Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

Best Quotes about Writing

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

Josh Billings

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

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

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

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

Sarah Hepola

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

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

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

Solomon Short

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

Leo Rosten

10.

Detail makes the difference between boring and terrific writing. ItÆs the difference between a pencil sketch and a lush oil painting. As a writer, words are your paint. Use all the colors.

Rhys Alexander

11.

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

12.

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

Robert Heinlein

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Real Live Preacher

16.

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

Blaise Pascal

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

H. G. Wells

20.

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

21.

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

Thomas Berger

22.

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

Martin Myers

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Jules Renard

26.

Keep writing. Keep doing it and doing it. Even in the moments when it's so hurtful to think about writing.

Heather Armstrong

27.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

28.

The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything.

John Irving

29.

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

Inigo DeLeon

30.

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

Thomas Mann

31.

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

32.

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

Jules Renard

33.

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

Edward Gibbon

34.

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

35.

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

Sir Francis Bacon

36.

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

Victor Hugo

37.

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

38.

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

Bobby Knight

39.

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Elaine Liner