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

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

Vigorous writing is concise.

William Strunk Jr.

Writing well mean never having to say,'I guess you had to be there.'

Jef Mallett

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

W. Somerset Maugham

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

Inigo DeLeon

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

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

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

Stephen King

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

Victor Hugo

10.

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac

11.

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

12.

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

Min Kim

13.

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

Solomon Short

14.

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

Thomas Berger

15.

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

George Burns

16.

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

Tom Bissell

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Robert Heinlein

20.

Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed there are many rewards, if you disgrace yourself you can always write a book.

Ronald Reagan

21.

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

22.

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

Eric A. Burns

23.

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

24.

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

George Ade

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Thomas Mann

28.

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

29.

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

Bobby Knight

30.

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

Ray Bradbury

31.

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

Leo Rosten

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

35.

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

Jules Renard

36.

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

Fran Lebowitz

37.

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

38.

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

Martin Myers

39.

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

40.

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

Peter De Vries

41.

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

Sarah Hepola

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

If the weak hand, that has recorded this tale, has, by its scenes, beguiled the mourner of one hour of sorrow, or, by its moral, taught him to sustain it - the effort, however humble, has not been vain, nor is the writer unrewarded.

Ann Radcliffe

46.

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

Stephen King

47.

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

H. G. Wells

48.

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

49.

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

Blaise Pascal

50.

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