Motivational Quotes

Writing

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

- Honore de Balzac

Best Quotes about Writing

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

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

I write because I'm afraid to say some things out loud.

Real Live Preacher

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

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

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

Henry James

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

Leo Rosten

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

Tom Bissell

10.

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne du Maurier

11.

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

H. G. Wells

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Robert Heinlein

15.

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

16.

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

Blaise Pascal

17.

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

18.

At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable.

Raymond Chandler

19.

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

Martin Myers

20.

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

21.

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

Bobby Knight

22.

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

23.

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

24.

I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.

Joan Didion

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.

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

Inigo DeLeon

27.

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

Randy Pausch

28.

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

Stephen King

29.

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

30.

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

Sarah Hepola

31.

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

32.

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac

33.

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

34.

Vigorous writing is concise.

William Strunk Jr.

35.

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

36.

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

Jeff Jarvis

37.

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

38.

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

Truman Capote

39.

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

Victor Hugo

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

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.

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

Ray Bradbury

45.

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

Sir Francis Bacon

46.

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

Real Live Preacher

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Thomas Berger