Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

Best Quotes about Writing

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

Martin Myers

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

Peter De Vries

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

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

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

Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum

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

Blaise Pascal

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

Edwin Schlossberg

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

Jules Renard

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

Jef Mallett

10.

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

Eric A. Burns

11.

An author is a fool who, not content with boring those he lives with, insists on boring future generations.

Charles de Montesquieu

12.

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

13.

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

Henry James

14.

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

15.

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

Sarah Hepola

16.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

17.

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

Bobby Knight

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Truman Capote

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

25.

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

26.

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

27.

Vigorous writing is concise.

William Strunk Jr.

28.

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac

29.

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

Solomon Short

30.

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

Min Kim

31.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

32.

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

Ray Bradbury

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Victor Hugo

36.

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

37.

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

Stephen King

38.

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

39.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

40.

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

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

H. G. Wells

44.

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

45.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

46.

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

47.

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

Carol Burnett

48.

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

Heather Armstrong

49.

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

50.

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