Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

- George Ade

Best Quotes about Writing

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

Randy Pausch

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

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

Stephen King

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

Fran Lebowitz

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

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

Carol Burnett

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

Thomas Mann

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

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Solomon Short

13.

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

Jules Renard

14.

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

15.

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

Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum

16.

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

Josh Billings

17.

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

18.

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

Elaine Liner

19.

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

H. G. Wells

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Peter De Vries

23.

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne du Maurier

24.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

25.

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

26.

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

27.

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

Jef Mallett

28.

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

Leo Rosten

29.

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

Raymond Chandler

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Truman Capote

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Martin Myers

38.

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

39.

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

Henry James

40.

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

Blaise Pascal

41.

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

42.

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

Bobby Knight

43.

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

44.

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

Sir Francis Bacon

45.

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

Robert Heinlein

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Edwin Schlossberg

50.

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

Thomas Berger