Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

- Randy Pausch

Best Quotes about Writing

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

Real Live Preacher

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

Inigo DeLeon

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

Ray Bradbury

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

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

Thomas Berger

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

Josh Billings

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King

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

Real Live Preacher

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

10.

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

Stephen King

11.

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

Eric A. Burns

12.

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

13.

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

George Ade

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.

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

16.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

17.

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

Melanie Benjamin

18.

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

Fran Lebowitz

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

22.

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

23.

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

Stephen King

24.

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

25.

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

Elaine Liner

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Min Kim

30.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

34.

Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed there are many rewards, if you disgrace yourself you can always write a book.

Ronald Reagan

35.

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

36.

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

George Burns

37.

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

38.

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

Thomas Mann

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

44.

Vigorous writing is concise.

William Strunk Jr.

45.

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

Jules Renard

46.

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

47.

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

Victor Hugo

48.

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

49.

Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a book.

Edward Gibbon

50.

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