Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

- Fran Lebowitz

Best Quotes about Writing

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

The first step in blogging is not writing them but reading them.

Jeff Jarvis

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

Fran Lebowitz

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

Benjamin Disraeli

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

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

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

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

Peter De Vries

10.

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

Eric A. Burns

11.

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

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

12.

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

Josh Billings

13.

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

14.

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

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.

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

17.

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

Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum

18.

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

19.

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac

20.

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

Real Live Preacher

21.

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

Sarah Hepola

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Real Live Preacher

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Stephen King

31.

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

Samuel Johnson

32.

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

Ray Bradbury

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Solomon Short

36.

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

Bobby Knight

37.

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

Jules Renard

38.

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

Martin Myers

39.

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

Thomas Mann

40.

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

41.

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

Tom Bissell

42.

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

43.

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

Edwin Schlossberg

44.

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

Randy Pausch

45.

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

46.

Writing well mean never having to say,'I guess you had to be there.'

Jef Mallett

47.

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

48.

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

Jules Renard

49.

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

George Burns

50.

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

W. Somerset Maugham