Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

- W. Somerset Maugham

Best Quotes about Writing

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

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

Robert Heinlein

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

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

Real Live Preacher

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

Stephen King

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

Jules Renard

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

George Ade

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

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

Blaise Pascal

10.

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

Sir Francis Bacon

11.

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

Eric A. Burns

12.

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

Victor Hugo

13.

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

Solomon Short

14.

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

15.

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

Inigo DeLeon

16.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Charles de Montesquieu

20.

The first step in blogging is not writing them but reading them.

Jeff Jarvis

21.

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

22.

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

23.

The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything.

John Irving

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Real Live Preacher

27.

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

28.

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

Henry James

29.

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

H. G. Wells

30.

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

Elaine Liner

31.

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

Thomas Berger

32.

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

Ray Bradbury

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

37.

The key to non-anxious sermon-writing is that itÆs not about me. ItÆs about the congregation. I honor the fact that the listeners bring more to the sermon than I do. I remind myself of the hundreds of times someone says,'I loved how you saidà'and then tell me things that they heard that were nowhere in my text and that I never said. But they heard what they needed to hear.

Reverend Sean Parker Dennison

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.

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

Jules Renard

40.

You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you're working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success - but only if you persist.

Isaac Asimov

41.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

42.

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

Fran Lebowitz

43.

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

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.

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

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Melanie Benjamin