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

If you want to write you must have faith in yourself. Faith enough to believe that if a thing is true about you, it is likely true about many people. And if you can have faith in your integrity and your motives, then you can write about yourself without fear.

Real Live Preacher

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

Truman Capote

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

A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor.

Ring Lardner

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

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

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

Eric A. Burns

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

Peter De Vries

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

10.

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

11.

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

Jules Renard

12.

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

Henry James

13.

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

14.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

15.

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

Victor Hugo

16.

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

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Thomas Mann

20.

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

21.

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

Leo Rosten

22.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

23.

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

H. G. Wells

24.

Vigorous writing is concise.

William Strunk Jr.

25.

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

Edwin Schlossberg

26.

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

27.

This is pretty much what journals are all about, at least to me. I knew as I wrote them that even though they provided an excellent place for brain (and heart, and psyche) dump, they were mainly a map of me.

Colleen Wainwright

28.

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

Solomon Short

29.

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

Min Kim

30.

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

31.

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Robert Heinlein

35.

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

Tom Bissell

36.

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

Ray Bradbury

37.

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

Blaise Pascal

38.

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

39.

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

Inigo DeLeon

40.

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

Stephen King

41.

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Randy Pausch

45.

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

46.

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

Melanie Benjamin

47.

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King

48.

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

Fran Lebowitz

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.

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

Sarah Hepola