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

Peter De Vries

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

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

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

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

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

Samuel Goldwyn

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

Martin Myers

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

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

Jef Mallett

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

13.

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

Solomon Short

14.

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

Randy Pausch

15.

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

16.

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

Elaine Liner

17.

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

Eric A. Burns

18.

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

19.

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

Jules Renard

20.

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

Raymond Chandler

21.

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

Thomas Berger

22.

Vigorous writing is concise.

William Strunk Jr.

23.

Keep writing. Keep doing it and doing it. Even in the moments when it's so hurtful to think about writing.

Heather Armstrong

24.

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

Josh Billings

25.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

26.

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

Thomas Mann

27.

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

Blaise Pascal

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.

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

30.

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

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

31.

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

32.

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

33.

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

Sir Francis Bacon

34.

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

35.

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

H. G. Wells

36.

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

37.

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

Leo Rosten

38.

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

39.

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

40.

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

41.

Not every story has explosions and car chases. That's why they have nudity and espionage.

Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum

42.

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac

43.

You ask me why I do not write something....I think one's feelings waste themselves in words, they ought all to be distilled into actions and into actions which bring results.

Florence Nightingale

44.

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

Real Live Preacher

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Samuel Johnson

48.

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

Melanie Benjamin

49.

Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.

Robert Heinlein

50.

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