Motivational Quotes

Writing

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

- Daphne du Maurier

Best Quotes about Writing

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

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

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

Carol Burnett

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

Min Kim

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

Henry James

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

Inigo DeLeon

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

Jef Mallett

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

Solomon Short

Please write again soon. Though my own life is filled with activity, letters encourage momentary escape into others lives and I come back to my own with greater contentment.

Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey

10.

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

Edward Gibbon

11.

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

Ray Bradbury

12.

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

13.

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Thomas Mann

18.

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

19.

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

Jules Renard

20.

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

21.

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

Thomas Berger

22.

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

Blaise Pascal

23.

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

Raymond Chandler

24.

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

Elaine Liner

25.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

26.

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

Josh Billings

27.

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

George Ade

28.

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

Martin Myers

29.

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

Tom Bissell

30.

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

31.

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Stephen King

42.

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

43.

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Real Live Preacher

48.

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

49.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

50.

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