Motivational Quotes

Writing

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

- Stephen King

Best Quotes about Writing

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

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

Benjamin Disraeli

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne du Maurier

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

Real Live Preacher

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

H. G. Wells

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

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

Josh Billings

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

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

Randy Pausch

10.

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

Jules Renard

11.

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

Tom Bissell

12.

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

13.

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

Sarah Hepola

14.

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

15.

Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

Samuel Johnson

16.

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

Edward Gibbon

17.

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

Edwin Schlossberg

18.

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

19.

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

Bobby Knight

20.

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

21.

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

Stephen King

22.

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

Heather Armstrong

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

30.

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

Martin Myers

31.

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

32.

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

Ray Bradbury

33.

This is the sixth book I've written, which isn't bad for a guy who's only read two.

George Burns

34.

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

35.

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac

36.

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

Solomon Short

37.

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

Blaise Pascal

38.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

39.

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

Stephen King

40.

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

41.

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

42.

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

Elaine Liner

43.

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

Min Kim

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

48.

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

49.

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

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