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

An author spends months writing a book, and maybe puts his heart's blood into it, and then it lies about unread till the reader has nothing else in the world to do.

W. Somerset Maugham

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

She was discovering once again that reading and writing were not the same-you couldn't just soak it up then squeeze it out again.

David Nicholls

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

Victor Hugo

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

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

Benjamin Disraeli

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

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

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

Randy Pausch

10.

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

H. G. Wells

11.

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

Melanie Benjamin

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Charles de Montesquieu

16.

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

Edwin Schlossberg

17.

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac

18.

If you want to write you must have faith in yourself. Faith enough to believe that if a thing is true about you, it is likely true about many people. And if you can have faith in your integrity and your motives, then you can write about yourself without fear.

Real Live Preacher

19.

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne du Maurier

20.

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

Carol Burnett

21.

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

Jules Renard

22.

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

Martin Myers

23.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

24.

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

25.

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

Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum

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.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Real Live Preacher

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Stephen King

33.

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

Bobby Knight

34.

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

Jef Mallett

35.

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

Henry James

36.

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

37.

If any man wish to write in a clear style, let him be first clear in his thoughts; and if any would write in a noble style, let him first possess a noble soul.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

38.

I take the view, and always have, that if you cannot say what you are going to say in twenty minutes you ought to go away and write a book about it.

Lord Brabazon

39.

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

Ray Bradbury

40.

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

41.

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

Sir Francis Bacon

42.

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

George Burns

43.

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

Solomon Short

44.

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

Blaise Pascal

45.

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

46.

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

Elaine Liner

47.

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

Edward Gibbon

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Samuel Johnson