Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

Best Quotes about Writing

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

Sir Francis Bacon

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

Josh Billings

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

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

Inigo DeLeon

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

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

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

Jules Renard

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

Melanie Benjamin

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

Blaise Pascal

10.

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

11.

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

H. G. Wells

12.

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

Ray Bradbury

13.

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

Edwin Schlossberg

14.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

15.

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

16.

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

Heather Armstrong

17.

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

18.

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

Randy Pausch

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Min Kim

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

George Ade

27.

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

Sarah Hepola

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Edward Gibbon

32.

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

Carol Burnett

33.

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

Thomas Mann

34.

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

Stephen King

35.

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

Eric A. Burns

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

40.

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

41.

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

42.

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne du Maurier

43.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

44.

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

Real Live Preacher

45.

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

46.

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

Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum

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.

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

49.

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

Jules Renard

50.

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