Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

- Jeff Jarvis

Best Quotes about Writing

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

Fran Lebowitz

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King

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

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

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

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

Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum

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

Martin Myers

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

Solomon Short

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

Heather Armstrong

10.

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

11.

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Edwin Schlossberg

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Blaise Pascal

19.

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

Truman Capote

20.

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

21.

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

Samuel Johnson

22.

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

Jules Renard

23.

Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money.

Jules Renard

24.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

George Ade

29.

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

Thomas Mann

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Charles de Montesquieu

33.

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

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Carol Burnett

41.

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

42.

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

Stephen King

43.

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

Josh Billings

44.

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

45.

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

Leo Rosten

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.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

48.

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

Stephen King

49.

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

50.

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

Min Kim