Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

Best Quotes about Writing

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

I take the view, and always have, that if you cannot say what you are going to say in twenty minutes you ought to go away and write a book about it.

Lord Brabazon

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

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

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

Thomas Mann

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

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

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

Stephen King

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

Jules Renard

10.

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

Sarah Hepola

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Charles de Montesquieu

15.

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

Thomas Berger

16.

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

17.

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

Samuel Johnson

18.

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

Ray Bradbury

19.

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

20.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

21.

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

Heather Armstrong

22.

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne du Maurier

23.

Vigorous writing is concise.

William Strunk Jr.

24.

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

Edwin Schlossberg

25.

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

26.

Writing well mean never having to say,'I guess you had to be there.'

Jef Mallett

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Eric A. Burns

30.

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

Truman Capote

31.

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac

32.

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

Real Live Preacher

33.

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

George Ade

34.

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

Robert Heinlein

35.

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

36.

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

37.

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

38.

It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.

Robert Benchley

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Real Live Preacher

42.

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

43.

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

44.

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

Jules Renard

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Josh Billings

48.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

49.

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

50.

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

Sir Francis Bacon