Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

Best Quotes about Writing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fran Lebowitz

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

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

Victor Hugo

10.

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

Sir Francis Bacon

11.

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

George Ade

12.

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

Inigo DeLeon

13.

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

Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

Peter De Vries

17.

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

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.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

20.

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

Blaise Pascal

21.

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

22.

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

23.

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac

24.

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

25.

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

Jules Renard

26.

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

Eric A. Burns

27.

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

Min Kim

28.

Journalism is just a gun. It's only got one bullet in it, but if you aim right, that's all you need. Aim it right and you can blow a kneecap off the world.

Warren Ellis

29.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

30.

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

31.

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

Martin Myers

32.

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

Thomas Mann

33.

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

George Burns

34.

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

Thomas Berger

35.

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

Robert Heinlein

36.

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

37.

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

Henry James

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Josh Billings

41.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

42.

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

43.

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

Melanie Benjamin

44.

The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.

Edwin Schlossberg

45.

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

Real Live Preacher

46.

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