Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

Best Quotes about Writing

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

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

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

Jef Mallett

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

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

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

Solomon Short

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne du Maurier

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

Min Kim

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

Randy Pausch

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

10.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

11.

People do tell a writer things that they don't tell others. I don't know why, unless it is that having read one or two of his books they feel on peculiarly intimate terms with him; or it may be that they dramatize themselves and, seeing themselves as it were as characters in a novel, are ready to be as open with him as they imagine the characters of his invention are.

W. Somerset Maugham

12.

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

Samuel Johnson

13.

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

14.

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

Thomas Mann

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Peter De Vries

18.

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

George Ade

19.

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

20.

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

Heather Armstrong

21.

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

Tom Bissell

22.

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

Leo Rosten

23.

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

Josh Billings

24.

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

Henry James

25.

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

26.

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

Jeff Jarvis

27.

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

Real Live Preacher

28.

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

Charles de Montesquieu

29.

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

Real Live Preacher

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.

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

Jules Renard

32.

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

33.

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

Sarah Hepola

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Stephen King

38.

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

39.

At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable.

Raymond Chandler

40.

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

41.

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King

42.

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

George Burns

43.

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

Eric A. Burns

44.

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

45.

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

46.

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac

47.

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

Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum

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.

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

50.

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

Robert Heinlein