Motivational Quotes

Writing

Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly misunderstand them.

- John Ruskin

Best Quotes about Writing

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

Real Live Preacher

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

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

Sir Francis Bacon

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

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

Randy Pausch

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac

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

Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

Samuel Johnson

10.

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

Tom Bissell

11.

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

Leo Rosten

12.

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

Bobby Knight

13.

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

14.

Write something to suit yourself and many people will like it; write something to suit everybody and scarcely anyone will care for it.

Jesse Stuart

15.

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

Thomas Mann

16.

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

17.

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

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.

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

20.

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

Edward Gibbon

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Thomas Berger

25.

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

Melanie Benjamin

26.

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

Real Live Preacher

27.

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

28.

I never feel that I have comprehended an emotion, or fully lived even the smallest events, until I have reflected upon it in my journal; my pen is my truest confidant, holding in check the passions and disappointments that I dare not share even with my beloved.

Stephanie Barron

29.

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

30.

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

Fran Lebowitz

31.

Vigorous writing is concise.

William Strunk Jr.

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Sarah Hepola

36.

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

Henry James

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne du Maurier

42.

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

Blaise Pascal

43.

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King

44.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

45.

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

Jules Renard

46.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

47.

Writing gives you the illusion of control, and then you realize it's just an illusion, that people are going to bring their own stuff into it.

David Sedaris

48.

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

49.

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

Martin Myers

50.

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

Inigo DeLeon