Motivational Quotes

Writing

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

- Honore de Balzac

Best Quotes about Writing

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

All a good letter has to do is make you feel special.

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

The first step in blogging is not writing them but reading them.

Jeff Jarvis

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

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

Benjamin Disraeli

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

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

Inigo DeLeon

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

Real Live Preacher

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

W. Somerset Maugham

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Truman Capote

14.

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

Min Kim

15.

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

16.

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

Jules Renard

17.

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

Tom Bissell

18.

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

Elaine Liner

19.

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King

20.

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

21.

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

Josh Billings

22.

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

23.

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

Samuel Johnson

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Victor Hugo

27.

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

Bobby Knight

28.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

29.

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

Blaise Pascal

30.

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

Thomas Mann

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.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Ray Bradbury

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.

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

Carol Burnett

38.

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

39.

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

Thomas Berger

40.

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

41.

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

Peter De Vries

42.

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

43.

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

Henry James

44.

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

Heather Armstrong

45.

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

Stephen King

46.

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

47.

Vigorous writing is concise.

William Strunk Jr.

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Solomon Short