Motivational Quotes

Writing

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

- Stephen King

Best Quotes about Writing

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

Jules Renard

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

Min Kim

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

Edward Gibbon

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

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

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

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

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

Jef Mallett

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

Melanie Benjamin

10.

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

Ray Bradbury

11.

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

12.

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

Sarah Hepola

13.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

14.

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

George Ade

15.

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

16.

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

17.

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

Elaine Liner

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.

Vigorous writing is concise.

William Strunk Jr.

20.

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

Victor Hugo

21.

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

Bobby Knight

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Edwin Schlossberg

25.

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

26.

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

Thomas Berger

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.

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

29.

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

Peter De Vries

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

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.

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

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

36.

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

Stephen King

37.

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

38.

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

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.

Write something to suit yourself and many people will like it; write something to suit everybody and scarcely anyone will care for it.

Jesse Stuart

41.

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

Real Live Preacher

42.

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

Randy Pausch

43.

There is only one way to defeat the enemy, and that is to write as well as one can. The best argument is an undeniably good book.

Saul Bellow

44.

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

45.

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

Tom Bissell

46.

Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time... The wait is simply too long.

Leonard Bernstein

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Martin Myers

50.

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