Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

- Sir Francis Bacon

Best Quotes about Writing

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

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

Sir Francis Bacon

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

Real Live Preacher

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

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

Samuel Johnson

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

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

Charles de Montesquieu

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

10.

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

Carol Burnett

11.

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

12.

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

Truman Capote

13.

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

14.

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

Eric A. Burns

15.

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King

16.

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

Jeff Jarvis

17.

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

18.

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

H. G. Wells

19.

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

Fran Lebowitz

20.

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

21.

Vigorous writing is concise.

William Strunk Jr.

22.

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

Jules Renard

23.

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

24.

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

Sarah Hepola

25.

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

26.

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

Jef Mallett

27.

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

Peter De Vries

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Martin Myers

31.

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

32.

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

Melanie Benjamin

33.

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

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.

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

36.

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

37.

See things as they are and write about them. DonÆt waste your creative energy trying to make things up. Even if you are writing fiction, write the things you see and know.

Real Live Preacher

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

43.

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

44.

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

Raymond Chandler

45.

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

George Ade

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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