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

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

Leo Rosten

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

Jules Renard

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

Maybe that's just what happens; you start out wanting to change the world through language, and end up thinking it's enough to tell a few jokes.

David Nicholls

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

Jef Mallett

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

Real Live Preacher

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

Sarah Hepola

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King

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

10.

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

11.

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

Carol Burnett

12.

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

Min Kim

13.

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

14.

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

Tom Bissell

15.

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

Ray Bradbury

16.

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

17.

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

Randy Pausch

18.

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

Stephen King

19.

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

Real Live Preacher

20.

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

Samuel Johnson

21.

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

Edwin Schlossberg

22.

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne du Maurier

23.

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

Elaine Liner

24.

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

25.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

26.

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

Bobby Knight

27.

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

Sir Francis Bacon

28.

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

29.

A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions (of which its author had quite probably never heard). It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.

Edith Wharton

30.

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Eric A. Burns

34.

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

Solomon Short

35.

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

Martin Myers

36.

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

37.

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

Victor Hugo

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Robert Heinlein

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

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.

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

49.

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

Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum

50.

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell