Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

Best Quotes about Writing

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

Fran Lebowitz

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

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

Carol Burnett

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

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

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

Josh Billings

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

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

10.

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

George Burns

11.

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

H. G. Wells

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Jeff Jarvis

16.

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

Thomas Berger

17.

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

Peter De Vries

18.

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

Jules Renard

19.

Detail makes the difference between boring and terrific writing. ItÆs the difference between a pencil sketch and a lush oil painting. As a writer, words are your paint. Use all the colors.

Rhys Alexander

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Inigo DeLeon

23.

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

Sir Francis Bacon

24.

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne du Maurier

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Heather Armstrong

28.

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

29.

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

Melanie Benjamin

30.

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

Stephen King

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Bobby Knight

34.

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

35.

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

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.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

38.

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

Real Live Preacher

39.

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

Blaise Pascal

40.

It's not enough to create magic. You have to create a price for magic, too. You have to create rules.