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

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

Thomas Mann

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

Real Live Preacher

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

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

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

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

A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions (of which its author had quite probably never heard). It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.

Edith Wharton

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

Heather Armstrong

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

10.

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

Jules Renard

11.

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

George Burns

12.

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

13.

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

Real Live Preacher

14.

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

Eric A. Burns

15.

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

Randy Pausch

16.

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

17.

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

Melanie Benjamin

18.

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

19.

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

Raymond Chandler

20.

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

Henry James

21.

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

Carol Burnett

22.

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

Thomas Berger

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Jules Renard

28.

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

Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum

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.

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

31.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Bobby Knight

35.

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

Sir Francis Bacon

36.

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

Stephen King

37.

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

38.

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

Martin Myers

39.

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

40.

Vigorous writing is concise.

William Strunk Jr.

41.

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

42.

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

H. G. Wells

43.

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

44.

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

Tom Bissell

45.

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

46.

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

Victor Hugo

47.

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

Blaise Pascal

48.

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

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

49.

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

Fran Lebowitz

50.

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