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

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

George Burns

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

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

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

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

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

George Ade

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

Fran Lebowitz

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

Real Live Preacher

10.

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

11.

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

Josh Billings

12.

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

13.

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

Sir Francis Bacon

14.

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

15.

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

Carol Burnett

16.

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

17.

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

Solomon Short

18.

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

Randy Pausch

19.

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

Peter De Vries

20.

There is only one way to defeat the enemy, and that is to write as well as one can. The best argument is an undeniably good book.

Saul Bellow

21.

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

Jules Renard

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

I take the view, and always have, that if you cannot say what you are going to say in twenty minutes you ought to go away and write a book about it.

Lord Brabazon

26.

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

Heather Armstrong

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Inigo DeLeon

30.

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King

31.

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

Elaine Liner

32.

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

Eric A. Burns

33.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

34.

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

35.

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

Edward Gibbon

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.

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

38.

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

C. S. Lewis

39.

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

Blaise Pascal

40.

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

41.

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

Stephen King

42.

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

43.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

44.

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

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

45.

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

46.

I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.