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

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

Stephen King

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

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

Victor Hugo

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

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

H. G. Wells

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

Eric A. Burns

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

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

Real Live Preacher

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

10.

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

Inigo DeLeon

11.

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

12.

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

Melanie Benjamin

13.

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

Stephen King

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

Solomon Short

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

20.

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

Henry James

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Raymond Chandler

25.

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

26.

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

27.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

28.

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

29.

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

Edwin Schlossberg

30.

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

Martin Myers

31.

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

Thomas Mann

32.

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

Peter De Vries

33.

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

Truman Capote

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Elaine Liner

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Bobby Knight

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.

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

Jules Renard

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Jules Renard

49.

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

50.

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

Edward Bulwer-Lytton