Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

- Samuel Goldwyn

Best Quotes about Writing

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne du Maurier

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

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

Elaine Liner

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

H. G. Wells

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

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

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

George Burns

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

10.

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

11.

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

Sarah Hepola

12.

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

13.

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

Ray Bradbury

14.

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

15.

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

Peter De Vries

16.

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

17.

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

Jef Mallett

18.

Your life story would not make a good book. Don't even try.

Fran Lebowitz

19.

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

Stephen King

20.

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

Real Live Preacher

21.

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

Thomas Berger

22.

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

Robert Heinlein

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Truman Capote

27.

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

Leo Rosten

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.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Jules Renard

32.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

33.

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

34.

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

George Ade

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Henry James

41.

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac

42.

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

Blaise Pascal

43.

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

44.

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

Bobby Knight

45.

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

Jeff Jarvis

46.

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

47.

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

48.

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

49.

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

Victor Hugo

50.

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

Heather Armstrong