Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

- Real Live Preacher

Best Quotes about 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

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

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

Josh Billings

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

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

Blaise Pascal

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac

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

Solomon Short

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

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.

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

11.

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

Min Kim

12.

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

Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum

13.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

14.

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

15.

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

16.

A writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view, a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway.

Junot Diaz

17.

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

Edwin Schlossberg

18.

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

Stephen King

19.

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

Real Live Preacher

20.

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

Sir Francis Bacon

21.

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

22.

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

Martin Myers

23.

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

24.

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

Raymond Chandler

25.

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

26.

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

27.

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

28.

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

Elaine Liner

29.

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne du Maurier

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Robert Heinlein

33.

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

Jules Renard

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Tom Bissell

38.

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

Sarah Hepola

39.

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

40.

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

Jeff Jarvis

41.

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

42.

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

43.

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

Eric A. Burns

44.

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

Jef Mallett

45.

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

George Ade

46.

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

Thomas Mann

47.

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

48.

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

Jules Renard

49.

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

50.

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

Samuel Johnson