Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

Best Quotes about Writing

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

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

Josh Billings

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

Leo Rosten

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

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

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

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

Victor Hugo

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

Jules Renard

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

Jef Mallett

10.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

11.

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

Stephen King

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

15.

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

16.

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

Real Live Preacher

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Edward Gibbon

20.

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

Eric A. Burns

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King

25.

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

Sarah Hepola

26.

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

Randy Pausch

27.

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

28.

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

29.

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

Jules Renard

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Truman Capote

35.

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

Melanie Benjamin

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.

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

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

41.

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

Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum

42.

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

Martin Myers

43.

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

Elaine Liner

44.

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

45.

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

Edwin Schlossberg

46.

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

Fran Lebowitz

47.

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

Stephen King

48.

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

49.

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

Robert Heinlein

50.

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

Min Kim