Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

Best Quotes about Writing

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

Elaine Liner

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

Thomas Berger

The best way to become acquainted with a subject is to write a book about it.

Benjamin Disraeli

I take the view, and always have, that if you cannot say what you are going to say in twenty minutes you ought to go away and write a book about it.

Lord Brabazon

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

Eric A. Burns

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

George Ade

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

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

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King

10.

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

Randy Pausch

11.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

12.

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

Robert Heinlein

13.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

14.

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

Blaise Pascal

15.

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

George Orwell

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

George Burns

19.

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

Martin Myers

20.

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

21.

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne du Maurier

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Jeff Jarvis

27.

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

Real Live Preacher

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

31.

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

32.

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

Jules Renard

33.

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

Josh Billings

34.

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

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.

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

37.

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

Tom Bissell

38.

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

Raymond Chandler

39.

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

40.

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

41.

The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.

Edwin Schlossberg

42.

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

43.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

44.

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

Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum

45.

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

46.

Vigorous writing is concise.

William Strunk Jr.

47.

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

48.

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

Inigo DeLeon

49.

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

50.

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

Stanislaw J. Lec