Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

Best Quotes about Writing

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

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

Tom Bissell

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

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

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

Inigo DeLeon

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

Solomon Short

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

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

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

10.

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

Ray Bradbury

11.

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

George Ade

12.

I never feel that I have comprehended an emotion, or fully lived even the smallest events, until I have reflected upon it in my journal; my pen is my truest confidant, holding in check the passions and disappointments that I dare not share even with my beloved.

Stephanie Barron

13.

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

Elaine Liner

14.

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

Stephen King

15.

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

George Burns

16.

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

Peter De Vries

17.

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

Real Live Preacher

18.

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

Blaise Pascal

19.

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

20.

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

Victor Hugo

21.

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

22.

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

Eric A. Burns

23.

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

Carol Burnett

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Stephen King

27.

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

28.

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac

29.

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

Martin Myers

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.

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

Randy Pausch

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

36.

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

Samuel Johnson

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

41.

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

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

42.

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

Charles de Montesquieu

43.

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

44.

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

Real Live Preacher

45.

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King

46.

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

Henry James

47.

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

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.

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

50.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata