Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

Best Quotes about Writing

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

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

Solomon Short

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac

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

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

Charles de Montesquieu

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

Josh Billings

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

Fran Lebowitz

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

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

10.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

11.

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

Martin Myers

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Leo Rosten

15.

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

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

16.

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

Ray Bradbury

17.

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

Stephen King

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Real Live Preacher

21.

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

22.

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

Elaine Liner

23.

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

Eric A. Burns

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.

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

Jef Mallett

26.

A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

Thomas Mann

27.

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

28.

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

Blaise Pascal

29.

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

30.

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

31.

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

Jules Renard

32.

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

George Burns

33.

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

George Ade

34.

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

35.

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

Stephen King

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.

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

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Sir Francis Bacon

42.

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

43.

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

Peter De Vries

44.

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

Truman Capote

45.

The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn't require any.

Russell Baker

46.

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

H. G. Wells

47.

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

Edward Gibbon

48.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

49.

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

50.

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

Tom Bissell