Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

Best Quotes about Writing

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

H. G. Wells

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

Stephen King

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

Randy Pausch

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

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

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

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

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

Blaise Pascal

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

10.

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

11.

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

Real Live Preacher

12.

A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions (of which its author had quite probably never heard). It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.

Edith Wharton

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Stephen King

16.

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

Sir Francis Bacon

17.

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

18.

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

Solomon Short

19.

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

Eric A. Burns

20.

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King

21.

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

22.

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

Raymond Chandler

23.

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

24.

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

Bobby Knight

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

George Burns

28.

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac

29.

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

Jules Renard

30.

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

Truman Capote

31.

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

Min Kim

32.

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

Ray Bradbury

33.

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

Real Live Preacher

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

39.

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

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

40.

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

41.

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

42.

Vigorous writing is concise.

William Strunk Jr.

43.

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

Fran Lebowitz

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Peter De Vries

47.

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

Martin Myers

48.

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

Elaine Liner

49.

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

50.

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