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

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

Henry James

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

Elaine Liner

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

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

Martin Myers

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

Samuel Goldwyn

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

The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything.

John Irving

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

Solomon Short

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

10.

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

11.

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

Inigo DeLeon

12.

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

13.

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

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.

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

Victor Hugo

16.

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King

17.

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

18.

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

Edward Gibbon

19.

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

Tom Bissell

20.

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

Josh Billings

21.

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

Sarah Hepola

22.

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

23.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

24.

The most difficult part of writing a book is not devising a plot which will captivate the reader. It's not developing characters the reader will have strong feelings for or against. It is not finding a setting which will take the reader to a place he or she as never been. It is not the research, whether in fiction or non-fiction. The most difficult task facing a writer is to find the voice in which to tell the story.

Randy Pausch

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Ray Bradbury

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Leo Rosten

31.

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

Jules Renard

32.

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

Truman Capote

33.

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

34.

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

Eric A. Burns

35.

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

Real Live Preacher

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Stephen King

39.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

40.

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

41.

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

42.

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

George Burns

43.

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

Fran Lebowitz

44.

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

45.

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

Samuel Johnson

46.

Vigorous writing is concise.

William Strunk Jr.

47.

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

Carol Burnett

48.

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne du Maurier

49.

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

50.

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