Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

- Jules Renard

Best Quotes about Writing

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

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

Real Live Preacher

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

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

Jeff Jarvis

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

Jef Mallett

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

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

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

Henry James

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

Stephen King

10.

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

Josh Billings

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Ray Bradbury

14.

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

15.

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

Min Kim

16.

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

Solomon Short

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Fran Lebowitz

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.

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

Jules Renard

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Charles de Montesquieu

26.

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

27.

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

Jules Renard

28.

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

Martin Myers

29.

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

30.

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King

31.

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

Real Live Preacher

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

40.

Words, once they are printed, have a life of their own.

Carol Burnett

41.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

42.

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

Blaise Pascal

43.

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

44.

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

Randy Pausch

45.

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

46.

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

Edwin Schlossberg

47.

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

Thomas Mann

48.

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

H. G. Wells

49.

Vigorous writing is concise.