Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

Best Quotes about Writing

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

Fran Lebowitz

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

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

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

Edward Gibbon

Not every story has explosions and car chases. That's why they have nudity and espionage.

Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum

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

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

Real Live Preacher

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

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

Tom Bissell

10.

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

11.

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

Carol Burnett

12.

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

13.

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

Inigo DeLeon

14.

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

15.

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

Josh Billings

16.

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

George Ade

17.

Why do writers write? Because it isn't there.

Thomas Berger

18.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

19.

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

20.

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

21.

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

Sarah Hepola

22.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

23.

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

24.

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

25.

Vigorous writing is concise.

William Strunk Jr.

26.

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

27.

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

Henry James

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Real Live Preacher

33.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

34.

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

Thomas Mann

35.

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

Jef Mallett

36.

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne du Maurier

37.

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

38.

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

Elaine Liner

39.

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

Blaise Pascal

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Stephen King

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

H. G. Wells

47.

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

Leo Rosten

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Truman Capote