Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

Best Quotes about Writing

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

Solomon Short

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

Charles de Montesquieu

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

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

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

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

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

W. Somerset Maugham

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

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

10.

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

11.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Inigo DeLeon

15.

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

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.

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.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

19.

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

H. G. Wells

20.

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

21.

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

22.

Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say'infinitely'when you mean'very'; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.

C. S. Lewis

23.

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

24.

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

Peter De Vries

25.

Vigorous writing is concise.

William Strunk Jr.

26.

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

27.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Raymond Chandler

31.

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

Henry James

32.

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

Ray Bradbury

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

37.

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

Blaise Pascal

38.

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

Sir Francis Bacon

39.

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

Randy Pausch

40.

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

Heather Armstrong

41.

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

Stephen King

42.

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

George Ade

43.

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

44.

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

45.

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac

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.

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

Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum

48.

All of us learn to write in the second grade. Most of us go on to greater things.

Bobby Knight

49.

I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.

Truman Capote

50.

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