Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

- Ray Bradbury

Best Quotes about Writing

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

Inigo DeLeon

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

Eric A. Burns

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

Min Kim

I never feel that I have comprehended an emotion, or fully lived even the smallest events, until I have reflected upon it in my journal; my pen is my truest confidant, holding in check the passions and disappointments that I dare not share even with my beloved.

Stephanie Barron

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

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

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

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

Real Live Preacher

This is the challenge of writing. You have to be very emotionally engaged in what youÆre doing, or it comes out flat. You canÆt fake your way through this.

Real Live Preacher

10.

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

Truman Capote

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Jules Renard

14.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

15.

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

Henry James

16.

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

Martin Myers

17.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

18.

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

19.

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

Heather Armstrong

20.

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

Ray Bradbury

21.

Journalism is just a gun. It's only got one bullet in it, but if you aim right, that's all you need. Aim it right and you can blow a kneecap off the world.

Warren Ellis

22.

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

Blaise Pascal

23.

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

Samuel Johnson

24.

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

Jeff Jarvis

25.

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

Solomon Short

26.

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

Stephen King

27.

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

H. G. Wells

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Leo Rosten

31.

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

Elaine Liner

32.

Vigorous writing is concise.

William Strunk Jr.

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.

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

Josh Billings

35.

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

36.

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac

37.

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

38.

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

Tom Bissell

39.

At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable.

Raymond Chandler

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Jef Mallett

44.

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

Real Live Preacher

45.

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

Randy Pausch

46.

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