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

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

Ray Bradbury

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

Jules Renard

Vigorous writing is concise.

William Strunk Jr.

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

Truman Capote

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

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

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

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

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

Martin Myers

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

Stephen King

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Josh Billings

16.

Maybe that's just what happens; you start out wanting to change the world through language, and end up thinking it's enough to tell a few jokes.

David Nicholls

17.

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

18.

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

Thomas Mann

19.

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

20.

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

Jef Mallett

21.

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

Carol Burnett

22.

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

Melanie Benjamin

23.

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

24.

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

25.

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne du Maurier

26.

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

Inigo DeLeon

27.

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

George Ade

28.

She was discovering once again that reading and writing were not the same-you couldn't just soak it up then squeeze it out again.

David Nicholls

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Blaise Pascal

32.

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

33.

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

H. G. Wells

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.

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

36.

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

Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Randy Pausch

42.

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

43.

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

Elaine Liner

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

47.

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

Sir Francis Bacon

48.

There are a lot of people who can't write and maybe shouldn't write.

Sarah Hepola

49.

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