Motivational Quotes

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

Best Quotes about Writing

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

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

Real Live Preacher

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

Raymond Chandler

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

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

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

Jef Mallett

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

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

Inigo DeLeon

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

Jules Renard

10.

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

Elaine Liner

11.

It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.

Robert Benchley

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

Samuel Johnson

17.

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

Bobby Knight

18.

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

19.

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

Charles de Montesquieu

20.

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

Truman Capote

21.

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

22.

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

Peter De Vries

23.

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

Eric A. Burns

24.

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

25.

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

H. G. Wells

26.

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

Fran Lebowitz

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Josh Billings

31.

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

Thomas Mann

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.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

34.

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

Real Live Preacher

35.

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne du Maurier

36.

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King

37.

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

Stephen King

38.

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac

39.

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

Ray Bradbury

40.

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

41.

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

Melanie Benjamin

42.

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

43.

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

Solomon Short

44.

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

45.

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

Robert Heinlein

46.

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

Randy Pausch

47.

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

Martin Myers

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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