Motivational Quotes

Writing

Even writers need relief from words.

- Sarah Vowell

Best Quotes about Writing

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

Eric A. Burns

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

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

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

Min Kim

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

Elaine Liner

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

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

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

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

Edwin Schlossberg

10.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

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.

Vigorous writing is concise.

William Strunk Jr.

13.

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

Samuel Johnson

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne du Maurier

19.

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

Peter De Vries

20.

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

21.

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

22.

If the weak hand, that has recorded this tale, has, by its scenes, beguiled the mourner of one hour of sorrow, or, by its moral, taught him to sustain it - the effort, however humble, has not been vain, nor is the writer unrewarded.

Ann Radcliffe

23.

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

Bobby Knight

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Martin Myers

30.

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

31.

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

George Ade

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

35.

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

Ray Bradbury

36.

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

37.

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

Blaise Pascal

38.

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

Real Live Preacher

39.

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

Carol Burnett

40.

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

Melanie Benjamin

41.

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

Henry James

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

45.

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

46.

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

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

47.

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

48.

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

Charles de Montesquieu

49.

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

Jef Mallett

50.

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

Inigo DeLeon