Motivational Quotes

Writing

It's not about the writing. It's about the feelings behind the words.

- Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

Best Quotes about Writing

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

Eric A. Burns

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

Edwin Schlossberg

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

Stephen King

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

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

Truman Capote

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

Thomas Berger

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

Raymond Chandler

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

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

10.

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

Robert Heinlein

11.

Maybe that's just what happens; you start out wanting to change the world through language, and end up thinking it's enough to tell a few jokes.

David Nicholls

12.

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

13.

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

Carol Burnett

14.

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

15.

Vigorous writing is concise.

William Strunk Jr.

16.

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

Bobby Knight

17.

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac

18.

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

19.

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

Solomon Short

20.

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

21.

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

Ray Bradbury

22.

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

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.

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

25.

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

Min Kim

26.

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

27.

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

Blaise Pascal

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Randy Pausch

35.

Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.

Sir Francis Bacon

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Elaine Liner

39.

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

Henry James

40.

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

41.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

42.

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

H. G. Wells

43.

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

Inigo DeLeon

44.

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

45.

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

46.

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

47.

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

George Ade

48.

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

49.

If the weak hand, that has recorded this tale, has, by its scenes, beguiled the mourner of one hour of sorrow, or, by its moral, taught him to sustain it - the effort, however humble, has not been vain, nor is the writer unrewarded.

Ann Radcliffe

50.

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

Jules Renard