Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

- Samuel Johnson

Best Quotes about Writing

Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.

Sir Francis Bacon

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

George Burns

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

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

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

Josh Billings

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

Leo Rosten

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

Samuel Johnson

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

Truman Capote

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

10.

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

Bobby Knight

11.

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

Edwin Schlossberg

12.

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

13.

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

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

14.

Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say'infinitely'when you mean'very'; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.

C. S. Lewis

15.

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne du Maurier

16.

Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.

Stephen King

17.

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

Ray Bradbury

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Charles de Montesquieu

25.

Vigorous writing is concise.

William Strunk Jr.

26.

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

Thomas Berger

27.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

28.

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

Sarah Hepola

29.

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

30.

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

Stephen King

31.

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

32.

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

Henry James

33.

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

34.

Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money.

Jules Renard

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

H. G. Wells

38.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

39.

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

Randy Pausch

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Real Live Preacher

44.

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

Melanie Benjamin

45.

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

46.

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

Edward Gibbon

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

50.

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