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

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

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

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

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

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

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

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

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

Bobby Knight

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

Martin Myers

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

14.

Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say'infinitely'when you mean'very'; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.

C. S. Lewis

15.

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

Leo Rosten

16.

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

Min Kim

17.

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

18.

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

Elaine Liner

19.

Journalism is just a gun. It's only got one bullet in it, but if you aim right, that's all you need. Aim it right and you can blow a kneecap off the world.

Warren Ellis

20.

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

Fran Lebowitz

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Heather Armstrong

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.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Carol Burnett

31.

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

Melanie Benjamin

32.

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

Victor Hugo

33.

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

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.

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

Jeff Jarvis

36.

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

Thomas Mann

37.

If any man wish to write in a clear style, let him be first clear in his thoughts; and if any would write in a noble style, let him first possess a noble soul.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

38.

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

Ray Bradbury

39.

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

Stephen King

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Sir Francis Bacon

43.

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

44.

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

45.

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Charles de Montesquieu

49.

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

Sarah Hepola

50.

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