Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

Best Quotes about Writing

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

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

Tom Bissell

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

Samuel Goldwyn

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

Solomon Short

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

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

Robert Heinlein

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac

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

Stephen King

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

Real Live Preacher

10.

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

Blaise Pascal

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Sarah Hepola

14.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

15.

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

16.

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

Carol Burnett

17.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

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.

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Jef Mallett

24.

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

25.

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

Real Live Preacher

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Thomas Mann

29.

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

30.

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

Leo Rosten

31.

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

Samuel Johnson

32.

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

33.

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

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.

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

Heather Armstrong

36.

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

Victor Hugo

37.

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

38.

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

39.

I think people want their illusions and writers are mostly illusion. When you read their words, you read a flattened, incomplete version of the writer.

Real Live Preacher

40.

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

Thomas Berger

41.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

42.

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

43.

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

44.

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

George Ade

45.

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

46.

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

Melanie Benjamin

47.

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

48.

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

Jules Renard

49.

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

50.

The tendinous part of the mind, so to speak, is more developed in winter; the fleshy, in summer. I should say winter had given the bone and sinew to literature, summer the tissues and the blood.

John Burroughs