Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

- Blaise Pascal

Best Quotes about Writing

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

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

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

Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum

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

Real Live Preacher

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

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

Stephen King

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

Carol Burnett

There's always something to write about. If there's not then you need to live life more aggressively.

Min Kim

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

10.

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

Randy Pausch

11.

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

Fran Lebowitz

12.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

13.

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

Truman Capote

14.

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

Jeff Jarvis

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.

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

George Ade

17.

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

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Henry James

21.

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

22.

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

23.

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac

24.

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

25.

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

Edwin Schlossberg

26.

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

Solomon Short

27.

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

28.

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

Stephen King

29.

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

Thomas Berger

30.

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

Thomas Mann

31.

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne du Maurier

32.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

33.

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

34.

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

Sir Francis Bacon

35.

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

George Burns

36.

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

37.

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

38.

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

Real Live Preacher

39.

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

40.

When you write things down, they sometimes take you places you hadn't planned.

Melanie Benjamin

41.

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

Jules Renard

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

46.

I don't think anyone should write their autobiography until after they're dead.

Samuel Goldwyn

47.

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

48.

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

Josh Billings

49.

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

50.

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