Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

Best Quotes about Writing

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

Jules Renard

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

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne du Maurier

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

Sir Francis Bacon

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

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

Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum

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

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

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

10.

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

Blaise Pascal

11.

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

Heather Armstrong

12.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Samuel Johnson

16.

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

Thomas Mann

17.

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

Tom Bissell

18.

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

Sarah Hepola

19.

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

20.

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

Martin Myers

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

26.

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

Bobby Knight

27.

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

Peter De Vries

28.

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

Fran Lebowitz

29.

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

30.

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

Jef Mallett

31.

Vigorous writing is concise.

William Strunk Jr.

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Real Live Preacher

35.

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

Henry James

36.

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

37.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

38.

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

Carol Burnett

39.

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

Jeff Jarvis

40.

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

H. G. Wells

41.

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

42.

I take the view, and always have, that if you cannot say what you are going to say in twenty minutes you ought to go away and write a book about it.

Lord Brabazon

43.

I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.

Truman Capote

44.

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

45.

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

Jules Renard

46.

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

47.

Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.

Robert Heinlein

48.

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

Eric A. Burns

49.

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

50.

The only reason for being a professional writer is that you can't help it.

Leo Rosten