Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

- Victor Hugo

Best Quotes about Writing

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

I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.

Joan Didion

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

Jules Renard

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

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

Min Kim

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

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

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

Eric A. Burns

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

Solomon Short

10.

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

Blaise Pascal

11.

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

12.

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

13.

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne du Maurier

14.

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

Tom Bissell

15.

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

Peter De Vries

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Sir Francis Bacon

21.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

22.

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

Jules Renard

23.

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

24.

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

Samuel Johnson

25.

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

26.

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

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

27.

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

Bobby Knight

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.

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

30.

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

Inigo DeLeon

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Randy Pausch

34.

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

Elaine Liner

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Ray Bradbury

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.

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

Henry James

40.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

41.

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

Fran Lebowitz

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.

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

44.

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

45.

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

Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum

46.

Advice to writers: Sometimes you just have to stop writing. Even before you begin.

Stanislaw J. Lec

47.

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

Edward Gibbon

48.

Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography, but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility.