Motivational Quotes

Writing

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

Best Quotes about Writing

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

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

Edwin Schlossberg

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blaise Pascal

10.

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

Victor Hugo

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Leo Rosten

15.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

16.

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

George Burns

17.

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

18.

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

Charles de Montesquieu

19.

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

Raymond Chandler

20.

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

Thomas Mann

21.

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

22.

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

Carol Burnett

23.

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

Sir Francis Bacon

24.

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

Thomas Berger

25.

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

26.

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

Jules Renard

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

30.

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

31.

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

Tom Bissell

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork.

Peter De Vries

36.

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

Jeff Jarvis

37.

W. Somerset Maugham

38.

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

Stephen King

39.

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

40.

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

41.

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

Real Live Preacher

42.

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

Stephen King

43.

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

Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Bobby Knight

47.

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

Eric A. Burns

48.

In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning.

George Orwell

49.

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

Samuel Johnson

50.

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