Motivational Quotes

Writing

Vigorous writing is concise.

- William Strunk Jr.

Best Quotes about Writing

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King

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

Randy Pausch

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

Samuel Goldwyn

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

Stanislaw J. Lec

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

Raymond Chandler

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

Samuel Johnson

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

Edwin Schlossberg

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

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

Stephen King

10.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Truman Capote

16.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

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.

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

H. G. Wells

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Real Live Preacher

22.

Even writers need relief from words.

Sarah Vowell

23.

Journalism is just a gun. It's only got one bullet in it, but if you aim right, that's all you need. Aim it right and you can blow a kneecap off the world.

Warren Ellis

24.

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

Blaise Pascal

25.

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

26.

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

Inigo DeLeon

27.

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

28.

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

Eric A. Burns

29.

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

Sarah Hepola

30.

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

Real Live Preacher

31.

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

32.

The most difficult part of writing a book is not devising a plot which will captivate the reader. It's not developing characters the reader will have strong feelings for or against. It is not finding a setting which will take the reader to a place he or she as never been. It is not the research, whether in fiction or non-fiction. The most difficult task facing a writer is to find the voice in which to tell the story.

Randy Pausch

33.

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

Thomas Berger

34.

The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn't require any.

Russell Baker

35.

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

Charles de Montesquieu

36.

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

Fran Lebowitz

37.

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

38.

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

Heather Armstrong

39.

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

40.

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

Carol Burnett

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Jeff Jarvis

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Jef Mallett

47.

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

48.

You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despairûthe sense that you can never completely put on the page whatÆs in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King

49.

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

50.

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

Solomon Short