Top 100 Writing Effort Quotes
#1. It has taken me years of struggle, hard work, and research to learn to make one simple gesture, and I know enough about the art of writing to realize that it would take as many years of concentrated effort to write one simple, beautiful sentence.
Isadora Duncan
#2. You can write and visualize goals all you want, but if you do not take action, your goals will never become a reality. To obtain a goal you have never before achieved will require tasks you have never before done.
Cameron C. Taylor
#3. The discipline of creation, be it to paint, compose, write, is an effort towards wholeness.
Madeleine L'Engle
#4. For me,the Bild-Dichtung [image-poem] is the ideal form,because the drawing process is constantly being interrupted or contrasted by the writing. And since I always have something to say when I am writing,the effort has a balancing effect. Drawing and writing are wonderful complements.
Gunter Brus
#5. Writing fiction is ... an endless and always defeated effort to capture some quality of life without killing it.
Rose Wilder Lane
#6. I disagree with the advice of 'write about what you know.' Write about what you need to know, in an effort to understand.
Donald Windham
#7. The world is corrupt, and the way for me to make it better is not by writing letters, but joining my efforts with those of others to produce a work of beauty.
H.S. Ede
#8. The scholar may be sure that he writes the tougher truth for the calluses on his palms. They give firmness to the sentence. Indeed, the mind never makes a great and successful effort, without a corresponding energy of the body.
Henry David Thoreau
#9. No reader owes me anything - I am owed nothing for my noble efforts, because my writing was always unconditional, always coming out of inner necessity.
Aleksandar Hemon
#10. I'm not the most prolific writer in the world, and, sadly, writing a novel involves a lot of effort.
Tibor Fischer
#11. The old incapacity. Interrupted my writing for barely ten days and already cast out. Once again prodigious efforts stand before me. You have to dive down, as it were, and sink more rapidly than that which sinks in advance of you.
Franz Kafka
#12. The filmmaking process is a team effort. A screenwriter cannot possibly do exactly what he wants as if he was writing a novel.
Leigh Brackett
#13. I'm writing and putting together my next few things. Even during the Red Army process, I've been writing and developing things, so that now that I'm done and with efforts supporting it throughout this process, I'm armed and ready to go with some things that I'm really passionate about.
Gabe Polsky
#14. Writing. It's a trivial pursuit, hardly worth the effort, inconsequential on any cosmic level. It's just blood and sweat and guts and bone hauled out of our bodies and fed through a typewriter to slosh all over the platen.
Kim Newman
#15. In the mental disturbance and effort of writing, what sustains you is the certainty that on every page there is something left unsaid.
Cesare Pavese
#16. I feel like if people are going to go to the effort to get a stamp and, you know, put it on an envelope that, you know, it's a big effort these days. So I often write back.
Adrian Tomine
#18. Of course, in fairness, I must remind you of this: that we writers are the most lily-livered of all craftsmen. We expect more, for the most peewee efforts, than any other people.
Brenda Ueland
#19. Transforming a brand into a socially responsible leader doesn't happen overnight by simply writing new marketing and advertising strategies. It takes effort to identify a vision that your customers will find credible and aligned with their values.
Simon Mainwaring
#20. Writing fiction or nonfiction is a lonely battle wrestling with sentences in an effort to put together an intelligible thought that speaks for the author.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#21. I wrote without much effort; for I was rich, and the rich are always respectable, whatever be their style of writing.
Jane Austen
#22. I made a very conscious effort to finish 'The Cypress House' before 'So Cold the River' launched, because I thought that would help build a buffer between my writing and any impact that came from either the success or the failure of that first book.
Michael Koryta
#23. Just remember, this is a collaborative effort. We don't have time for creative differences or outbreaks of artistic integrity.
Greg Cox
#24. Indeed, the ratio of time spent reading versus writing is well over 10 to 1. We are constantly reading old code as part of the effort to write new code. ...[Therefore,] making it easy to read makes it easier to write.
Robert C. Martin
#25. When aspiring writers ask me about how they should target their writing, I tell them to pay no attention to that kind of thing. It will restrict you. You will end up falling into stereotypes in an effort to tailor your work toward a perceived genre category.
Carrie Vaughn
#26. I feel like a ghost wandering in a world grown alien. I cannot cast out the old way of writing and I cannot acquire the new. I have made an intense effort to feel the musical manner of today, but it will not come to me.
Sergei Rachmaninoff
#27. It isn't the subjects we write about but the seriousness and subtlety of our expression that determines the worth of or effort.
Joyce Carol Oates
#28. You've got to make an effort to get the details right, because even through someone picks it up and knows it's a novel, they know someone's made it up and they know it's not real, if you make a small mistake they will cease to imaginatively engage with the story.
Sara Sheridan
#29. All my writing has been an effort to sort out the paradoxes of my life.
Nancy Friday
#30. Ability, commitment, effort. Those are the three things required to succeed. If you have them, success will happen as sure as the sun will rise.
You just have to give it time
Cassandra Sky West
#31. Not to write, for many of us, is to die. We must take ares each and every day, perhaps knowing that the battle cannot be entirely won, but fight we must, if only a gentle bout. The smallest effort to win means, at the end of each day, a sort of victory.
Ray Bradbury
#32. And no one ever told me about the laziness of grief. Except at my job
where the machine seems to run on much as usual
I loath the slightest effort. Not only writing but even reading a letter is too much.
C.S. Lewis
#33. Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.
Flannery O'Connor
#34. If you are going to be a writer there is nothing I can say to stop you; if you're not going to be a writer nothing I can say will help you. What you really need at the beginning is somebody to let you know that the effort is real.
James A. Baldwin
#35. Never will I make that extra effort to live according to reality which alone makes good writing possible: hence the manic-depressiveness of my style, - which is either bright, cruel and superficial; or pessimistic; moth-eaten with self-pity
Cyril Connolly
#36. I knew that you couldn't make a living simply writing about the outdoors, so I made an effort from the beginning of my freelance career to write about other subjects.
Jon Krakauer
#37. Going into the second arc, I'm making a conscious effort to do something I say I never do, which is to change my style because of feedback. I'm trying to make 'Pretty Deadly' more accessible by being more clear in the writing.
Kelly Sue DeConnick
#38. There's a lot of effort expended once you begin to completely trash your life. Sometimes, writing feels like this to me.
Dan Chaon
#39. The important thing is not what we write but how we write, and in my opinion the modern writer must be an adventurer above all, willing to take every risk, and be prepared to founder in his effort if need be. In other words we must write dangerously
James Joyce
#40. The Polar Express was the easiest of my picture book manuscripts to write ... Once I realized the train was going to the North Pole, finding the story seemed less like a creative effort than an act of recollection. I felt, like the storys narrator, that I was remembering something, not making it up.
Chris Van Allsburg
#41. Now that I'm staring down the barrel of the last act of my life, I'm less excited about control and solo effort, and I resent the way the business aspects interfere with my space for creative writing.
David Knopfler
#42. By using stale metaphors, similes and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself.
George Orwell
#43. The sheer complexity of writing a play always had dazzled me. In an effort to understand it, I became a critic.
Kenneth Tynan
#44. And instead of dying Immediately after they shot him, he would go on to survive several days solely because of the cold that January. Maybe that's why we are drawn to those who posses the coldest of hearts ... In effort to survive.
Bethany Brookbank
#45. Writing good jokes requires effort. Think I'll just start dressing funnier.
Dov Davidoff
#46. So much of the effort that goes into writing prose for me is about making sentences that capture the music that I'm hearing in my head. It takes a lot of work, writing, writing, and rewriting to get the music exactly the way you want it to be.
Jonathan Lethem
#47. Composition is for the most part an effort of slow diligence and steady perseverance, to which the mind is dragged by necessity or resolution, and from which the attention is every moment starting to more delightful amusements.
Samuel Johnson
#48. In a sense, you're always mythologizing your life; it's always an effort to make yourself epic. At least in fiction you can lie and sort of justify your delusion about your "epicness." But when you're writing a memoir, you're trying to make your life epic and it's not - nobody's life is.
Sherman Alexie
#49. I don't have much to say about honesty. All that I feel about it that people don't discuss as far as I know is how much effort it is to create truly honest writing, in my opinion. It requires a lot of thinking and effort.
Marie Calloway
#50. There is both a skill factor and an effort factor in dream recall. People can develop dream recall skills, such as lying still in the morning and writing down whatever comes to mind.
Henry Reed
#51. No writing effort is ever wasted. At the very least, it's practice, and a writer never knows when he or she might usefully cannibalize an earlier effort for something new.
Therese Fowler
#52. Sometimes you read something and it's just
it doesn't invite a reader ... Sometimes you read something and it's not saying, 'oh come in, come in have a seat. I'm going to tell you what happened.' Perhaps my writing comes off as conversational ... and that takes effort.
David Sedaris
#53. I think talent is like a water table under the earth - you tap it with your effort and it comes through you.
Natalie Goldberg
#54. When you have been writing for a lot of years, you have to make an effort not to start repeating yourself. It occurred to me that I tended to tread certain ground automatically, because it was comfortable, but that there were areas I avoided automatically because they made me nervous.
Merrill Markoe
#55. What I wanted was to write a memoir that was immersive rather than reflective, to resurrect a long-gone version of my own consciousness. I kept expecting that sooner or later the effort would come to seem like second nature to me, but it never did.
Kevin Brockmeier
#56. As well as writing, 2004 saw my first attempt at wine making: the elixir of life. Unfortunately, my effort tasted more like the elixir of death.
Craig Briggs
#57. Songs will always become a story in some way. I think it's my strongpoint as a writer musically. I don't shy away from it. It's not really an effort. It's how I write songs.
Mike Stud
#58. I never question the way I write. Writing is the only thing that's without seams for me. It's an effort to talk because my pictures have to be turned into these sounds. It's an effort to be alive. It's work. But writing is wonderful.
Augusten Burroughs
#59. There is an atmosphere of spiritual effort here. No other city is quite like it. I wake early, often at 5 o'clock, and start writing at once.
James Joyce
#60. Forgiveness and faith are like writing a story. They take time, effort, revisions. When
Daisy Hernandez
#61. Writing and reading fiction is, I think, a human effort to make sense of the world.
Robin Hobb
#63. But what is hard to understand is why the math and science gap launched a massive movement on behalf of girls, and yet a much larger gap in reading, writing, and school engagement created no comparable effort for boys.
Christina Hoff Sommers
#64. Why it should be such an effort to write to the people one loves I can't imagine. It's none at all to write to those who don't really count.
Katherine Mansfield
#65. Day after day, week after week; writing great fiction takes time, emotion, skill and effort.
Carla H. Krueger
#66. Writing a first novel takes so much effort, with such little promise of result or reward, that it must necessarily be a labor of love bordering on madness.
Steven Saylor
#67. In quickness is truth. The more swiftly you write, the more honest you are. In hesitation is thought. In delay comes the effort for a style, instead of leaping upon truth which is the only style worth deadfalling or tiger-trapping.
Ray Bradbury
#68. World creation should be an effort of great and covetous love.
Micah R. Sisk
#69. I've never thought of writing as the mere arrangement of words on the page but the attempted embodiment of a vision; a complex of emotions; raw experience. The effort of memorable art is to evoke in the reader or spectator emotions appropriate to that effort.
Joyce Carol Oates
#70. My idea of writing is of unflinching and continual effort, somehow trying to find the right words until you reach a point where you can make no further progress and you either have something or you don't.
James Salter
#71. I'm trying to read/edit my story as if I have no existing knowledge of the story, no investment in it, no sense of what Herculean effort went into writing page 23, no pretensions as to why the dull patch on page 4 is important for the fireworks that will happen on page 714.
George Saunders
#72. I put a lot of effort into writing 'A Briefer History' at a time when I was critically ill with pneumonia because I think that it's important for scientists to explain their work, particularly in cosmology. This now answers many questions once asked of religion.
Stephen Hawking
#73. Someone who wants to write should make an effort to write a little something every day. Writing in this sense is the same as athletes who practice a sport every day to keep their skills honed.
Anita Desai
#74. I went to the trash pile at Tuskegee Institute and started my laboratory with bottles, old fruit jars and any other thing I found I could use ... [The early efforts were] worked out almost wholly on top of my flat topped writing desk and with teacups, glasses, bottles and reagents I made myself.
George Washington Carver
#75. Book writing is not a get-rich-quick scheme. Anyone who decides to write a book must expect to invest a lot of time and effort without any guarantee of success. Books do not write themselves and they do not sell themselves. Authors write and promote their books.
Dan Poynter
#76. I find if you're targeting Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X right from the start, your code will probably work anywhere else that you might try it later ... Writing code that is cross-platform from the start requires more discipline, but I find it is worth the effort.
Ryan C. Gordon
#77. I wouldn't write any kind of book without a contract and an advance. You can't invest that amount of time and effort without one.
Harrison Salisbury
#78. I think what makes good children's books is putting the same care and effort into it as if I was writing for adults. I don't write anything - put anything in my books - that I'd be embarrassed to put in an adult book.
Louis Sachar
#79. During the 1980s, when Japan's economy was roaring and people were writing books with titles like 'Japan is Number One,' most Japanese college students didn't make the effort to become fluent in English.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#80. Time, effort & persistence make for the writing of a good novel. There's no such thing as "writer's block." Just reluctance to make the slog
Mark Rubinstein
#81. The United States has made a massive effort since the end of the Second World War to secure the dominance of its films in foreign markets - an achievement generally pushed home politically, by writing clauses into various treaties and aid packages.
Fredric Jameson
#82. An artist's sensitivity to criticism is, at least in part, an effort to keep unimpaired the zest, or confidence, or arrogance, which he needs to make creation possible; or an instinct to climb through his problems in his own way as he should, and must.
Christopher Fry
#83. The average page of a book weighs about 0.035 of an ounce, but getting people to keep turning them takes enormous effort.
Dave Preston
#84. Very conscious of the fact that an effort was being made to destroy my mind, because I was deprived of books, deprived of any means of writing, deprived of human companionship. You never know how much you need it until you're deprived of it.
Wole Soyinka
#85. If you take the time and put in the effort to write your own material and absolutely refuse to be denied the right to make your film it is difficult whatever colour you are.
Denzel Washington
#87. I got into writing in college ... well, in elementary school. But in college, I started writing seriously and had a professor who read my writing and gave me permission to pursue that as a real effort and time-consuming effort.
Lauren Holmes
#89. There is the happiness which comes from creative effort. The joy of dreaming, creating, building, whether in painting a picture, writing an epic, singing a song, composing a symphony, devising new invention, creating a vast industry.
Henry Miller
#90. I started reading my manuscripts out loud, to hear what they sounded like. If the text flows with little effort, then I am satisfied, but if I keep stumbling and stuttering while I read, then I rewrite.
Gudjon Bergmann
#91. But I MUST say what I feel and think in some way - it is such a relief! But the effort is getting to be greater than the relief.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#92. A Train was born without any effort - if was like writing a letter to a friend.
Billy Strayhorn
#93. He would like to be capable of writing as he thinks, quickly, without effort, the word as agile and dynamic as athletes in a race, jumping over hurdles, one after the other, go, go, go, flying towards the finishing post, faster than the disgust limping behind him.
Filippo Bologna
#94. The writer has two kinds of faith: actual writing and sitting openly. Have faith in your personal effort or sweat. And faith in God, or whatever you want to call it. Then the voices will come. Faith is the big deal.
Suzan-Lori Parks
#95. Children should learn to draw as they learn to write, and such a mystery should not be made of it. They should be encouraged, not flattered ... then [later in life] double the effort is required to get the facility which might have been gained insensibly.
William Morris Hunt
#96. No matter how much enthusiasm and effort you put into writing, if you totally lack literary talent you can forget about being a novelist.
Haruki Murakami
#97. A novel is an interminable effort. You think until you are weary. You write until you are ready to scream. You stop. You rest. But you have to get back to it. You have to pick up the threads, revive your enthusiasm, recapture the mood.
Frank Gruber
#98. Merely because you have got something to say that may be of interest to others does not free you from making all due effort to express that something in the best possible medium and form.
[Letter to Max E. Feckler, Oct. 26, 1914]
Jack London
#99. I've devoted a lot of my time and effort during the past few years to developing my advertising copywriting business to the point of where I can support my family and don't have to depend on writing fiction for my income.
George Stephen
#100. I esteem his understanding and subtlety highly, but I consider that they have been put to ill use in the greater part of his work, where the author studies things of little use...
{Writing about Isaac Newton}
Christiaan Huygens
