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

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

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

Thomas Mann

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

Martin Myers

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

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

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

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac

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

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

Sarah Hepola

10.

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

11.

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

George Burns

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

15.

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

Stephen King

16.

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

Min Kim

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Jules Renard

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Charles de Montesquieu

26.

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

Josh Billings

27.

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

Bobby Knight

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Samuel Johnson

31.

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

32.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

33.

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

H. G. Wells

34.

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

Elaine Liner

35.

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

Henry James

36.

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

37.

Beneath the rule of men entirely great, The pen is mightier than the sword.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

38.

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

39.

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

Inigo DeLeon

40.

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

Randy Pausch

41.

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

Blaise Pascal

42.

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

Truman Capote

43.

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

44.

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

Edwin Schlossberg

45.

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

Robert Heinlein

46.

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

47.

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

Melanie Benjamin

48.

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

49.

Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed there are many rewards, if you disgrace yourself you can always write a book.

Ronald Reagan

50.

Even writers need relief from words.