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

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

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

Jules Renard

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

H. G. Wells

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

Jeff Jarvis

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne du Maurier

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

Samuel Johnson

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

Real Live Preacher

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

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

Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum

10.

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

Blaise Pascal

11.

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

12.

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

Randy Pausch

13.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

14.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

15.

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

16.

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

Henry James

17.

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

18.

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

Eric A. Burns

19.

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

20.

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

Sarah Hepola

21.

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

22.

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

Solomon Short

23.

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

Bobby Knight

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Truman Capote

27.

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

Edward Gibbon

28.

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

Heather Armstrong

29.

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

George Burns

30.

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

Robert Heinlein

31.

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

Edwin Schlossberg

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Ray Bradbury

35.

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

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.

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

38.

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

Charles de Montesquieu

39.

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

Jules Renard

40.

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

41.

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

Stephen King

42.

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

Real Live Preacher

43.

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

44.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

45.

Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed there are many rewards, if you disgrace yourself you can always write a book.

Ronald Reagan

46.

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

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.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

49.

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

50.

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

Fran Lebowitz