Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

- Tom Bissell

Best Quotes about Writing

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

Samuel Johnson

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

Bobby Knight

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

Sir Francis Bacon

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

Randy Pausch

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

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

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

Carol Burnett

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

Thomas Mann

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

Stephen King

10.

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

Sarah Hepola

11.

The only reason for being a professional writer is that you can't help it.

Leo Rosten

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

Josh Billings

17.

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

Edward Gibbon

18.

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

Thomas Berger

19.

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

Martin Myers

20.

Your life story would not make a good book. Don't even try.

Fran Lebowitz

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

George Burns

25.

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

26.

I always wrote with the idea that what I put out there is going to stay there. Once I publish something, it has been published. I've never deleted more than one or two posts from my site. I don't think that there are takebacks. I don't feel right about it.

Alison Headley

27.

Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say'infinitely'when you mean'very'; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.

C. S. Lewis

28.

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

29.

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

Henry James

30.

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

Melanie Benjamin

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

34.

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

35.

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

Robert Heinlein

36.

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

Blaise Pascal

37.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

38.

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

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

39.

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

40.

Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed there are many rewards, if you disgrace yourself you can always write a book.

Ronald Reagan

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Jules Renard

49.

The tendinous part of the mind, so to speak, is more developed in winter; the fleshy, in summer. I should say winter had given the bone and sinew to literature, summer the tissues and the blood.

John Burroughs

50.

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