Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

- Raymond Chandler

Best Quotes about Writing

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

Jef Mallett

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

Charles de Montesquieu

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

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

Inigo DeLeon

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

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

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

Carol Burnett

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

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

10.

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

11.

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

Elaine Liner

12.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Henry James

16.

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

17.

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

Jules Renard

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

21.

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne du Maurier

22.

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

Raymond Chandler

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

George Burns

26.

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

H. G. Wells

27.

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

Jeff Jarvis

28.

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

Tom Bissell

29.

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

Real Live Preacher

30.

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

31.

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

32.

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King

33.

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

Melanie Benjamin

34.

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

Leo Rosten

35.

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

Thomas Mann

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Truman Capote

39.

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

George Ade

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Bobby Knight

44.

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

Blaise Pascal

45.

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

Eric A. Burns

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Edward Gibbon