Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

- Eric A. Burns

Best Quotes about Writing

Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed there are many rewards, if you disgrace yourself you can always write a book.

Ronald Reagan

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

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

Sir Francis Bacon

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

Stephen King

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

George Burns

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

H. G. Wells

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

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 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

10.

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

Samuel Johnson

11.

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

12.

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

Min Kim

13.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

14.

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

15.

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

16.

It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.

Robert Benchley

17.

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

18.

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

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 am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac

21.

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

22.

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

Tom Bissell

23.

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

24.

Vigorous writing is concise.

William Strunk Jr.

25.

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

Eric A. Burns

26.

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

Melanie Benjamin

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

George Ade

31.

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

Robert Heinlein

32.

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

Ray Bradbury

33.

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

34.

All a good letter has to do is make you feel special.

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

35.

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

36.

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

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

37.

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

38.

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

Victor Hugo

39.

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

Henry James

40.

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

41.

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

Fran Lebowitz

42.

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

43.

There is nothing to write about, you say. Well then, write and let me know just this - that there is nothing to write about; or tell me in the good old style if you are well. That's right. I am quite well.

Pliny the Younger

44.

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

Carol Burnett

45.

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

46.

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

47.

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

Real Live Preacher

48.

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

49.

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

Edwin Schlossberg

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