Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

Best Quotes about Writing

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

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

Martin Myers

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

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

H. G. Wells

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

Inigo DeLeon

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

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

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

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

W. Somerset Maugham

10.

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

11.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

12.

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

Ray Bradbury

13.

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

Solomon Short

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.

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

Carol Burnett

16.

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

17.

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

George Ade

18.

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

Blaise Pascal

19.

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

Melanie Benjamin

20.

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King

21.

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

Thomas Mann

22.

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

Stephen King

23.

The only reason for being a professional writer is that you can't help it.

Leo Rosten

24.

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

George Burns

25.

Vigorous writing is concise.

William Strunk Jr.

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Eric A. Burns

31.

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

Elaine Liner

32.

Keep writing. Keep doing it and doing it. Even in the moments when it's so hurtful to think about writing.

Heather Armstrong

33.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

34.

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

35.

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

Robert Heinlein

36.

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

37.

A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor.

Ring Lardner

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Real Live Preacher

41.

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

42.

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

Randy Pausch

43.

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Sarah Hepola

48.

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

49.

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

Bobby Knight

50.

In comparing various authors with one another, I have discovered that some of the gravest and latest writers have transcribed, word for word, from former works, without making acknowledgment.

Pliny the Elder