Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

Best Quotes about Writing

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

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

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

Victor Hugo

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

I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.

Truman Capote

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

Tom Bissell

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

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

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne du Maurier

10.

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

11.

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

12.

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

Inigo DeLeon

13.

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

14.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

15.

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

Jules Renard

16.

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

Min Kim

17.

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

18.

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

Carol Burnett

19.

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

20.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

21.

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

22.

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

Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum

23.

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

24.

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

Robert Heinlein

25.

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

26.

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

Real Live Preacher

27.

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

28.

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

Bobby Knight

29.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

30.

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

31.

Vigorous writing is concise.

William Strunk Jr.

32.

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac

33.

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

Leo Rosten

34.

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

Jef Mallett

35.

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

H. G. Wells

36.

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

37.

If you want to write you must have faith in yourself. Faith enough to believe that if a thing is true about you, it is likely true about many people. And if you can have faith in your integrity and your motives, then you can write about yourself without fear.

Real Live Preacher

38.

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

Thomas Mann

39.

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

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

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.

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

George Ade

45.

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

Charles de Montesquieu

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Jules Renard

49.

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

50.

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