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

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

Leo Rosten

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

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

Inigo DeLeon

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

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

Real Live Preacher

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

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

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

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

George Ade

10.

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

Jules Renard

11.

If any man wish to write in a clear style, let him be first clear in his thoughts; and if any would write in a noble style, let him first possess a noble soul.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

12.

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

13.

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

Victor Hugo

14.

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

15.

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

Charles de Montesquieu

16.

Vigorous writing is concise.

William Strunk Jr.

17.

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

18.

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

Thomas Berger

19.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

20.

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

21.

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

Carol Burnett

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Edwin Schlossberg

25.

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

George Burns

26.

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

Tom Bissell

27.

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

Bobby Knight

28.

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

29.

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

Randy Pausch

30.

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

Edward Gibbon

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Elaine Liner

35.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

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.

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne du Maurier

38.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

39.

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

40.

Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.

Stephen King

41.

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

42.

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

Truman Capote

43.

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

Jules Renard

44.

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

45.

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

Fran Lebowitz

46.

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

47.

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

48.

Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time... The wait is simply too long.

Leonard Bernstein

49.

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

50.

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