Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

Best Quotes about Writing

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

Martin Myers

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

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

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

Carol Burnett

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

Inigo DeLeon

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

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

Elaine Liner

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

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

10.

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

Sarah Hepola

11.

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

12.

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

Bobby Knight

13.

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne du Maurier

14.

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

Real Live Preacher

15.

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

16.

Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography, but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility.

Katherine Paterson

17.

Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time... The wait is simply too long.

Leonard Bernstein

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Victor Hugo

21.

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

22.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

23.

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

24.

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

Stephen King

25.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

26.

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

Real Live Preacher

27.

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

28.

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

Peter De Vries

29.

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

30.

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

Tom Bissell

31.

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

Randy Pausch

32.

I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.

Joan Didion

33.

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

Jef Mallett

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Jules Renard

39.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

40.

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

41.

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

42.

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

Min Kim

43.

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

44.

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

Edward Gibbon

45.

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

Heather Armstrong

46.

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac

47.

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

Jeff Jarvis

48.

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

Jules Renard

49.

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

Edwin Schlossberg

50.

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