Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

- Carol Burnett

Best Quotes about Writing

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

Melanie Benjamin

Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly misunderstand them.

John Ruskin

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

Tom Bissell

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

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

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

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

Leo Rosten

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

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac

10.

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

Peter De Vries

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.

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

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

16.

Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

Samuel Johnson

17.

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

Robert Heinlein

18.

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

Sir Francis Bacon

19.

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

Raymond Chandler

20.

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

Jules Renard

21.

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

22.

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

Martin Myers

23.

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

24.

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

Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Jules Renard

29.

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

Heather Armstrong

30.

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

George Burns

31.

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

Eric A. Burns

32.

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

Victor Hugo

33.

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

34.

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

Charles de Montesquieu

35.

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

Blaise Pascal

36.

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

Real Live Preacher

37.

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

Min Kim

38.

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

Thomas Berger

39.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

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.

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

42.

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

Fran Lebowitz

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

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.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Thomas Mann

50.

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King