Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

- Solomon Short

Best Quotes about Writing

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

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

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

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

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

Real Live Preacher

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

Bobby Knight

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

Stephen King

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

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

Fran Lebowitz

10.

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

11.

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

Jules Renard

12.

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

Tom Bissell

13.

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

Sarah Hepola

14.

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

George Ade

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Victor Hugo

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

26.

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

Eric A. Burns

27.

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King

28.

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

Inigo DeLeon

29.

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne du Maurier

30.

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

31.

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

Stephen King

32.

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

33.

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

34.

If the weak hand, that has recorded this tale, has, by its scenes, beguiled the mourner of one hour of sorrow, or, by its moral, taught him to sustain it - the effort, however humble, has not been vain, nor is the writer unrewarded.

Ann Radcliffe

35.

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

Edwin Schlossberg

36.

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

37.

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

Randy Pausch

38.

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

Melanie Benjamin

39.

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

Elaine Liner

40.

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

Robert Heinlein

41.

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

Blaise Pascal

42.

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

Thomas Mann

43.

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

44.

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

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.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Martin Myers

50.

Writing gives you the illusion of control, and then you realize it's just an illusion, that people are going to bring their own stuff into it.

David Sedaris