Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

- Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

Best Quotes about Writing

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

Samuel Johnson

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

Victor Hugo

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

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

H. G. Wells

I have never thought of writing as hard work, but I have worked hard to find a voice.

Randy Pausch

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

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

Edward Gibbon

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

10.

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

Edwin Schlossberg

11.

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

12.

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

13.

Beneath the rule of men entirely great, The pen is mightier than the sword.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

14.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

15.

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

Sir Francis Bacon

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Min Kim

19.

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

Eric A. Burns

20.

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

Thomas Berger

21.

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

Jeff Jarvis

22.

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

23.

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

Solomon Short

24.

There is only one way to defeat the enemy, and that is to write as well as one can. The best argument is an undeniably good book.

Saul Bellow

25.

Please write again soon. Though my own life is filled with activity, letters encourage momentary escape into others lives and I come back to my own with greater contentment.

Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey

26.

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

27.

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

28.

The only reason for being a professional writer is that you can't help it.

Leo Rosten

29.

You ask me why I do not write something....I think one's feelings waste themselves in words, they ought all to be distilled into actions and into actions which bring results.

Florence Nightingale

30.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

31.

Vigorous writing is concise.

William Strunk Jr.

32.

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

Carol Burnett

33.

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

34.

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

35.

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King

36.

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

37.

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

Elaine Liner

38.

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

Ray Bradbury

39.

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

40.

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

Robert Heinlein

41.

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

Sarah Hepola

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Real Live Preacher

45.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

46.

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

Tom Bissell

47.

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

Jef Mallett

48.

I write because I'm afraid to say some things out loud.

Real Live Preacher

49.

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

50.

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