Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

- Leo Rosten

Best Quotes about Writing

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

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

Carol Burnett

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

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

Elaine Liner

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

Sarah Hepola

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

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

Eric A. Burns

I don't think anyone should write their autobiography until after they're dead.

Samuel Goldwyn

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

Thomas Berger

10.

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

Solomon Short

11.

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

Samuel Johnson

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

15.

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

Jeff Jarvis

16.

If the weak hand, that has recorded this tale, has, by its scenes, beguiled the mourner of one hour of sorrow, or, by its moral, taught him to sustain it - the effort, however humble, has not been vain, nor is the writer unrewarded.

Ann Radcliffe

17.

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

18.

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

Victor Hugo

19.

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

Blaise Pascal

20.

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

21.

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

Melanie Benjamin

22.

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

23.

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

H. G. Wells

24.

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

25.

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

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.

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

28.

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

Edward Gibbon

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Fran Lebowitz

33.

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

Robert Heinlein

34.

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

Inigo DeLeon

35.

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

Real Live Preacher

36.

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

37.

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

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

38.

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

Edwin Schlossberg

39.

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

40.

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

Thomas Mann

41.

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

Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum

42.

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

43.

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Charles de Montesquieu

47.

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

48.

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