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

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

Heather Armstrong

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

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

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

Truman Capote

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King

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

Edwin Schlossberg

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

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

George Burns

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

10.

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

Min Kim

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Melanie Benjamin

14.

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

15.

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne du Maurier

16.

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

Stephen King

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Martin Myers

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Ray Bradbury

24.

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

Victor Hugo

25.

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

26.

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

Charles de Montesquieu

27.

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

28.

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

Josh Billings

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Sarah Hepola

35.

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

36.

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

George Ade

37.

At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable.

Raymond Chandler

38.

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

39.

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

40.

The key to non-anxious sermon-writing is that itÆs not about me. ItÆs about the congregation. I honor the fact that the listeners bring more to the sermon than I do. I remind myself of the hundreds of times someone says,'I loved how you saidà'and then tell me things that they heard that were nowhere in my text and that I never said. But they heard what they needed to hear.

Reverend Sean Parker Dennison

41.

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

Robert Heinlein

42.

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

Thomas Mann

43.

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

H. G. Wells

44.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

45.

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

Blaise Pascal

46.

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

Randy Pausch

47.

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

48.

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

49.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

50.

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