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

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

Carol Burnett

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

Real Live Preacher

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

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

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

Robert Heinlein

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

Ray Bradbury

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

Eric A. Burns

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

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

Randy Pausch

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

14.

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

Jules Renard

15.

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

Heather Armstrong

16.

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

Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum

17.

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

Jef Mallett

18.

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

19.

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

Stephen King

20.

Journalism is just a gun. It's only got one bullet in it, but if you aim right, that's all you need. Aim it right and you can blow a kneecap off the world.

Warren Ellis

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say'infinitely'when you mean'very'; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.

C. S. Lewis

26.

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

Stephen King

27.

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

28.

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

Truman Capote

29.

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

Charles de Montesquieu

30.

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

31.

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

Jeff Jarvis

32.

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

33.

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

Leo Rosten

34.

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

35.

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

Melanie Benjamin

36.

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

37.

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

Fran Lebowitz

38.

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

Tom Bissell

39.

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

Edwin Schlossberg

40.

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

Real Live Preacher

41.

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

42.

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

Victor Hugo

43.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

44.

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

Bobby Knight

45.

About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment.

Josh Billings

46.

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

47.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

48.

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac

49.

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

50.

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