Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

- Ray Bradbury

Best Quotes about Writing

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

Jef Mallett

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

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

Martin Myers

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

Bobby Knight

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

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

Benjamin Disraeli

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

Fran Lebowitz

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

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

10.

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King

11.

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

Ray Bradbury

12.

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

13.

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

Victor Hugo

14.

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

Sir Francis Bacon

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Stephen King

18.

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

Thomas Mann

19.

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

Carol Burnett

20.

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

Leo Rosten

21.

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

22.

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

23.

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

24.

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

Inigo DeLeon

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

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.

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

Charles de Montesquieu

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Solomon Short

34.

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

Edwin Schlossberg

35.

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

George Ade

36.

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

37.

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

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.

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

40.

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

Peter De Vries

41.

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

42.

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

43.

There's always something to write about. If there's not then you need to live life more aggressively.

Min Kim

44.

Not every story has explosions and car chases. That's why they have nudity and espionage.

Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum

45.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

46.

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

47.

Vigorous writing is concise.

William Strunk Jr.

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Jeff Jarvis