Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

- Stephen King

Best Quotes about Writing

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

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

Elaine Liner

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

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

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

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

H. G. Wells

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

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

Jeff Jarvis

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

Edwin Schlossberg

10.

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

Robert Heinlein

11.

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

Randy Pausch

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Inigo DeLeon

15.

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

Eric A. Burns

16.

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Raymond Chandler

20.

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

Tom Bissell

21.

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

Josh Billings

22.

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

23.

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

Henry James

24.

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

Real Live Preacher

25.

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

Ray Bradbury

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Sarah Hepola

29.

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

George Ade

30.

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne du Maurier

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Heather Armstrong

36.

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

Martin Myers

37.

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

38.

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Fran Lebowitz

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Bobby Knight

46.

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

Melanie Benjamin

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.

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