Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

- Martin Myers

Best Quotes about Writing

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

Solomon Short

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

W. Somerset Maugham

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

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

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

Inigo DeLeon

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

Maybe that's just what happens; you start out wanting to change the world through language, and end up thinking it's enough to tell a few jokes.

David Nicholls

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

Fran Lebowitz

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

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

10.

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

11.

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

Stephen King

12.

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

Truman Capote

13.

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

14.

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

Elaine Liner

15.

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

16.

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

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.

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

Real Live Preacher

19.

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

H. G. Wells

20.

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

21.

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

Edward Gibbon

22.

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

Carol Burnett

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Jules Renard

26.

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

Melanie Benjamin

27.

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

28.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

29.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

30.

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

Thomas Mann

31.

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

George Burns

32.

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac

33.

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

Min Kim

34.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

35.

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

36.

Vigorous writing is concise.

William Strunk Jr.

37.

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

38.

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

39.

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

40.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

41.

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

Raymond Chandler

42.

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

Thomas Berger

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Stephen King

46.

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

Jef Mallett

47.

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

48.

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

Leo Rosten

49.

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

50.

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