Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

- Real Live Preacher

Best Quotes about Writing

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

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

Randy Pausch

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

Fran Lebowitz

This is the challenge of writing. You have to be very emotionally engaged in what youÆre doing, or it comes out flat. You canÆt fake your way through this.

Real Live Preacher

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

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

Jules Renard

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

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

Samuel Goldwyn

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

Sarah Hepola

10.

Journalism is just a gun. It's only got one bullet in it, but if you aim right, that's all you need. Aim it right and you can blow a kneecap off the world.

Warren Ellis

11.

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

Jeff Jarvis

12.

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

Real Live Preacher

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Raymond Chandler

16.

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

Melanie Benjamin

17.

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King

18.

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

19.

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

Edward Gibbon

20.

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

Ray Bradbury

21.

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

Charles de Montesquieu

22.

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

Robert Heinlein

23.

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

Stephen King

24.

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

Jef Mallett

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Bobby Knight

28.

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

Leo Rosten

29.

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

Stephen King

30.

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

George Burns

31.

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

Elaine Liner

32.

If you want to write you must have faith in yourself. Faith enough to believe that if a thing is true about you, it is likely true about many people. And if you can have faith in your integrity and your motives, then you can write about yourself without fear.

Real Live Preacher

33.

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

Martin Myers

34.

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

35.

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

Real Live Preacher

36.

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

37.

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

Samuel Johnson

38.

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne du Maurier

39.

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

Eric A. Burns

40.

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

41.

This is pretty much what journals are all about, at least to me. I knew as I wrote them that even though they provided an excellent place for brain (and heart, and psyche) dump, they were mainly a map of me.

Colleen Wainwright

42.

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

Jules Renard

43.

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

44.

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

45.

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

Inigo DeLeon

46.

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

Truman Capote

47.

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