Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

Best Quotes about Writing

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

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

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

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

Inigo DeLeon

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

Jeff Jarvis

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

Charles de Montesquieu

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

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

Eric A. Burns

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

Sir Francis Bacon

10.

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

Randy Pausch

11.

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

Ray Bradbury

12.

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

Min Kim

13.

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

Jules Renard

14.

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

Jules Renard

15.

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

Real Live Preacher

16.

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

Solomon Short

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

H. G. Wells

20.

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

21.

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

Real Live Preacher

22.

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

23.

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

24.

Vigorous writing is concise.

William Strunk Jr.

25.

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne du Maurier

26.

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

27.

Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a book.

Edward Gibbon

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

33.

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

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.

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King

36.

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

37.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

38.

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

Bobby Knight

39.

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

40.

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

George Ade

41.

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

Robert Heinlein

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Blaise Pascal

46.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

47.

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

Jef Mallett

48.

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

49.

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

Victor Hugo

50.

I always wrote with the idea that what I put out there is going to stay there. Once I publish something, it has been published. I've never deleted more than one or two posts from my site. I don't think that there are takebacks. I don't feel right about it.

Alison Headley