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

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

Fran Lebowitz

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

H. G. Wells

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

Bobby Knight

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

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

Melanie Benjamin

Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.

Sir Francis Bacon

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

Thomas Berger

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

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

Thomas Mann

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Edwin Schlossberg

13.

If a writer wrote merely for his time, I would have to break my pen and throw it away.

Victor Hugo

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

George Ade

18.

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

19.

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

Carol Burnett

20.

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

Inigo DeLeon

21.

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

22.

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

Peter De Vries

23.

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

Tom Bissell

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Blaise Pascal

27.

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

28.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

29.

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

30.

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

Martin Myers

31.

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

Min Kim

32.

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

Stephen King

33.

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

George Burns

34.

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

35.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

36.

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

Josh Billings

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

42.

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

43.

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

Henry James

44.

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

Jules Renard

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Jef Mallett

49.

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

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

50.

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