Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

Best Quotes about Writing

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

Victor Hugo

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

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

Ray Bradbury

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

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

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

George Ade

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

Raymond Chandler

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

10.

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

11.

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

Henry James

12.

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

13.

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

Edward Gibbon

14.

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

15.

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

Min Kim

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Jef Mallett

19.

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

Jules Renard

20.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

21.

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

Elaine Liner

22.

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

23.

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

Sarah Hepola

24.

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

Stephen King

25.

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

26.

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

Samuel Johnson

27.

This is the sixth book I've written, which isn't bad for a guy who's only read two.

George Burns

28.

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

29.

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

Stephen King

30.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

31.

Vigorous writing is concise.

William Strunk Jr.

32.

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

Thomas Berger

33.

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

34.

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

35.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and all time.

George Bernard Shaw

36.

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

37.

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

Real Live Preacher

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Fran Lebowitz

41.

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

42.

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

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.

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

Solomon Short

45.

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Inigo DeLeon

49.

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

50.

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