellent place for brain (and heart, and psyche) dump, they were mainly a map of me.

Colleen Wainwright

48.

See things as they are and write about them. DonÆt waste your creative energy trying to make things up. Even if you are writing fiction, write the things you see and know.

Real Live Preacher

49.

Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed there are many rewards, if you disgrace yourself you can always write a book.

Ronald Reagan

50.

Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

Samuel Johnson