Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

- Samuel Goldwyn

Best Quotes about Writing

Vigorous writing is concise.

William Strunk Jr.

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

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

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

Jeff Jarvis

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

It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.

Robert Benchley

After being Turned Down by numerous Publishers, he had decided to write for Posterity.

George Ade

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne du Maurier

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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Stephen King

13.

Why do writers write? Because it isn't there.

Thomas Berger

14.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

15.

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

16.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

17.

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

Min Kim

18.

An author spends months writing a book, and maybe puts his heart's blood into it, and then it lies about unread till the reader has nothing else in the world to do.

W. Somerset Maugham

19.

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

Henry James

20.

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

Jules Renard

21.

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

Edwin Schlossberg

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Bobby Knight

25.

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

Robert Heinlein

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Samuel Johnson

30.

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

31.

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

35.

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

Fran Lebowitz

36.

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

Leo Rosten

37.

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

Inigo DeLeon

38.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

39.

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

40.

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

George Burns

41.

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

Edward Gibbon

42.

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

Martin Myers

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Blaise Pascal

49.

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

50.

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

Peter De Vries