Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

Best Quotes about Writing

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

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

Raymond Chandler

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

Melanie Benjamin

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

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

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

Stephen King

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

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

Thomas Mann

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

W. Somerset Maugham

10.

Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed there are many rewards, if you disgrace yourself you can always write a book.

Ronald Reagan

11.

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

12.

It's not about the writing. It's about the feelings behind the words.

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

13.

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

14.

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

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

15.

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

16.

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

Victor Hugo

17.

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

Martin Myers

18.

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

19.

Vigorous writing is concise.

William Strunk Jr.

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.

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

Edwin Schlossberg

22.

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne du Maurier

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.

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

Charles de Montesquieu

25.

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

Inigo DeLeon

26.

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

27.

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

Robert Heinlein

28.

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

29.

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

Thomas Berger

30.

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

Stephen King

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Josh Billings

35.

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

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.

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

38.

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

Truman Capote

39.

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

40.

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

George Ade

41.

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

Real Live Preacher

42.

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

Sir Francis Bacon

43.

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

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.

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

Jeff Jarvis

46.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

47.

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

Randy Pausch

48.

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

49.

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

Real Live Preacher

50.

A great writer reveals the truth even when he or she does not wish to.

Tom Bissell