Motivational Quotes

Writing

If you want to write you must have faith in yourself. Faith enough to believe that if a thing is true about you, it is likely true about many people. And if you can have faith in your integrity and your motives, then you can write about yourself without fear.

- Real Live Preacher

Best Quotes about Writing

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

Jules Renard

Real Live Preacher

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

Real Live Preacher

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

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

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

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

Elaine Liner

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

Tom Bissell

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

Solomon Short

10.

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

Leo Rosten

11.

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

Bobby Knight

12.

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

Blaise Pascal

13.

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

14.

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

Melanie Benjamin

15.

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

Victor Hugo

16.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

17.

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

Henry James

18.

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

Martin Myers

19.

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

20.

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

Sir Francis Bacon

21.

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

22.

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

Thomas Berger

23.

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

Min Kim

24.

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

Charles de Montesquieu

25.

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

26.

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

Jeff Jarvis

27.

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

28.

Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography, but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility.

Katherine Paterson

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Heather Armstrong

32.

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

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.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

35.

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

36.

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

37.

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

38.

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

George Ade

39.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

40.

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

41.

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

Robert Heinlein

42.

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

Jef Mallett

43.

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

44.

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

Raymond Chandler

45.

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne du Maurier

46.

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

H. G. Wells

47.

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

48.

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King

49.

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

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

50.

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