Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

- Real Live Preacher

Best Quotes about Writing

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

Ray Bradbury

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

H. G. Wells

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

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

Victor Hugo

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

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

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

Real Live Preacher

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

Thomas Berger

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

Sarah Hepola

10.

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

Leo Rosten

11.

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

Charles de Montesquieu

12.

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

George Ade

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

Peter De Vries

17.

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

Jules Renard

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

George Burns

21.

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

Sir Francis Bacon

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Tom Bissell

25.

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

26.

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

27.

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Jules Renard

31.

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

32.

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

Thomas Mann

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Bobby Knight

36.

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

37.

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

Melanie Benjamin

38.

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

Fran Lebowitz

39.

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

Eric A. Burns

40.

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne du Maurier

41.

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

42.

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

Truman Capote

43.

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

44.

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

45.

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

Stephen King

46.

First you're an unknown, then you write one book and you move up to obscurity.

Martin Myers

47.

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

Samuel Johnson

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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