Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

Best Quotes about Writing

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

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

Josh Billings

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

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

Tom Bissell

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King

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

Fran Lebowitz

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

Elaine Liner

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

Peter De Vries

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

Jules Renard

10.

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

George Burns

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.

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

Ray Bradbury

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

Victor Hugo

17.

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

Edward Gibbon

18.

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

19.

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

20.

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

21.

Please write again soon. Though my own life is filled with activity, letters encourage momentary escape into others lives and I come back to my own with greater contentment.

Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey

22.

Vigorous writing is concise.

William Strunk Jr.

23.

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

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.

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

26.

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

27.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

28.

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

Truman Capote

29.

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

Min Kim

30.

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

Jef Mallett

31.

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

32.

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

H. G. Wells

33.

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

Melanie Benjamin

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

Real Live Preacher

40.

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

Thomas Berger

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

Inigo DeLeon

43.

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

Randy Pausch

44.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

45.

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

Blaise Pascal

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Samuel Johnson

49.

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

50.

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

Raymond Chandler