Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

- H. G. Wells

Best Quotes about Writing

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

Eric A. Burns

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

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

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

Ray Bradbury

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

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

Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum

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

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

Elaine Liner

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

Jef Mallett

10.

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

11.

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

Inigo DeLeon

12.

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King

13.

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

14.

I always wrote with the idea that what I put out there is going to stay there. Once I publish something, it has been published. I've never deleted more than one or two posts from my site. I don't think that there are takebacks. I don't feel right about it.

Alison Headley

15.

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

Melanie Benjamin

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Carol Burnett

20.

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

Thomas Berger

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Edwin Schlossberg

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Randy Pausch

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Henry James

31.

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

32.

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

Sarah Hepola

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Blaise Pascal

36.

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne du Maurier

37.

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

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.

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

Truman Capote

40.

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

Solomon Short

41.

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

Real Live Preacher

42.

A great writer reveals the truth even when he or she does not wish to.

Tom Bissell

43.

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

44.

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

Bobby Knight

45.

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

46.

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

Samuel Johnson

47.

There is only one way to defeat the enemy, and that is to write as well as one can. The best argument is an undeniably good book.

Saul Bellow

48.

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

49.

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

Peter De Vries

50.

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell