Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

- Inigo DeLeon

Best Quotes about Writing

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

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

Victor Hugo

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

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac

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

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

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

Stephen King

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

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

Jules Renard

10.

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

George Ade

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.

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

Real Live Preacher

13.

Vigorous writing is concise.

William Strunk Jr.

14.

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

15.

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

Peter De Vries

16.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

17.

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

18.

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

Eric A. Burns

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Martin Myers

22.

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

23.

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

Thomas Mann

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.

The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.

Edwin Schlossberg

26.

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

27.

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

Jules Renard

28.

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

Robert Heinlein

29.

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

Charles de Montesquieu

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Bobby Knight

35.

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

Sarah Hepola

36.

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

37.

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

Min Kim

38.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

39.

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

40.

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

Melanie Benjamin

41.

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

42.

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

Sir Francis Bacon

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

H. G. Wells

46.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

47.

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

Henry James

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.

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

Fran Lebowitz

50.

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

Elaine Liner