Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

- Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

Best Quotes about Writing

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

After being Turned Down by numerous Publishers, he had decided to write for Posterity.

George Ade

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

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

Samuel Johnson

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

Benjamin Disraeli

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

Tom Bissell

This is the challenge of writing. You have to be very emotionally engaged in what youÆre doing, or it comes out flat. You canÆt fake your way through this.

Real Live Preacher

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

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

10.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

14.

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

15.

Vigorous writing is concise.

William Strunk Jr.

16.

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

Charles de Montesquieu

17.

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

Truman Capote

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.

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

Raymond Chandler

20.

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

21.

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

Henry James

22.

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

23.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

24.

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

Jules Renard

25.

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

26.

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

Sir Francis Bacon

27.

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

28.

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

H. G. Wells

29.

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

Randy Pausch

30.

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

Solomon Short

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Robert Heinlein

34.

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

Thomas Mann

35.

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

Real Live Preacher

36.

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

37.

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne du Maurier

38.

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

Bobby Knight

39.

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

Ray Bradbury

40.

I have made this [letter] longer, because I have not had the time to make it shorter.

Blaise Pascal

41.

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

Stephen King

42.

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

43.

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

44.

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

Stephen King

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Fran Lebowitz

48.

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

49.

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

George Burns

50.

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

Edwin Schlossberg