Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

- Min Kim

Best Quotes about Writing

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

Real Live Preacher

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

Edwin Schlossberg

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

Samuel Johnson

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

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

Edward Gibbon

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

Jef Mallett

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

Josh Billings

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

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

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

10.

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

11.

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

Eric A. Burns

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

H. G. Wells

15.

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King

16.

After being Turned Down by numerous Publishers, he had decided to write for Posterity.

George Ade

17.

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

18.

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

19.

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne du Maurier

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Leo Rosten

23.

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

Charles de Montesquieu

24.

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

Blaise Pascal

25.

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

26.

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac

27.

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

Jules Renard

28.

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

Thomas Berger

29.

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

33.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

34.

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

Fran Lebowitz

35.

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

36.

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

Jules Renard

37.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

38.

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

39.

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

Solomon Short

40.

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

41.

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

Tom Bissell

42.

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

Henry James

43.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

44.

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

Carol Burnett

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

49.

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

50.

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

Thomas Mann