Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

Best Quotes about Writing

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 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

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

Sarah Hepola

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

Benjamin Disraeli

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

Jules Renard

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

Victor Hugo

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

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

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

10.

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

George Ade

11.

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

12.

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

Peter De Vries

13.

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

14.

Vigorous writing is concise.

William Strunk Jr.

15.

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

16.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

17.

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

Henry James

18.

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

Samuel Johnson

19.

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

Robert Heinlein

20.

Keep writing. Keep doing it and doing it. Even in the moments when it's so hurtful to think about writing.

Heather Armstrong

21.

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

22.

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

Sir Francis Bacon

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Truman Capote

26.

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

Thomas Mann

27.

No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft.

H. G. Wells

28.

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King

29.

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

Real Live Preacher

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.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Stephen King

34.

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

Blaise Pascal

35.

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

Edwin Schlossberg

36.

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac

37.

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

Melanie Benjamin

38.

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

George Burns

39.

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

Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum

40.

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

41.

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

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.

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

45.

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

46.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Jules Renard