Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

- Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

Best Quotes about Writing

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

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

Eric A. Burns

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

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

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

Thomas Berger

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

Inigo DeLeon

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

Randy Pausch

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne du Maurier

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

Robert Heinlein

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Jef Mallett

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

Truman Capote

15.

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

Blaise Pascal

16.

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

17.

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

Sarah Hepola

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Edwin Schlossberg

22.

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

Melanie Benjamin

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Fran Lebowitz

28.

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

29.

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

30.

Vigorous writing is concise.

William Strunk Jr.

31.

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

32.

A great writer reveals the truth even when he or she does not wish to.

Tom Bissell

33.

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

34.

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

Jeff Jarvis

35.

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

Sir Francis Bacon

36.

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

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

37.

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

H. G. Wells

38.

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

39.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Henry James

43.

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

44.

All of us learn to write in the second grade. Most of us go on to greater things.

Bobby Knight

45.

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

Ray Bradbury

46.

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

47.

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

48.

Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.

Stephen King

49.

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

50.

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

Benjamin Disraeli