Motivational Quotes

Writing

Even writers need relief from words.

- Sarah Vowell

Best Quotes about Writing

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

H. G. Wells

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

About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment.

Josh Billings

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

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

Stephen King

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

Elaine Liner

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

Charles de Montesquieu

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

Tom Bissell

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

Bobby Knight

10.

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

Edward Gibbon

11.

At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable.

Raymond Chandler

12.

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

Solomon Short

13.

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

14.

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

15.

I've always believed in writing without a collaborator, because where two people are writing the same book, each believes he gets all the worries and only half the royalties.

Agatha Christie

16.

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

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.

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

George Ade

19.

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

20.

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King

21.

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

22.

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

Jef Mallett

23.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

24.

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

George Burns

25.

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

Edwin Schlossberg

26.

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

27.

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

Jules Renard

28.

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

29.

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

Leo Rosten

30.

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

31.

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

Thomas Berger

32.

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

Martin Myers

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Real Live Preacher

36.

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

37.

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

Peter De Vries

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac

42.

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

Stephen King

43.

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

Jules Renard

44.

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

Real Live Preacher

45.

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

46.

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

Henry James

47.

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

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.

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

50.

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