Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

- George Ade

Best Quotes about Writing

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

Inigo DeLeon

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

Jules Renard

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

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

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

Jeff Jarvis

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

Edward Gibbon

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

Charles de Montesquieu

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

Leo Rosten

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

10.

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

11.

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

Randy Pausch

12.

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

Solomon Short

13.

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

14.

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

15.

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

16.

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

17.

Vigorous writing is concise.

William Strunk Jr.

18.

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

Truman Capote

19.

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

20.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

21.

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

22.

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

Real Live Preacher

23.

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

24.

This is the challenge of writing. You have to be very emotionally engaged in what youÆre doing, or it comes out flat. You canÆt fake your way through this.

Real Live Preacher

25.

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

26.

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

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

27.

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

28.

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

Jules Renard

29.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

33.

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

Robert Heinlein

34.

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

35.

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

Elaine Liner

36.

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

37.

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

Bobby Knight

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Stephen King

42.

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

George Ade

43.

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

44.

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

Eric A. Burns

45.

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

Martin Myers

46.

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

47.

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

Samuel Johnson

48.

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

Jef Mallett

49.

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

50.

I think people want their illusions and writers are mostly illusion. When you read their words, you read a flattened, incomplete version of the writer.

Real Live Preacher