Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

Best Quotes about Writing

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

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

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

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

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

Stephen King

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

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

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

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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

George Burns

13.

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

Stephen King

14.

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

Real Live Preacher

15.

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

Sir Francis Bacon

16.

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

Blaise Pascal

17.

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

H. G. Wells

18.

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

19.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

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.

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

Ray Bradbury

22.

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

Edwin Schlossberg

23.

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

24.

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

Peter De Vries

25.

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

Jules Renard

26.

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

Fran Lebowitz

27.

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

Elaine Liner

28.

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

Truman Capote

29.

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

30.

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne du Maurier

31.

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

Jules Renard

32.

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

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

33.

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

Henry James

34.

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

Solomon Short

35.

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac

36.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

37.

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

Josh Billings

38.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Thomas Berger

43.

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

Randy Pausch

44.

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

Thomas Mann

45.

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

46.

Vigorous writing is concise.

William Strunk Jr.

47.

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

Charles de Montesquieu

48.

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

49.

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

50.

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