Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

- Ray Bradbury

Best Quotes about Writing

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leo Rosten

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

Real Live Preacher

10.

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac

11.

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

12.

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

Min Kim

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Jules Renard

16.

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

Inigo DeLeon

17.

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

18.

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

Martin Myers

19.

I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.

Joan Didion

20.

Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography, but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility.

Katherine Paterson

21.

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

Ray Bradbury

22.

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

23.

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

24.

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

The key to non-anxious sermon-writing is that itÆs not about me. ItÆs about the congregation. I honor the fact that the listeners bring more to the sermon than I do. I remind myself of the hundreds of times someone says,'I loved how you saidà'and then tell me things that they heard that were nowhere in my text and that I never said. But they heard what they needed to hear.

Reverend Sean Parker Dennison

33.

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

Fran Lebowitz

34.

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

Henry James

35.

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne du Maurier

36.

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

37.

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

Sarah Hepola

38.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

39.

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

40.

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

Victor Hugo

41.

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

Samuel Johnson

42.

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

Raymond Chandler

43.

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

Tom Bissell

44.

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

Sir Francis Bacon

45.

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

Stephen King

46.

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

47.

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

Jules Renard

48.

The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything.

John Irving

49.

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

Randy Pausch

50.

It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.

Robert Benchley