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

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

Thomas Berger

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

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

Benjamin Disraeli

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

Real Live Preacher

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

Randy Pausch

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

H. G. Wells

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

Edward Gibbon

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

George Burns

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

Heather Armstrong

10.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

11.

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

12.

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

Thomas Mann

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Martin Myers

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.

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

18.

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

Jeff Jarvis

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Samuel Johnson

22.

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

23.

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

Josh Billings

24.

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

Sarah Hepola

25.

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

Bobby Knight

26.

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

27.

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

Carol Burnett

28.

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

29.

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

Solomon Short

30.

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

Ray Bradbury

31.

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

Eric A. Burns

32.

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

Robert Heinlein

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Truman Capote

39.

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

40.

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

41.

There is nothing to write about, you say. Well then, write and let me know just this - that there is nothing to write about; or tell me in the good old style if you are well. That's right. I am quite well.

Pliny the Younger

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Fran Lebowitz

45.

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

Henry James

46.

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

47.

Detail makes the difference between boring and terrific writing. ItÆs the difference between a pencil sketch and a lush oil painting. As a writer, words are your paint. Use all the colors.

Rhys Alexander

48.

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

49.

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

Inigo DeLeon

50.

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