Motivational Quotes

Writing

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

- Daphne du Maurier

Best Quotes about Writing

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

Jules Renard

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

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

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

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

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

Elaine Liner

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

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

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

Victor Hugo

10.

Maybe that's just what happens; you start out wanting to change the world through language, and end up thinking it's enough to tell a few jokes.

David Nicholls

11.

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

Carol Burnett

12.

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

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.

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

15.

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

Jeff Jarvis

16.

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

Samuel Johnson

17.

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

George Ade

18.

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

19.

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

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.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Henry James

24.

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

25.

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

Fran Lebowitz

26.

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

27.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

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.

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

30.

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

Tom Bissell

31.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

George Burns

35.

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

36.

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

Charles de Montesquieu

37.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

38.

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

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

39.

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

Real Live Preacher

40.

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

Stephen King

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.

A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor.

Ring Lardner

43.

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

Solomon Short

44.

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

45.

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

Bobby Knight

46.

I have never thought of writing as hard work, but I have worked hard to find a voice.

Randy Pausch

47.

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne du Maurier

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

H. G. Wells