Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

- Ray Bradbury

Best Quotes about 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

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

Robert Heinlein

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

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

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

Jules Renard

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

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

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

Samuel Johnson

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

10.

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

11.

This is the sixth book I've written, which isn't bad for a guy who's only read two.

George Burns

12.

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

13.

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

Charles de Montesquieu

14.

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

H. G. Wells

15.

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

16.

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac

17.

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

18.

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

Fran Lebowitz

19.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

20.

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

Jeff Jarvis

21.

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

22.

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

23.

The most difficult part of writing a book is not devising a plot which will captivate the reader. It's not developing characters the reader will have strong feelings for or against. It is not finding a setting which will take the reader to a place he or she as never been. It is not the research, whether in fiction or non-fiction. The most difficult task facing a writer is to find the voice in which to tell the story.

Randy Pausch

24.

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

Blaise Pascal

25.

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

Victor Hugo

26.

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

27.

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King

28.

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

Stephen King

29.

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

30.

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

Real Live Preacher

31.

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

32.

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

Edwin Schlossberg

33.

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

Thomas Berger

34.

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

George Ade

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.

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

Thomas Mann

37.

Vigorous writing is concise.

William Strunk Jr.

38.

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

Melanie Benjamin

39.

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

Carol Burnett

40.

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

44.

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

Sarah Hepola

45.

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

Inigo DeLeon

46.

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

Jef Mallett

47.

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

48.

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

Raymond Chandler

49.

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

50.

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne du Maurier