Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

- Jef Mallett

Best Quotes about Writing

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

W. Somerset Maugham

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

Sarah Hepola

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac

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

Samuel Johnson

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

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

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

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

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

10.

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

Peter De Vries

11.

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

12.

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

Jeff Jarvis

13.

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

Fran Lebowitz

14.

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

15.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

16.

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

Stephen King

17.

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

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.

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

20.

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

Raymond Chandler

21.

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

Jules Renard

22.

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

23.

You ask me why I do not write something....I think one's feelings waste themselves in words, they ought all to be distilled into actions and into actions which bring results.

Florence Nightingale

24.

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne du Maurier

25.

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

Blaise Pascal

26.

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

27.

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

Carol Burnett

28.

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

Bobby Knight

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.

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

31.

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

H. G. Wells

32.

I think people want their illusions and writers are mostly illusion. When you read their words, you read a flattened, incomplete version of the writer.

Real Live Preacher

33.

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

Leo Rosten

34.

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

Min Kim

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Randy Pausch

38.

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

39.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

40.

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

Inigo DeLeon

41.

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

Josh Billings

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

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.

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

47.

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

Edwin Schlossberg

48.

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

49.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

50.

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