Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

- Raymond Chandler

Best Quotes about Writing

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

Randy Pausch

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

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

Sarah Hepola

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

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

Tom Bissell

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

Josh Billings

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

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

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

10.

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac

11.

Your manuscript is both good and original, but the part that is good is not original and the part that is original is not good.

Samuel Johnson

12.

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

Jules Renard

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

16.

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

Real Live Preacher

17.

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

18.

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

Leo Rosten

19.

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

Samuel Johnson

20.

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

George Ade

21.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

22.

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

23.

Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time... The wait is simply too long.

Leonard Bernstein

24.

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

Robert Heinlein

25.

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King

26.

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

Martin Myers

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Sir Francis Bacon

30.

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

31.

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

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.

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.

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

Min Kim

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Blaise Pascal

38.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

39.

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

Jeff Jarvis

40.

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

Stephen King

41.

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

George Burns

42.

Vigorous writing is concise.

William Strunk Jr.

43.

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

44.

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

Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Melanie Benjamin

48.

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

49.

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

50.

A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor.

Ring Lardner