Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

- Henry James

Best Quotes about Writing

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

Thomas Mann

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

Carol Burnett

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

Samuel Goldwyn

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

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

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

Inigo DeLeon

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

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

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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to.

W. Somerset Maugham

13.

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

14.

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

Edwin Schlossberg

15.

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

Sir Francis Bacon

16.

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

Tom Bissell

17.

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

18.

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

Solomon Short

19.

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

Henry James

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.

Journalism is just a gun. It's only got one bullet in it, but if you aim right, that's all you need. Aim it right and you can blow a kneecap off the world.

Warren Ellis

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Martin Myers

25.

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

26.

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

Josh Billings

27.

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

28.

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

Blaise Pascal

29.

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

30.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

31.

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

32.

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

Samuel Johnson

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Elaine Liner

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.

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

Victor Hugo

39.

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

Robert Heinlein

40.

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

Ray Bradbury

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Melanie Benjamin

44.

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

Bobby Knight

45.

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

H. G. Wells

46.

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

47.

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

Eric A. Burns

48.

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

49.

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

50.

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

Stephen King