Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

- Ray Bradbury

Best Quotes about Writing

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

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

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

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

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

Victor Hugo

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

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

Elaine Liner

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

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

Jef Mallett

10.

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

Stephen King

11.

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

Robert Heinlein

12.

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne du Maurier

13.

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

Tom Bissell

14.

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

Josh Billings

15.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

16.

We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to.

W. Somerset Maugham

17.

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

Real Live Preacher

18.

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

19.

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

Melanie Benjamin

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

23.

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

24.

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

George Ade

25.

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

26.

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

Raymond Chandler

27.

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

H. G. Wells

28.

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King

29.

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

30.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

31.

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

Charles de Montesquieu

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Henry James

35.

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

36.

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac

37.

Writing gives you the illusion of control, and then you realize it's just an illusion, that people are going to bring their own stuff into it.

David Sedaris

38.

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

39.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

40.

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

Solomon Short

41.

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

42.

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

Edward Gibbon

43.

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

Blaise Pascal

44.

Vigorous writing is concise.

William Strunk Jr.

45.

All of us learn to write in the second grade. Most of us go on to greater things.

Bobby Knight

46.

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

Heather Armstrong

47.

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

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

48.

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

Leo Rosten

49.

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

50.

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