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

Peter De Vries

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

Leo Rosten

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

Truman Capote

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

Real Live Preacher

I always wrote with the idea that what I put out there is going to stay there. Once I publish something, it has been published. I've never deleted more than one or two posts from my site. I don't think that there are takebacks. I don't feel right about it.

Alison Headley

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

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

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

George Burns

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

Stephen King

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King

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.

In comparing various authors with one another, I have discovered that some of the gravest and latest writers have transcribed, word for word, from former works, without making acknowledgment.

Pliny the Elder

16.

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

17.

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

Min Kim

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Victor Hugo

21.

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

Real Live Preacher

22.

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

23.

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

Jeff Jarvis

24.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

25.

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

26.

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

Bobby Knight

27.

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

Tom Bissell

28.

I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.

Oscar Wilde

29.

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

30.

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac

31.

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

H. G. Wells

32.

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

33.

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

Heather Armstrong

34.

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

35.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

36.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

37.

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

Charles de Montesquieu

38.

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

Jef Mallett

39.

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

Randy Pausch

40.

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

41.

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

Blaise Pascal

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Fran Lebowitz

45.

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

46.

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

Josh Billings

47.

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

48.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

49.

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

50.

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

Sir Francis Bacon