Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

- Sarah Hepola

Best Quotes about Writing

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

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

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

Henry James

The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything.

John Irving

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

Bobby Knight

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

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

Martin Myers

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

Samuel Johnson

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

Real Live Preacher

10.

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

Thomas Mann

11.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

12.

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

Heather Armstrong

13.

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

14.

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

Min Kim

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Elaine Liner

18.

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

Josh Billings

19.

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

20.

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

Tom Bissell

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

26.

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

Fran Lebowitz

27.

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Leo Rosten

31.

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

32.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

33.

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

Raymond Chandler

34.

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

35.

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

George Burns

36.

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

37.

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

Sarah Hepola

38.

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

Jules Renard

39.

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

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

40.

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

Ray Bradbury

41.

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

Jef Mallett

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Sir Francis Bacon

47.

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

Real Live Preacher

48.

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

49.

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

Melanie Benjamin

50.

Vigorous writing is concise.

William Strunk Jr.