Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

- Truman Capote

Best Quotes about Writing

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

Peter De Vries

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

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

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

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

Raymond Chandler

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

Thomas Berger

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

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

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

10.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

11.

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

Elaine Liner

12.

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

13.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

14.

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

15.

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

Josh Billings

16.

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

17.

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

Ray Bradbury

18.

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

19.

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

Melanie Benjamin

20.

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

21.

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac

22.

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

Jules Renard

23.

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

24.

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

Eric A. Burns

25.

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

George Ade

26.

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

Inigo DeLeon

27.

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

Real Live Preacher

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Solomon Short

31.

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King

32.

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

33.

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

Sarah Hepola

34.

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

Min Kim

35.

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

Fran Lebowitz

36.

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

Jules Renard

37.

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

Stephen King

38.

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

Randy Pausch

39.

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

40.

Not every story has explosions and car chases. That's why they have nudity and espionage.

Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum

41.

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

Tom Bissell

42.

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

43.

You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despairûthe sense that you can never completely put on the page whatÆs in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King

44.

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

Blaise Pascal

45.

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

46.

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

Victor Hugo

47.

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

48.

An author is a fool who, not content with boring those he lives with, insists on boring future generations.

Charles de Montesquieu

49.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

50.

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