Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

Best Quotes about Writing

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

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne du Maurier

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

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

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

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

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

Min Kim

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

Jeff Jarvis

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

10.

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

Truman Capote

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Blaise Pascal

14.

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

15.

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

Jules Renard

16.

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

Real Live Preacher

17.

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

Randy Pausch

18.

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

19.

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

Stephen King

20.

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

Solomon Short

21.

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

Real Live Preacher

22.

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

Inigo DeLeon

23.

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

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

24.

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

Thomas Berger

25.

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

Martin Myers

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.

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

28.

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

29.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

30.

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

31.

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

Edward Gibbon

32.

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

Samuel Johnson

33.

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

34.

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

Henry James

35.

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

Tom Bissell

36.

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

37.

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

Josh Billings

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Peter De Vries

42.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

43.

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

44.

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

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.

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

47.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

48.

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

Fran Lebowitz

49.

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

50.

I always wrote with the idea that what I put out there is going to stay there. Once I publish something, it has been published. I've never deleted more than one or two posts from my site. I don't think that there are takebacks. I don't feel right about it.

Alison Headley