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

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

Blaise Pascal

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

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

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

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

Edwin Schlossberg

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

Melanie Benjamin

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

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

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

Fran Lebowitz

10.

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

11.

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

Robert Heinlein

12.

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

Tom Bissell

13.

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

Raymond Chandler

14.

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

Stephen King

15.

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

16.

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

Sir Francis Bacon

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Min Kim

23.

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

Charles de Montesquieu

24.

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

Thomas Mann

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

28.

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

29.

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

Inigo DeLeon

30.

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

Victor Hugo

31.

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

32.

Keep writing. Keep doing it and doing it. Even in the moments when it's so hurtful to think about writing.

Heather Armstrong

33.

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

Eric A. Burns

34.

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

35.

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

Martin Myers

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac

42.

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

43.

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

44.

Vigorous writing is concise.

William Strunk Jr.

45.

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

46.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

47.

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

Jules Renard

48.

Not every story has explosions and car chases. That's why they have nudity and espionage.

Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum

49.

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