Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

- Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Best Quotes about Writing

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac

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

Raymond Chandler

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

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

The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn't require any.

Russell Baker

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

Victor Hugo

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

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

Charles de Montesquieu

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.

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

Edwin Schlossberg

11.

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

Jef Mallett

12.

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

Thomas Berger

13.

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

H. G. Wells

14.

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

Leo Rosten

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Real Live Preacher

19.

Vigorous writing is concise.

William Strunk Jr.

20.

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

Martin Myers

21.

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

22.

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

Jules Renard

23.

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

Josh Billings

24.

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

25.

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

Fran Lebowitz

26.

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

Ray Bradbury

27.

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

28.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

29.

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

30.

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

Blaise Pascal

31.

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

32.

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

George Ade

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Heather Armstrong

39.

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

Elaine Liner

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Henry James

45.

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

Sarah Hepola

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.

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

Thomas Mann

48.

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

49.

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

Real Live Preacher

50.

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