Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

- Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum

Best Quotes about Writing

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

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

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

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

Henry James

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

Typos are very important to all written form. It gives the reader something to look for so they aren't distracted by the total lack of content in your writing.

Randy K. Milholland

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

George Ade

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

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

10.

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

C. S. Lewis

11.

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

12.

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King

13.

Please write again soon. Though my own life is filled with activity, letters encourage momentary escape into others lives and I come back to my own with greater contentment.

Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey

14.

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

Thomas Berger

15.

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

16.

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

Peter De Vries

17.

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

18.

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

George Burns

19.

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

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

20.

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

21.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

22.

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

23.

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

Jules Renard

24.

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

Leo Rosten

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.

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

Eric A. Burns

27.

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

Tom Bissell

28.

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

29.

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

Inigo DeLeon

30.

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

Josh Billings

31.

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

Blaise Pascal

32.

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

Jules Renard

33.

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

Robert Heinlein

34.

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

Real Live Preacher

35.

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

Sarah Hepola

36.

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

Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum

37.

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

38.

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

Truman Capote

39.

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

Thomas Mann

40.

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

H. G. Wells

41.

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

42.

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

Martin Myers

43.

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne du Maurier

44.

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

45.

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

Jeff Jarvis

46.

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

Charles de Montesquieu

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

Vigorous writing is concise.

William Strunk Jr.