Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

- Edward Gibbon

Best Quotes about Writing

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

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

I never feel that I have comprehended an emotion, or fully lived even the smallest events, until I have reflected upon it in my journal; my pen is my truest confidant, holding in check the passions and disappointments that I dare not share even with my beloved.

Stephanie Barron

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

Samuel Goldwyn

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

Carol Burnett

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

Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum

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

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

Sarah Hepola

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

10.

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

Henry James

11.

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

Samuel Johnson

12.

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

Bobby Knight

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

The most difficult part of writing a book is not devising a plot which will captivate the reader. It's not developing characters the reader will have strong feelings for or against. It is not finding a setting which will take the reader to a place he or she as never been. It is not the research, whether in fiction or non-fiction. The most difficult task facing a writer is to find the voice in which to tell the story.

Randy Pausch

18.

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

19.

Vigorous writing is concise.

William Strunk Jr.

20.

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

Fran Lebowitz

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

26.

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

27.

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

George Burns

28.

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

Edward Gibbon

29.

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

Ray Bradbury

30.

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

Josh Billings

31.

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne du Maurier

32.

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

33.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Leo Rosten

37.

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

38.

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

39.

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac

40.

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

Eric A. Burns

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.

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

Heather Armstrong

43.

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

44.

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

Min Kim

45.

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

Inigo DeLeon

46.

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

47.

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

George Ade

48.

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

49.

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

Peter De Vries

50.

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