Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

- Jef Mallett

Best Quotes about Writing

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

Melanie Benjamin

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

Eric A. Burns

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

Sir Francis Bacon

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

George Burns

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King

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

Solomon Short

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

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

Fran Lebowitz

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

Raymond Chandler

10.

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

11.

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

Peter De Vries

12.

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

Jules Renard

13.

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

14.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

15.

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

16.

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

Charles de Montesquieu

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Stephen King

20.

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

21.

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

Thomas Mann

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Real Live Preacher

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

31.

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

Truman Capote

32.

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

Edward Gibbon

33.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

34.

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

35.

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

Randy Pausch

36.

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

Henry James

37.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

38.

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

39.

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

Ray Bradbury

40.

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

41.

Vigorous writing is concise.

William Strunk Jr.

42.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

43.

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

Thomas Berger

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Min Kim

49.

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

50.

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

Carol Burnett