Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

Best Quotes about Writing

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

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

Samuel Johnson

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

Elaine Liner

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

Victor Hugo

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

Thomas Mann

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

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

Stephen King

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

Benjamin Disraeli

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

10.

Vigorous writing is concise.

William Strunk Jr.

11.

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

Robert Heinlein

12.

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

13.

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

14.

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

15.

A writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view, a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway.

Junot Diaz

16.

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King

17.

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

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

18.

A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor.

Ring Lardner

19.

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne du Maurier

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

23.

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

Real Live Preacher

24.

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

Edward Gibbon

25.

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

Leo Rosten

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Raymond Chandler

30.

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

Sarah Hepola

31.

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

Eric A. Burns

32.

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

Heather Armstrong

33.

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

34.

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

Min Kim

35.

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

Tom Bissell

36.

In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning.

George Orwell

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

40.

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

Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum

41.

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

42.

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

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.

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

45.

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

Jeff Jarvis

46.

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

47.

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

Josh Billings

48.

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

49.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

50.

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