Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

- Ray Bradbury

Best Quotes about Writing

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

Thomas Berger

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

Solomon Short

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

Elaine Liner

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

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

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

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

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

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

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

Benjamin Disraeli

10.

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

Inigo DeLeon

11.

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

12.

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac

13.

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

14.

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

15.

Vigorous writing is concise.

William Strunk Jr.

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Jeff Jarvis

19.

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

Victor Hugo

20.

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

Edwin Schlossberg

21.

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

22.

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

Tom Bissell

23.

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

Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum

24.

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

Leo Rosten

25.

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

Martin Myers

26.

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

27.

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

Stephen King

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.

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

Melanie Benjamin

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Randy Pausch

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Peter De Vries

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

42.

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

Jules Renard

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.

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

Samuel Johnson

45.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

46.

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

Thomas Mann

47.

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

48.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

49.

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King

50.

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