Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

- Carol Burnett

Best Quotes about Writing

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

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

Real Live Preacher

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

Tom Bissell

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

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

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

Ray Bradbury

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

Bobby Knight

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

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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Carol Burnett

13.

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

Inigo DeLeon

14.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

15.

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

Elaine Liner

16.

Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a book.

Edward Gibbon

17.

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

18.

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

19.

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

Stephen King

20.

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

21.

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

Peter De Vries

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Solomon Short

27.

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

Raymond Chandler

28.

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

29.

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

Min Kim

30.

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

Jules Renard

31.

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

32.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

33.

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

Edwin Schlossberg

34.

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

35.

The tendinous part of the mind, so to speak, is more developed in winter; the fleshy, in summer. I should say winter had given the bone and sinew to literature, summer the tissues and the blood.

John Burroughs

36.

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

Eric A. Burns

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Jeff Jarvis

41.

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

42.

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

Charles de Montesquieu

43.

I think people want their illusions and writers are mostly illusion. When you read their words, you read a flattened, incomplete version of the writer.

Real Live Preacher

44.

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

45.

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

Thomas Mann

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Sir Francis Bacon

49.

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne du Maurier

50.

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

Stanislaw J. Lec