Writing Quotes

Inspirational Writing Quotes

1. The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe. – Gustave Flaubert.
   

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2. Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader – not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon. –E. L Doctorow
3. You don’t start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it’s good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That’s why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence. – Gustave Flaubert.
   

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4. Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go. – E. L Doctorow
5. No amount of money can replace the kind of happiness and satisfaction I derive out of writing. – Screenivasan.
6. Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing. – Benjamin Franklin.
7. The heart and soul of good writing is research; you should write not what you know but what you can find out about. – Robert J. Sawyer.
8. Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers. – Isaac Asimov.
9. There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed. – Ernest Hemingway.
10. Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man. – Francis Bacon.
11. I believe that writing is derivative. I think good writing comes from good reading. – Charles Kuralt.
12. And the idea of just wandering off to a cafe with a notebook and writing and seeing where that takes me for a while is just bliss. – J. K Rowling.
13. You don’t start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it’s good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That’s why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence. – Octavia E. Butler.
14. I am a woman, and I am a Latina. Those are the things that make my writing distinctive. Those are the things that give my writing power. – Sandra Cisneros.
15. Writing the perfect paper is a lot like a military operation. It takes discipline, foresight, research, strategy, and, if done right, ends in total victory. – Ryan Holiday.
16. If I wanted to curse you out, I would write everything I wanted to say to you in my diary, and it was like screaming in my head. After that, I would have no feelings for you; I wouldn’t be mad at you or upset because I already said it to you when I wrote it down. That’s what writing did for me. – Claressa Shields.
17. A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. – Thomas Mann.
18. The beautiful part of writing is that you don’t have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon. You can always do it better, find the exact word, the apt phrase, the leaping simile. – Robert Cormier.
19. If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time or the tools to write. – Stephen King.
20. The beautiful part of writing is that you don’t have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon. You can always do it better, find the exact word, the apt phrase, the leaping simile. – Robert Cormier.
21. People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them I have the heart of a small boy… and I keep it in a jar on my desk. – Stephen King.
22. When I do have free time, I spend it with friends, or I spend it at home writing or making something. – Billie Eillish.
23. When asked, ‘How do you write?’ I invariably answer, ‘one word at a time.’ – Stephen King.
24. And as a writer, one of the things that I’ve always been interested in doing is actually invading your comfort space. Because that’s what we’re supposed to do. Get under your skin, and make you react. – Stephen King.
25. 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. – E. L Doctorow
26. Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you’re doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing. – E. L Doctorow
27. The writer isn’t made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century. –E. L Doctorow
28. “Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.” – Mark Twain.
29. Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake. – E. L Doctorow
30. One of the things I had to learn as a writer was to trust the act of writing. To put myself in the position of writing to find out what I was writing. E. L Doctorow
31. When you’re writing a book, you don’t really think about it critically. You don’t want to know too well what you’re doing. First, you write the book, then you find the justification for it. – E. L Doctorow.
32. The important thing is not to be too comfortable when you’re writing. Noise in the street? That’s good. The computer goes down? That’s good. All these things are good. It has to be a little bit of a struggle. – E. L Doctorow.
33. Writing is like prostitution. First, you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money. – Moliere.
34. The writing process, the way I go about it is I do whatever the beat feels like, whatever the beat is telling me to do. Usually, when the beat comes on, I think of a hook or the subject I want to rap about almost instantly. Within four, eight bars of it playing I’m just like, ‘Oh, OK. This is what I wanna do’. – Eminem.
35. The most difficult and complicated part of the writing process is the beginning. – B Yehoshua.
36. Your writing voice is the deepest possible reflection of who you are. The job of your voice is not to seduce or flatter or make well-shaped sentences. In your voice, your readers should be able to hear the contents of your mind, your heart, your soul. – Meg Rosoff.
37. Revision is the heart of writing. Every page I do is done over seven or eight times. – Patricia Reilly Giff.
    

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38. You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children. – Madeleine L’Engle.
39. Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be. – Mark Twain.
40. We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect. – Anais Nin.
41. You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write. – Saul Bellow.
42. No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader. – Robert Frost.
43. The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. ’tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning. – Mark Twain.
44. Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly — they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced. – Aldous Huxley.
45. The scariest moment is always just before you start. – Stephen King.
46. Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on. – Louis L’Amour.
47. After nourishment, shelter, and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world. – Philip Pullman.
48. Stories may well be lies, but they are good lies that say true things, and which can sometimes. – Neil Gaiman.
49. The first draft of anything is shit. – Ernest Hemingway.
50. If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. – Stephen King.
51. I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn. – Anne Frank.
52. Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly. – Franz Kafka.
53. you can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will. – Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft.
54. A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. – Thomas Mann, Essays of Three Decades.
55. There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts. – Charles Dickens.
56. Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college. – Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country.
57. Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart. – William Wordsworth.
58. A word after a word after a word is power. – Margaret Atwood.
59. There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know where they’ll take you. – Beatrix Potter.
60. Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters. – Neil Gaiman.
61. Tears are words that need to be written. – Paulo Coelho.
62. You must write every single day of your life… You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads… may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world. – Ray Bradbury.
63. You can make anything by writing. – S. Lewis.
64. Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it’s always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins. – Neil Gaiman.
65. Writing is like sex. First, you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money. – Virginia Woolf.
66. I write to give myself strength. I write to be the characters that I am not. I write to explore all the things I’m afraid of. – Joss Whedon.
67. You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write. – Annie Proulx.
68. This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until it’s done. It’s that easy, and that hard. – Neil Gaiman.
69. A well-composed book is a magic carpet on which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter in any other way. – Caroline Gordon.
70. Always be a poet, even in prose. – Charles Baudelaire.
    

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71. Imagination is like a muscle. I found out that the more I wrote, the bigger it got. – Philip José Farmer.
72. The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say. – Anais Nin.
73. I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness. – Franz Kafka.
74. Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time. – Howard Nemerov.
75. The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words. – William H. Gass.
76. Write the kind of story you would like to read. People will give you all sorts of advice about writing, but if you are not writing something you like, no one else will like it either. – Meg Cabot.