Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

- Benjamin Disraeli

Best Quotes about Writing

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

Thomas Mann

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

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

H. G. Wells

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

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

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

George Burns

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

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

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

Elaine Liner

10.

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

Edward Gibbon

11.

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

12.

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

Jeff Jarvis

13.

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

14.

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

15.

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac

16.

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

Ray Bradbury

17.

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

Robert Heinlein

18.

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

19.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

20.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

21.

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

Tom Bissell

22.

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

Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum

23.

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

Victor Hugo

24.

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

Real Live Preacher

25.

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King

26.

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

Jef Mallett

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Edwin Schlossberg

32.

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

Sir Francis Bacon

33.

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

Stephen King

34.

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

35.

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

Stephen King

36.

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

Thomas Berger

37.

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

Blaise Pascal

38.

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

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.

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

Real Live Preacher

41.

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

42.

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

Heather Armstrong

43.

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

44.

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

Leo Rosten

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Jules Renard

48.

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

Eric A. Burns

49.

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