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

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

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

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

Jef Mallett

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne du Maurier

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

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

Fran Lebowitz

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

Stephen King

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

Josh Billings

10.

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

11.

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

Truman Capote

12.

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

Jules Renard

13.

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

Ray Bradbury

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Real Live Preacher

18.

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

H. G. Wells

19.

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

20.

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

Victor Hugo

21.

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

22.

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

Robert Heinlein

23.

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

Randy Pausch

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Melanie Benjamin

27.

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

28.

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

Inigo DeLeon

29.

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

30.

Vigorous writing is concise.

William Strunk Jr.

31.

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

32.

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

Real Live Preacher

33.

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

Solomon Short

34.

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

35.

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

Blaise Pascal

36.

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

George Burns

37.

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork.

Peter De Vries

42.

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

43.

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

Martin Myers

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.

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King

46.

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

47.

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

Henry James

48.

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

49.

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

Samuel Johnson

50.

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