Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

- George Burns

Best Quotes about Writing

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

Benjamin Disraeli

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

Real Live Preacher

No letter from a lover is ever more welcome, brings more joy, than a publisher's expression of interest does to a new author!

Judith Brocklehurst

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

Charles de Montesquieu

Keep writing. Keep doing it and doing it. Even in the moments when it's so hurtful to think about writing.

Heather Armstrong

The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything.

John Irving

The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn't require any.

Russell Baker

She was discovering once again that reading and writing were not the same-you couldn't just soak it up then squeeze it out again.

David Nicholls

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

10.

Words, once they are printed, have a life of their own.

Carol Burnett

11.

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

12.

Sometimes, when it's going badly, she wonders if what she believes to be a love of the written word is really just a fetish for stationary. The true writer, the born writer, will scribble words on scraps of litter, the back of a bus ticket, on the wall of a cell.

David Nicholls

13.

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

14.

I don't think anyone should write their autobiography until after they're dead.

Samuel Goldwyn

15.

Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly misunderstand them.

John Ruskin

16.

If writers stopped writing about what happened to them, then there would be a lot of empty pages.

Elaine Liner

17.

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

18.

The first step in blogging is not writing them but reading them.

Jeff Jarvis

19.

I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.

Joan Didion

20.

No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft.

H. G. Wells

21.

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

Robert Heinlein

22.

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

Eric A. Burns

23.

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

Sir Francis Bacon

24.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and all time.

George Bernard Shaw

25.

Vigorous writing is concise.

William Strunk Jr.

26.

Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money.

Jules Renard

27.

I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let's start with typewriters.

Solomon Short

28.

In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning.

George Orwell

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Melanie Benjamin

32.

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

33.

Not every story has explosions and car chases. That's why they have nudity and espionage.

Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum

34.

It's not about the writing. It's about the feelings behind the words.

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

35.

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

Edwin Schlossberg

36.

First you're an unknown, then you write one book and you move up to obscurity.

Martin Myers

37.

Writing gives you the illusion of control, and then you realize it's just an illusion, that people are going to bring their own stuff into it.

David Sedaris

38.

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

39.

A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions (of which its author had quite probably never heard). It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.

Edith Wharton

40.

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

41.

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

Inigo DeLeon

42.

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

George Burns

43.

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

44.

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King

45.

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

Ray Bradbury

46.

I've always believed in writing without a collaborator, because where two people are writing the same book, each believes he gets all the worries and only half the royalties.

Agatha Christie

47.

You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despairûthe sense that you can never completely put on the page whatÆs in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King

48.

The reserve of modern assertions is sometimes pushed to extremes, in which the fear of being contradicted leads the writer to strip himself of almost all sense and meaning.

Sir Winston Churchill

49.

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

Sarah Hepola

50.

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