Motivational Quotes

Writing

Even writers need relief from words.

- Sarah Vowell

Best Quotes about Writing

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

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

Stephen King

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

Bobby Knight

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

Jules Renard

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

Edwin Schlossberg

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

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

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

Samuel Johnson

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Truman Capote

15.

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

George Ade

16.

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

Sarah Hepola

17.

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

Ray Bradbury

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Carol Burnett

23.

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

24.

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

Tom Bissell

25.

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

26.

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

Robert Heinlein

27.

Detail makes the difference between boring and terrific writing. ItÆs the difference between a pencil sketch and a lush oil painting. As a writer, words are your paint. Use all the colors.

Rhys Alexander

28.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

29.

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

30.

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne du Maurier

31.

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

Thomas Mann

32.

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

Randy Pausch

33.

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

Jules Renard

34.

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

35.

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

Blaise Pascal

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Martin Myers

39.

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

40.

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

Min Kim

41.

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

George Burns

42.

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

43.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

44.

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

45.

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

Eric A. Burns

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

50.

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