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

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac

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

Write something to suit yourself and many people will like it; write something to suit everybody and scarcely anyone will care for it.

Jesse Stuart

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

George Burns

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

Ray Bradbury

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

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

W. Somerset Maugham

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

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

10.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

11.

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King

12.

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

13.

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

Jef Mallett

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

George Ade

18.

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

19.

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

Elaine Liner

20.

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

21.

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

Min Kim

22.

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

Melanie Benjamin

23.

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

Edwin Schlossberg

24.

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

25.

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

Peter De Vries

26.

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

Henry James

27.

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

28.

A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

Thomas Mann

29.

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

Stephen King

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.

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

32.

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

Charles de Montesquieu

33.

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

Robert Heinlein

34.

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

Edward Gibbon

35.

If any man wish to write in a clear style, let him be first clear in his thoughts; and if any would write in a noble style, let him first possess a noble soul.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

36.

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

Solomon Short

37.

It is not a bad idea to get in the habit of writing down one's thoughts. It saves one having to bother anyone else with them.

Isabel Colegate

38.

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

Jules Renard

39.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

40.

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

Heather Armstrong

41.

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

42.

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

Real Live Preacher

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

46.

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

47.

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

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

48.

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

Josh Billings

49.

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

50.

Even writers need relief from words.