Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

- Blaise Pascal

Best Quotes about Writing

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

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

Real Live Preacher

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

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

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

Charles de Montesquieu

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

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

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

Fran Lebowitz

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

10.

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

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.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Ray Bradbury

15.

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

Thomas Berger

16.

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

17.

The most difficult part of writing a book is not devising a plot which will captivate the reader. It's not developing characters the reader will have strong feelings for or against. It is not finding a setting which will take the reader to a place he or she as never been. It is not the research, whether in fiction or non-fiction. The most difficult task facing a writer is to find the voice in which to tell the story.

Randy Pausch

18.

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

George Burns

19.

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

20.

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

21.

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

Min Kim

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Carol Burnett

25.

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

Tom Bissell

26.

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

Truman Capote

27.

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

Randy Pausch

28.

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

George Ade

29.

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

Raymond Chandler

30.

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

31.

Vigorous writing is concise.

William Strunk Jr.

32.

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

36.

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

Thomas Mann

37.

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

Bobby Knight

38.

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

Melanie Benjamin

39.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

40.

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

Inigo DeLeon

41.

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

42.

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

Eric A. Burns

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Samuel Johnson

46.

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

47.

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

Solomon Short

48.

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

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

49.

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

Henry James

50.

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