Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

Best Quotes about Writing

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

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

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

Eric A. Burns

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

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

Edward Gibbon

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

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 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

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

10.

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

Thomas Mann

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Randy Pausch

14.

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

Tom Bissell

15.

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

Thomas Berger

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Min Kim

20.

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

21.

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac

22.

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

23.

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne du Maurier

24.

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

25.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

26.

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

Charles de Montesquieu

27.

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

Sir Francis Bacon

28.

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

Real Live Preacher

29.

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

Samuel Johnson

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Truman Capote

33.

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

34.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

35.

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

36.

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

Edwin Schlossberg

37.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

38.

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

Melanie Benjamin

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.

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

Elaine Liner

41.

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

42.

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

Jeff Jarvis

43.

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

44.

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Leo Rosten

48.

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

Jules Renard

49.

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

50.

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

Peter De Vries