Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

Best Quotes about Writing

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

H. G. Wells

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

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

Edwin Schlossberg

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

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

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

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

Sarah Hepola

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

Carol Burnett

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

10.

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

11.

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

Min Kim

12.

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

Henry James

13.

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

14.

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne du Maurier

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.

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

Bobby Knight

17.

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

Raymond Chandler

18.

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

Real Live Preacher

19.

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac

20.

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

21.

Vigorous writing is concise.

William Strunk Jr.

22.

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

Truman Capote

23.

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

Jef Mallett

24.

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

Melanie Benjamin

25.

If a writer wrote merely for his time, I would have to break my pen and throw it away.

Victor Hugo

26.

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

27.

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

Tom Bissell

28.

Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time... The wait is simply too long.

Leonard Bernstein

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Jeff Jarvis

32.

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

Jules Renard

33.

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

34.

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

35.

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

36.

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

Martin Myers

37.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

38.

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

Thomas Mann

39.

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

Eric A. Burns

40.

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

41.

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

Fran Lebowitz

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

45.

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

Inigo DeLeon

46.

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

Sir Francis Bacon

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.

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

49.

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

50.

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