Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

Best Quotes about Writing

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

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

Real Live Preacher

The most difficult part of writing a book is not devising a plot which will captivate the reader. It's not developing characters the reader will have strong feelings for or against. It is not finding a setting which will take the reader to a place he or she as never been. It is not the research, whether in fiction or non-fiction. The most difficult task facing a writer is to find the voice in which to tell the story.

Randy Pausch

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

Sarah Hepola

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

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

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

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

Elaine Liner

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King

10.

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

Stephen King

11.

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

Peter De Vries

12.

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

13.

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

Carol Burnett

14.

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

Edward Gibbon

15.

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

Randy Pausch

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

George Ade

20.

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

21.

Please write again soon. Though my own life is filled with activity, letters encourage momentary escape into others lives and I come back to my own with greater contentment.

Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey

22.

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

Tom Bissell

23.

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

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.

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

26.

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

Samuel Johnson

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Blaise Pascal

31.

The first step in blogging is not writing them but reading them.

Jeff Jarvis

32.

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

Martin Myers

33.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

34.

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

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

35.

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

36.

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

37.

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne du Maurier

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time... The wait is simply too long.

Leonard Bernstein

42.

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

43.

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

Henry James

44.

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

Charles de Montesquieu

45.

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

46.

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

Jules Renard

47.

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

48.

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

49.

Vigorous writing is concise.

William Strunk Jr.

50.

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

Fran Lebowitz