Motivational Quotes

Writing

I never feel that I have comprehended an emotion, or fully lived even the smallest events, until I have reflected upon it in my journal; my pen is my truest confidant, holding in check the passions and disappointments that I dare not share even with my beloved.

- Stephanie Barron

Best Quotes about Writing

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

Solomon Short

Not every story has explosions and car chases. That's why they have nudity and espionage.

Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum

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

Tom Bissell

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne du Maurier

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

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

Samuel Johnson

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

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

Edwin Schlossberg

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

Randy Pausch

10.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

11.

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

George Burns

12.

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

Leo Rosten

13.

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

Melanie Benjamin

14.

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

15.

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

Sarah Hepola

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

21.

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

Real Live Preacher

22.

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

23.

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

Jules Renard

24.

A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor.

Ring Lardner

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Josh Billings

28.

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

Martin Myers

29.

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

Jeff Jarvis

30.

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

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.

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

Heather Armstrong

33.

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

Jef Mallett

34.

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

35.

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

Inigo DeLeon

36.

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

Truman Capote

37.

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King

38.

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

39.

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

Ray Bradbury

40.

If you want to write you must have faith in yourself. Faith enough to believe that if a thing is true about you, it is likely true about many people. And if you can have faith in your integrity and your motives, then you can write about yourself without fear.

Real Live Preacher

41.

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

42.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

43.

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

Stephen King

44.

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

Carol Burnett

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Raymond Chandler

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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