Motivational Quotes

Writing

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

- Honore de Balzac

Best Quotes about Writing

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

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

Stephen King

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

Charles de Montesquieu

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

Edward Gibbon

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

Sarah Hepola

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

Edwin Schlossberg

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

Samuel Goldwyn

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

W. Somerset Maugham

In comparing various authors with one another, I have discovered that some of the gravest and latest writers have transcribed, word for word, from former works, without making acknowledgment.

Pliny the Elder

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 only reason for being a professional writer is that you can't help it.

Leo Rosten

12.

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

Martin Myers

13.

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

14.

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

Samuel Johnson

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Melanie Benjamin

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.

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne du Maurier

23.

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

Tom Bissell

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Real Live Preacher

28.

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

29.

After being Turned Down by numerous Publishers, he had decided to write for Posterity.

George Ade

30.

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

Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum

31.

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

Jef Mallett

32.

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

Carol Burnett

33.

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

George Burns

34.

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

35.

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

Elaine Liner

36.

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

37.

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

38.

Your life story would not make a good book. Don't even try.

Fran Lebowitz

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

42.

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

Eric A. Burns

43.

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

44.

You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despairûthe sense that you can never completely put on the page whatÆs in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King

45.

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Stephen King

50.

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