Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

Best Quotes about Writing

If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time or the tools to write.

Stephen King

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

Vigorous writing is concise.

William Strunk Jr.

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

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

Min Kim

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

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

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

Thomas Berger

I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let's start with typewriters.

Solomon Short

10.

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

11.

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

Thomas Mann

12.

The reserve of modern assertions is sometimes pushed to extremes, in which the fear of being contradicted leads the writer to strip himself of almost all sense and meaning.

Sir Winston Churchill

13.

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

Elaine Liner

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne du Maurier

18.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

19.

Write something to suit yourself and many people will like it; write something to suit everybody and scarcely anyone will care for it.

Jesse Stuart

20.

I've always believed in writing without a collaborator, because where two people are writing the same book, each believes he gets all the worries and only half the royalties.

Agatha Christie

21.

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

22.

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

23.

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac

24.

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

Martin Myers

25.

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

George Ade

29.

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

Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum

30.

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

Leo Rosten

31.

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

Inigo DeLeon

32.

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

33.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

34.

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

35.

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

Tom Bissell

36.

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

Melanie Benjamin

37.

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

Truman Capote

38.

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

39.

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

Real Live Preacher

40.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

41.

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

H. G. Wells

42.

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

43.

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

Eric A. Burns

44.

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

45.

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

Real Live Preacher

46.

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

Robert Heinlein

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Josh Billings