Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

Best Quotes about Writing

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

Fran Lebowitz

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

W. Somerset Maugham

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

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

Martin Myers

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

Real Live Preacher

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

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

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

Jef Mallett

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

Carol Burnett

10.

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

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

11.

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

12.

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

Edwin Schlossberg

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.

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

15.

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

16.

You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you're working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success - but only if you persist.

Isaac Asimov

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Sir Francis Bacon

23.

Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.

Stephen King

24.

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

Thomas Mann

25.

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

26.

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

Bobby Knight

27.

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

Edward Gibbon

28.

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

29.

Vigorous writing is concise.

William Strunk Jr.

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Solomon Short

33.

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

Truman Capote

34.

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

Stephen King

35.

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

36.

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

Peter De Vries

37.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

38.

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

39.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Jules Renard

43.

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

George Burns

44.

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

Real Live Preacher

45.

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

46.

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

Blaise Pascal

47.

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

48.

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac

49.

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

Victor Hugo

50.

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

Samuel Johnson