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

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

Truman Capote

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

Peter De Vries

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

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

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

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

W. Somerset Maugham

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

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

Edwin Schlossberg

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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

This is the challenge of writing. You have to be very emotionally engaged in what youÆre doing, or it comes out flat. You canÆt fake your way through this.

Real Live Preacher

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.

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

15.

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

Carol Burnett

16.

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

Real Live Preacher

17.

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

Sarah Hepola

18.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

19.

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

20.

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

Blaise Pascal

21.

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

Henry James

22.

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

Sir Francis Bacon

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

H. G. Wells

28.

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

29.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

30.

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

31.

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

Elaine Liner

32.

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

Ray Bradbury

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Heather Armstrong

38.

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

Inigo DeLeon

39.

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

Jef Mallett

40.

The only reason for being a professional writer is that you can't help it.

Leo Rosten

41.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

42.

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

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

43.

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

Stephen King

44.

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

45.

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

Jules Renard

46.

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

47.

I have never thought of writing as hard work, but I have worked hard to find a voice.

Randy Pausch

48.

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

49.

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

50.

In comparing various authors with one another, I have discovered that some of the gravest and latest writers have transcribed, word for word, from former works, without making acknowledgment.

Pliny the Elder