Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

- Robert Heinlein

Best Quotes about Writing

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

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

Elaine Liner

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

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

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

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

Jef Mallett

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

Josh Billings

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

10.

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

11.

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

Edward Gibbon

12.

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

Thomas Mann

13.

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

H. G. Wells

14.

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

Melanie Benjamin

15.

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

Robert Heinlein

16.

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

Tom Bissell

17.

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

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

18.

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

Stephen King

19.

Not every story has explosions and car chases. That's why they have nudity and espionage.

Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Real Live Preacher

24.

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

Samuel Johnson

25.

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King

26.

The tendinous part of the mind, so to speak, is more developed in winter; the fleshy, in summer. I should say winter had given the bone and sinew to literature, summer the tissues and the blood.

John Burroughs

27.

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

28.

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

George Orwell

29.

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Blaise Pascal

33.

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

34.

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

Randy Pausch

35.

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

Raymond Chandler

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Heather Armstrong

43.

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

Truman Capote

44.

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

Sir Francis Bacon

45.

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

Min Kim

46.

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

47.

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

Solomon Short

48.

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

49.

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

Ray Bradbury

50.

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