Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

- Bobby Knight

Best Quotes about Writing

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

Carol Burnett

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

Ray Bradbury

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

Josh Billings

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

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

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

Real Live Preacher

A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions (of which its author had quite probably never heard). It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.

Edith Wharton

Write something to suit yourself and many people will like it; write something to suit everybody and scarcely anyone will care for it.

Jesse Stuart

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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

George Burns

13.

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

Eric A. Burns

14.

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

Sir Francis Bacon

15.

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

Solomon Short

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Henry James

20.

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

Jules Renard

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.

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

23.

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

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

24.

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

Inigo DeLeon

25.

Vigorous writing is concise.

William Strunk Jr.

26.

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

27.

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

Melanie Benjamin

28.

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

Robert Heinlein

29.

No letter from a lover is ever more welcome, brings more joy, than a publisher's expression of interest does to a new author!

Judith Brocklehurst

30.

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

Min Kim

31.

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

Stephen King

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

35.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

36.

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

37.

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

Truman Capote

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

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.

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

43.

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

Jules Renard

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Elaine Liner

48.

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

49.

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