Top 1200 Successful Writing Quotes & Sayings

My friends found out that I was writing a book on Twitter. It didn't seem worth mentioning over dinner. They're all so successful themselves.

The secret of successful writing lies in striking the right keys on the typewriter.

It doesn't matter if people are playing jazz or writing poetry. If they want to be successful, they need to learn how to persist and persevere and keep on working until the work is done... I bet there isn't a single highly successful person who has not depended on grit. Nobody is talented enough to not have to work hard, and that's what grit allows you to do.

I don't know if I ever would have developed into a good actor, but that got completely scotched when I lost my vocal cord at 14 in the operation. But writing always - writing plays, writing, writing, writing, that was what I wanted to do.

Successful writers are not the ones who write the best sentences. They are the ones who keep writing.

We're running into a lot of new problems today because of what we emphasize in this culture. The word 'success' to the average person means earning a lot of money and having a home, two cars, children in college. Success to me is entirely different to what success is to the average person. Success is being a successful human being in terms of pursuing what you believe in. If you believe in making paintings, writing poetry, writing music. If this is what you really want, you're successful to yourself. But to be successful to your culture means to sell yourself short of what you really want

You're successful if you can get one person to pick it up and put it on the turntable and go, Wow, thanks for writing that!

To have a successful writing career, you must be willing to sacrifice a great deal. The book, the deadline come first before anything else. Writing is not a job; it is a lifestyle, and it is a roller-coaster ride of highs and lows. You need self-confidence and an iron carapace.

I'm not successful in Hollywood, and I probably would never be. I think Hollywood has such an interesting model for success, and it creates those successful people. I'm not in that chosen category, but what is successful for me is that, in spite of that, I've been able to work and do the things that I wrote down that I wanted to do and be.

Our popular government has often been called an experiment. Two points in it our people have already settled, the successful establishing and the successful administering of it. One still remains, its successful maintenance against a formidable internal attempt to overthrow it.

For actors, being successful is generally getting a job. If you can work a lot, you're really successful. If you work a lot on projects that are interesting and intelligent and great fun to be part of, then you're hugely successful. And I feel hugely successful. I can't believe that I get to be involved with the projects and the people I work with.

I want to be successful. Not just money. Just making a successful record and a successful show... I could feel successful without selling a million records.

I think that the word 'ambitious' is still used in a derogatory way when it comes to women, in a way that it's not when it comes to men. It's a generalisation because not everyone is like this, but I think there's almost a love-hate relationship going on with successful women, where you can be a little bit successful and you'll be celebrated, but don't become too successful because that seems to bring out the hate in some cases. Take one glance at social media and you can see that successful women don't seem to be treated with the same respect as successful men.

More than this, I believe that the only lastingly important form of writing is writing for children. It is writing that is carried in the reader's heart for a lifetime; it is writing that speaks to the future.

You're going to be successful or you're not going to be successful. You have to handle success and not being successful in the same way.

When people talk about successful retailers and those that are not so successful, the customer determines at the end of the day who is successful and for what reason.

When you're in youth development, you have to develop players - win or come in second. But the job where I am and the reality of our industry is to win to be successful, and that is what I have to do. I have to be successful, and I want to be successful, so we'll do everything we can do to win.

I started writing my own plays, and I would sell out, but after everything was said and done, I'd break even. That's being successful.

What I know now is that everybody in life, no matter where you are or what you do, must be able to sell in order to be successful. I used to believe that I could be successful on talent alone. What I realize now is that I can only be successful if I can have people buy my talent.

To be successful in writing, use short sentences.

But I wouldn't recommend writing. You can be a successful writer and never meet another soul. I'm not sure that's a good thing.

I'm a successful novelist, and I've been a lucky one, so I don't want to cry the poor mouth. Writing has never been easy.

The thing about writing in America is that writers in America have an arc. You enter writing as a career, you expect to be successful, and really it's the wrong thing. It's not a profession.

Fiction writing was in my blood from a very young age, but I never considered writing as a real career. I thought you had to have some literary pedigree to be a successful author, the son of Hemingway or Fitzgerald.

Writers and musicians know well the importance of extensive reading for successful writing or extensive listening for musical composition. Likewise, visual artists... understand that successful artistic creativity depends upon extensive visual exposure.

I feel successful when the writing goes well. This lasts five minutes. Once, when I was number one on the bestseller list, I also felt successful. That lasted three minutes.

It's essential to have sacred time for writing. All successful authors have some daily commitment to keep on-track and moving forward.

The only thing all successful people have in common is that they're successful, so don't waste your time copying "the successful strategies" of others.

I know there's a difference between being successful and feeling successful. And if you ask me if I feel successful, the honest answer is 'not yet.'

The challenges of writing a book are very different from writing a blog or tweets. I've been writing a blog since I was in the 6th grade, so I had this style of writing that was definitely not proper for writing a book.

When I was writing 'The Windup Girl' and 'Ship Breaker,' I was writing those simultaneously, so I was an unpublished writer, not really having that full sense that these books would go out in the world, that they would be successful, that there would be an audience and that there would be fans of those stories.

Writing objects to the lie that life is small. Writing is a cell of energy. Writing defines itself. Writing draws its viewer in for longer than an instant. Writing exhibits boldness. Writing restores power to exalt, unnerve, shock, and transform us. Writing does not imitate life, it anticipates life.

Distractions have never prevented a Writing Writer Who Writes from writing; distractions are an excuse proffered by Non-Writing Non-Writers Who are Not-Writing for why they are not writing.

When I'm writing, I'm writing for a particular actor. When a lot of writers are writing, they're writing an idea. So they're not really writing in a specific voice.

There is a huge tension in trying to write with small children because they demand your attention and your time with a fierceness that can be matched by nothing else, but if you are successful in writing while you have small children, I actually think that your writing is likely to be deeper than it was before.

There's always pressure, a great deal of pressure, when writing, since my first books were so successful.

Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you're doing - none of that is writing. Writing is writing. Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

I think everybody wants everybody to be successful. There is that competitive nature, in a sense that everybody wants to be the best, but if A.J. Styles is more successful, and Braun Strowman is more successful, that makes the company more successful.

I remind young people everywhere I go, one of the worst things the older generation did was to tell them for twenty-five years "Be successful, be successful, be successful" as opposed to "Be great, be great, be great". There's a qualitative difference.

Those things which we call extraordinary, remarkable, or unusual may make history, but they do not make real life. After all, to do well those things which God ordained to be the common lot of all mankind, is the truest greatness. To be a successful father or a successful mother is greater than to be a successful general or a successful statesman.

I don't enjoy any of the process of writing. I enjoy it when it goes on if it zings and it has great warmth and import and it's successful.

The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from.

The difficulty of writing a second novel is directly proportional to how successful the first novel was, it seems.

In my mind, only one inviolable precept exists in terms of being a successful writer: you have to write. The unspoken sub-laws of that one precept are: to write, you must start writing and then finish writing. And then, most likely, start writing all over again because this writing "thing" is one long and endless ride on a really weird (but pretty awesome) carousel. Cue the calliope music.

People always say, 'How is it to be so successful?' I'm not successful yet. Richard Branson is successful. That's successful. Michael Jackson was successful. U2 was successful. I'm just a guy, doing okay. But I'm a happy guy doing okay.

The first and perhaps the most important requirement for a successful writing performance - and writing is a performance, like singing an aria or dancing a jig - is to understand the nature of the occasion.

The key to writing successful YA is to keep the adults out of the story as much as possible.

I have been successful probably because I have always realized that I knew nothing about writing and have merely tried to tell an interesting story entertainingly.

If I was Leo DiCaprio or someone similarly gifted and successful I wouldn't be writing. I'd be too busy acting in all the best scripts in town to try and write them!

A show can be artistically successful; a show can be financially successful; a show can be successful by the transformative experience the audience is having; a show can be successful from the point of view of what is experienced by the cast and the company on a daily basis.

I enjoy writing, sometimes; I think that most writers will tell you about the agony of writing more than the joy of writing, but writing is what I was meant to do.

I'm always writing. A friend of mine once said, 'You avoid re-writing by writing.' Which is kind of a good point, because re-writing seems to be mostly about craft, and writing is just, like, getting out your passion on a piece of paper.

Was I a successful father? Maybe not. Was I a successful husband? Probably not. Was I a successful actor? Probably not.

There are so many different kinds of writing and so many ways to work that the only rule is this: do what works. Almost everything has been tried and found to succeed for somebody. The methods, even the ideas of successful writers contradict each other in a most heartening way, and the only element I find common to all successful writers is persistence-an overwhelming determination to succeed.

With showrunning, the more successful you get, the more you're pulled away from the writing.

If you are making money writing, you are doing great. If you can support yourself writing, you are a success. I don't care if you're writing textbooks or Pulitzer Prize-winning articles for weighty publications of world renown: If you're writing and it's paying the bills, consider yourself a successful writer.

Outlining is not writing. Coming up with ideas is not writing. Researching is not writing. Creating characters is not writing. Only writing is writing.

Successful people have fear, successful people have doubts, and successful people have worries. They just don't let these feelings stop them.

The major difference I've found between the highly successful and the least successful is that the highly successful stick to it. They have staying power. Everybody fails. Everybody takes his knocks, but the highly successful keep coming back.

Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you're doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.