Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

Best Quotes about Writing

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

Jules Renard

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

Truman Capote

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

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

Thomas Berger

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

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

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

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

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

Charles de Montesquieu

10.

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

George Ade

11.

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

Ray Bradbury

12.

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

Jef Mallett

13.

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

Sir Francis Bacon

14.

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

Stephen King

15.

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

Edward Gibbon

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Jules Renard

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Stephen King

22.

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

Bobby Knight

23.

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

Thomas Mann

24.

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

25.

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

Heather Armstrong

26.

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

Victor Hugo

27.

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

28.

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

H. G. Wells

29.

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

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.

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

Jeff Jarvis

32.

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

Carol Burnett

33.

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

Blaise Pascal

34.

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

Robert Heinlein

35.

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

36.

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

37.

Ann Radcliffe

38.

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac

39.

Writing gives you the illusion of control, and then you realize it's just an illusion, that people are going to bring their own stuff into it.

David Sedaris

40.

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

Solomon Short

41.

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

42.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

43.

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

Peter De Vries

44.

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

45.

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

Henry James

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.

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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