Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

Best Quotes about Writing

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

Stephen King

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

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

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

Carol Burnett

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

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

Charles de Montesquieu

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

Raymond Chandler

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

Real Live Preacher

10.

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

Edward Gibbon

11.

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

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

12.

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

13.

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

Edwin Schlossberg

14.

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

Peter De Vries

15.

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Inigo DeLeon

19.

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

20.

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac

21.

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

Real Live Preacher

22.

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

Jef Mallett

23.

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

24.

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

Robert Heinlein

25.

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

Henry James

26.

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

27.

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

Elaine Liner

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Josh Billings

31.

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

Thomas Berger

32.

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

Jules Renard

33.

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

34.

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

Min Kim

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Tom Bissell

39.

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

Melanie Benjamin

40.

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

Randy Pausch

41.

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

Truman Capote

42.

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

43.

Vigorous writing is concise.

William Strunk Jr.

44.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

45.

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

46.

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

Ray Bradbury

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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