Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

Best Quotes about Writing

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

Samuel Johnson

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne du Maurier

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

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

Truman Capote

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

Jules Renard

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

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

Edwin Schlossberg

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

Robert Heinlein

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

Carol Burnett

10.

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

11.

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

12.

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

13.

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

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

14.

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

Sarah Hepola

15.

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

16.

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

Jules Renard

17.

Keep writing. Keep doing it and doing it. Even in the moments when it's so hurtful to think about writing.

Heather Armstrong

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.

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

Tom Bissell

20.

There's always something to write about. If there's not then you need to live life more aggressively.

Min Kim

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

25.

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

Real Live Preacher

26.

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

Henry James

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Charles de Montesquieu

30.

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

31.

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

George Burns

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Thomas Berger

35.

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

Inigo DeLeon

36.

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

37.

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

Martin Myers

38.

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

39.

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

Raymond Chandler

40.

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

41.

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

42.

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

Eric A. Burns

43.

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

Randy Pausch

44.

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

Melanie Benjamin

45.

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

Edward Gibbon

46.

I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let's start with typewriters.

Solomon Short

47.

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

Bobby Knight

48.

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

Stephen King

49.

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

50.

If the weak hand, that has recorded this tale, has, by its scenes, beguiled the mourner of one hour of sorrow, or, by its moral, taught him to sustain it - the effort, however humble, has not been vain, nor is the writer unrewarded.

Ann Radcliffe