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

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

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

Eric A. Burns

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

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

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

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

Real Live Preacher

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

Jeff Jarvis

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

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

Melanie Benjamin

10.

An author spends months writing a book, and maybe puts his heart's blood into it, and then it lies about unread till the reader has nothing else in the world to do.

W. Somerset Maugham

11.

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

12.

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

13.

Vigorous writing is concise.

William Strunk Jr.

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.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Randy Pausch

20.

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

H. G. Wells

21.

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

Edwin Schlossberg

22.

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

Henry James

23.

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

24.

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac

25.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

26.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

27.

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

Charles de Montesquieu

28.

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

George Burns

29.

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

Sir Francis Bacon

30.

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

Real Live Preacher

31.

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

Bobby Knight

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Edward Gibbon

36.

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

37.

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

Fran Lebowitz

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

43.

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

44.

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

45.

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King

46.

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

Jules Renard

47.

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

48.

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

Carol Burnett

49.

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

Jef Mallett

50.

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