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

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

Min Kim

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

Literature is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none.

Jules Renard

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

Edward Gibbon

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

W. Somerset Maugham

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

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

Josh Billings

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

Stephen King

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

10.

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

11.

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

Melanie Benjamin

12.

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

Real Live Preacher

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Ray Bradbury

16.

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

17.

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

Jef Mallett

18.

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

Raymond Chandler

19.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

20.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

21.

Detail makes the difference between boring and terrific writing. ItÆs the difference between a pencil sketch and a lush oil painting. As a writer, words are your paint. Use all the colors.

Rhys Alexander

22.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

23.

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

Blaise Pascal

24.

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

Truman Capote

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

H. G. Wells

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Jeff Jarvis

35.

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

Thomas Berger

36.

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

Bobby Knight

37.

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

38.

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

39.

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

Leo Rosten

40.

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

Samuel Johnson

41.

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

42.

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King

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.

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

45.

An author spends months writing a book, and maybe puts his heart's blood into it, and then it lies about unread till the reader has nothing else in the world to do.

W. Somerset Maugham

46.

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

47.

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

Victor Hugo

48.

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

George Ade

49.

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

Real Live Preacher

50.

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