Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

- W. Somerset Maugham

Best Quotes about Writing

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

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

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

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

Victor Hugo

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

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

Peter De Vries

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

Edwin Schlossberg

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

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

10.

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

Truman Capote

11.

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac

12.

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

Blaise Pascal

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.

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

15.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

16.

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

Min Kim

17.

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

Solomon Short

18.

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

19.

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

20.

Words, once they are printed, have a life of their own.

Carol Burnett

21.

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

22.

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

Sir Francis Bacon

23.

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

24.

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

Edward Gibbon

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Ray Bradbury

29.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

30.

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

Real Live Preacher

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Robert Heinlein

35.

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

Real Live Preacher

36.

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne du Maurier

37.

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

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

38.

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

H. G. Wells

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.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

41.

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

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.

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

44.

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

45.

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

George Burns

46.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

47.

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