Motivational Quotes

Writing

A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

- Thomas Mann

Best Quotes about Writing

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

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

H. G. Wells

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

Jeff Jarvis

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

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

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

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

Eric A. Burns

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

Thomas Berger

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

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

10.

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

Raymond Chandler

11.

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

12.

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

Ray Bradbury

13.

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

Martin Myers

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.

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

16.

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

Peter De Vries

17.

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

Real Live Preacher

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Robert Heinlein

22.

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

23.

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

George Burns

24.

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

Melanie Benjamin

25.

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

Henry James

26.

In comparing various authors with one another, I have discovered that some of the gravest and latest writers have transcribed, word for word, from former works, without making acknowledgment.

Pliny the Elder

27.

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

Inigo DeLeon

28.

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

29.

Vigorous writing is concise.

William Strunk Jr.

30.

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

31.

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

Bobby Knight

32.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

33.

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

Stephen King

34.

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

Samuel Johnson

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac

43.

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

Carol Burnett

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.

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

Jules Renard

46.

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

47.

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

Josh Billings

48.

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

49.

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

Sarah Hepola

50.

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

Tom Bissell