Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

Best Quotes about Writing

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

Samuel Johnson

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

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King

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

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

Thomas Mann

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

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

Carol Burnett

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

Edwin Schlossberg

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

10.

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

Jef Mallett

11.

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

Jules Renard

12.

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

13.

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

Randy Pausch

14.

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

15.

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

Jeff Jarvis

16.

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

17.

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

Robert Heinlein

18.

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

Victor Hugo

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.

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

21.

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

Ray Bradbury

22.

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

23.

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

Truman Capote

24.

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

Peter De Vries

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Leo Rosten

29.

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne du Maurier

30.

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

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.

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

Tom Bissell

33.

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

34.

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

Martin Myers

35.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

36.

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

Fran Lebowitz

37.

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

38.

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

Real Live Preacher

39.

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

Bobby Knight

40.

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

41.

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

Blaise Pascal

42.

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

Real Live Preacher

43.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

44.

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

Solomon Short

45.

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

49.

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

50.

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

Min Kim