Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

Best Quotes about Writing

I take the view, and always have, that if you cannot say what you are going to say in twenty minutes you ought to go away and write a book about it.

Lord Brabazon

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

Robert Heinlein

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

Martin Myers

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

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

A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor.

Ring Lardner

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

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

Inigo DeLeon

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

10.

Detail makes the difference between boring and terrific writing. ItÆs the difference between a pencil sketch and a lush oil painting. As a writer, words are your paint. Use all the colors.

Rhys Alexander

11.

An author spends months writing a book, and maybe puts his heart's blood into it, and then it lies about unread till the reader has nothing else in the world to do.

W. Somerset Maugham

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Melanie Benjamin

15.

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

Stephen King

16.

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

17.

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

Blaise Pascal

18.

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

Sir Francis Bacon

19.

I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.

Oscar Wilde

20.

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

21.

If the weak hand, that has recorded this tale, has, by its scenes, beguiled the mourner of one hour of sorrow, or, by its moral, taught him to sustain it - the effort, however humble, has not been vain, nor is the writer unrewarded.

Ann Radcliffe

22.

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

23.

If any man wish to write in a clear style, let him be first clear in his thoughts; and if any would write in a noble style, let him first possess a noble soul.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

24.

About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment.

Josh Billings

25.

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

26.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

27.

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

Elaine Liner

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

A great writer reveals the truth even when he or she does not wish to.

Tom Bissell

33.

Vigorous writing is concise.

William Strunk Jr.

34.

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

Real Live Preacher

35.

I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork.

Peter De Vries

36.

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

Edward Gibbon

37.

Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.

Stephen King

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

George Burns

41.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

42.

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

Victor Hugo

43.

The most difficult part of writing a book is not devising a plot which will captivate the reader. It's not developing characters the reader will have strong feelings for or against. It is not finding a setting which will take the reader to a place he or she as never been. It is not the research, whether in fiction or non-fiction. The most difficult task facing a writer is to find the voice in which to tell the story.

Randy Pausch

44.

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

45.

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

Henry James

46.

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

Eric A. Burns

47.

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac

48.

There's always something to write about. If there's not then you need to live life more aggressively.