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

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

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

Jules Renard

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

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

Carol Burnett

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

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

Victor Hugo

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

Ray Bradbury

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

There is nothing to write about, you say. Well then, write and let me know just this - that there is nothing to write about; or tell me in the good old style if you are well. That's right. I am quite well.

Pliny the Younger

10.

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

11.

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

H. G. Wells

12.

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

13.

Writing gives you the illusion of control, and then you realize it's just an illusion, that people are going to bring their own stuff into it.

David Sedaris

14.

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

Stephen King

15.

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

Elaine Liner

16.

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

17.

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

Tom Bissell

18.

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

19.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

20.

Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.

Sir Francis Bacon

21.

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

22.

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne du Maurier

23.

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

Real Live Preacher

24.

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

Martin Myers

25.

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

Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum

26.

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

Inigo DeLeon

27.

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

28.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

29.

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

30.

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

Edward Gibbon

31.

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

Blaise Pascal

32.

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

33.

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

Truman Capote

34.

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

Heather Armstrong

35.

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

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 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

38.

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

Henry James

39.

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

40.

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

Samuel Johnson

41.

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

42.

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

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

43.

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

Real Live Preacher

44.

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

45.

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

Edwin Schlossberg

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Stanislaw J. Lec