Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

- Stanislaw J. Lec

Best Quotes about Writing

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

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

Melanie Benjamin

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

Blaise Pascal

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

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

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

Eric A. Burns

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

Heather Armstrong

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

Randy Pausch

10.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

11.

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

12.

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

13.

If you want to write you must have faith in yourself. Faith enough to believe that if a thing is true about you, it is likely true about many people. And if you can have faith in your integrity and your motives, then you can write about yourself without fear.

Real Live Preacher

14.

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

15.

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

Min Kim

16.

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

17.

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

Jules Renard

18.

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

19.

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

Edward Gibbon

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Carol Burnett

23.

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

Fran Lebowitz

24.

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

Martin Myers

25.

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

26.

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

27.

Vigorous writing is concise.

William Strunk Jr.

28.

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

Robert Heinlein

29.

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

Jules Renard

30.

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

31.

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

Thomas Mann

32.

You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance.

Ray Bradbury

33.

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

Stephen King

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Charles de Montesquieu

37.

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

38.

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

Bobby Knight

39.

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

Peter De Vries

40.

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

41.

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

Inigo DeLeon

42.

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

43.

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

Jeff Jarvis

44.

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

45.

The best way to become acquainted with a subject is to write a book about it.

Benjamin Disraeli

46.

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

Solomon Short

47.

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

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

48.

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

Truman Capote

49.

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

50.

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

W. Somerset Maugham