Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

- Henry James

Best Quotes about Writing

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

Truman Capote

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

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

Ray Bradbury

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

Real Live Preacher

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

Samuel Johnson

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

Eric A. Burns

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

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

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

Min Kim

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.

Writing gives you the illusion of control, and then you realize it's just an illusion, that people are going to bring their own stuff into it.

David Sedaris

12.

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

Jules Renard

13.

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

14.

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

George Burns

15.

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

Charles de Montesquieu

16.

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

Peter De Vries

17.

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

18.

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

Edward Gibbon

19.

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

20.

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

Sarah Hepola

21.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

25.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

26.

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

27.

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

Real Live Preacher

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Thomas Berger

32.

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

Robert Heinlein

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 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

35.

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

Jef Mallett

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Martin Myers

39.

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

40.

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

Sir Francis Bacon

41.

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

George Ade

42.

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

43.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

44.

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

45.

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

Raymond Chandler

46.

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

47.

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

Melanie Benjamin

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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