Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

- Truman Capote

Best Quotes about Writing

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

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

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

Eric A. Burns

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

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

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

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

Stephen King

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

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

10.

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

11.

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

Peter De Vries

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

15.

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

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

16.

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

Inigo DeLeon

17.

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

18.

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

Min Kim

19.

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

Thomas Mann

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.

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

Thomas Berger

22.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

23.

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

Jules Renard

24.

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

George Burns

25.

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

26.

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

Melanie Benjamin

27.

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

28.

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

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.

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac

32.

Writing well mean never having to say,'I guess you had to be there.'

Jef Mallett

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Tom Bissell

36.

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

37.

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne du Maurier

38.

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

George Ade

39.

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

Sarah Hepola

40.

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

41.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

46.

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King

47.

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

Jules Renard

48.

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

49.

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

Ray Bradbury

50.

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

Fran Lebowitz