Writing is a very effective means of self-expression, creativity, and communication.
Whether you’re a seasoned author or just starting out in writing, finding inspiration can be difficult.
That’s why it may be so beneficial to read the quotes of people who have gone before us and earned a name for themselves in the enigmatic world of writing.
This article will look at some of the most inspirational writing quotes from notable authors, encompassing a variety of styles and genres.
From Mark Twain’s humor to Maya Angelou’s wisdom, these quotes and sayings are surely going to give you the inspiration and motivation to to keep writing no matter what.
Top 10 Writing Quotes
Writers live twice. ~ Natalie Goldberg.
Write drunk, edit sober. ~ Ernest Hemingway.
You can make anything by writing. ~ C.S. Lewis.
Words are a lens to focus one’s mind. ~ Ayn Rand.
Half my life is an act of revision. ~ John Irving.
You fail only if you stop writing. ~ Ray Bradbury.
Be willing to write really badly. ~ Jennifer Egan.
Write what should not be forgotten. ~ Isabel Allende.
You can fix anything but a blank page. ~ Nora Roberts.
A writer is a world trapped in a person. ~ Victor Hugo.
Also read: Blogging Quotes to Inspire You to Start Blog Writing and Inspiring Dare To Dream Quotes to Achieve Big in Life
Images for Writing Quotes
Every writer I know has trouble writing. ~ Joseph Heller.
A word after a word after a word is power. ~ Margaret Atwood.
Anyone who says writing is easy isn’t doing it right. ~ Amy Joy.
Get through a draft as quickly as possible. ~ Joshua Wolf Shenk.
There is no greater power on this earth than story. ~ Libba Bray.
Style means the right word. The rest matters little. ~ Jules Renard.
Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement. ~ C. S. Lewis.
A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit. ~ Richard Bach.
Writing Quotes
Let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences. ~ Sylvia Plath.
Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it. ~ Oscar Wilde.
Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers. ~ T.S. Eliot.
Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river. ~ Lisa See.
History will be kind to me for I intend to write it. ~ Winston Churchill.
The first draft is just you telling yourself the story. ~ Terry Pratchett.
If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word. ~ Margaret Atwood.
We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect. ~ Anaïs Nin.
Famous Writing Quotes
First, find out what your hero wants, then just follow him. ~ Ray Bradbury.
If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood. ~ Peter Handke.
To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. ~ Herman Melville.
You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page. ~ Jodi Picoult.
One sure window into a person’s soul is his reading list. ~ Mary B. W. Tabor.
If you want to change the world, pick up your pen and write. ~ Martin Luther.
One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple. ~ Jack Kerouac.
As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand. ~ Ernest Hemingway.
You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. ~ Ray Bradbury.
I think all writing is a disease. You can’t stop it. ~ William Carlos Williams.
Inspiring Quotes About Writing
The best time to plan a book is while you’re doing the dishes. ~ Agatha Christie.
There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you. ~ Maya Angelou.
I am not at all in a humor for writing; I must write on until I am. ~ Jane Austen.
To gain your own voice, you have to forget about having it heard. ~ Allen Ginsberg.
If the book is true, it will find an audience that is meant to read it. ~ Wally Lamb.
What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure. ~ Samuel Johnson.
The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself. ~ Albert Camus.
Famous Quotes on Writing
There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story. ~ Frank Herbert.
No matter what people tell you, words and ideas can change the world. ~ Robin Williams.
Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing. ~ Benjamin Franklin.
It is by sitting down to write every morning that one becomes a writer. ~ Gerald Brenan.
If you wait for inspiration to write you’re not a writer, you’re a waiter. ~ Dan Poynter.
It is perfectly okay to write garbage – as long as you edit brilliantly. ~ C. J. Cherryh.
It is only by writing, not dreaming about it, that we develop our own style. ~ P.D. James.
No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else’s draft. ~ H.G. Wells.
Best Quotes About Writing
The task of a writer consists of being able to make something out of an idea. ~ Thomas Mann.
The Six Golden Rules of Writing: Read, read, read, and write, write, write. ~ Ernest Gaines.
No author dislikes to be edited as much as he dislikes not to be published. ~ Russell Lynes.
I kept always two books in my pocket: one to read, one to write in. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson.
How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live. ~ Henry David Thoreau.
I don’t want just words. If that’s all you have for me, you’d better go. ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald.
The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life. ~ Zadie Smith.
The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone’s neurosis. ~ William Styron.
I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn. ~ Anne Frank.
Inspirational Writing Quotes By Famous Authors
A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. ~ Thomas Mann.
Focus more on your desire than on your doubt, and the dream will take care of itself. ~ Mark Twain.
It doesn’t matter how many book ideas you have if you can’t finish writing your book. ~ Joe Bunting.
There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at the typewriter and bleed. ~ Ernest Hemingway.
Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on. ~ Louis L’Amour.
Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short. ~ Henry David Thoreau.
We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down. ~ Kurt Vonnegut.
Not a wasted word. This has been a main point to my literary thinking all my life. ~ Hunter S. Thompson.
Motivational Quotes To Bring Out The Writer In You
There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are. ~ Somerset Maugham.
All stories have to at least try to explain some small portion of the meaning of life. ~ Gene Weingarten.
So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads. ~ Dr. Seuss.
All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know. ~ Ernest Hemingway.
Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else. ~ Gloria Steinem.
The main thing I try to do is write as clearly as I can. I rewrite a good deal to make it clear. ~ E.B. White.
I could write an entertaining novel about rejection slips, but I fear it would be overly long. ~ Louise Brown.
If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster. ~ Isaac Asimov.
If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that. ~ Stephen King.
If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it. ~ Toni Morrison.
I believe myself that a good writer doesn’t really need to be told anything except to keep at it. ~ Chinua Achebe.
Quotes About Writing from Famous Writers
I do not over-intellectualise the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story. ~ Tom Clancy.
No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader. ~ Robert Frost.
Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule. ~ Stephen King.
Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others. ~ Virginia Woolf.
It’s none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think you were born that way. ~ Ernest Hemingway.
A writer never has a vacation. For a writer life consists of either writing or thinking about writing. ~ Eugene Ionesco.
Most writers regard the truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are most economical in its use. ~ Mark Twain.
For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word. ~ Catherine Drinker Bowen.
If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don’t listen to writers talking about writing or themselves. ~ Lillian Hellman.
I don’t wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that. Your mind must know it has got to get down to work. ~ Pearl S. Buck.
Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. ~ Annie Dillard.
Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open. ~ Natalie Goldberg.
Everywhere I go, I’m asked if the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them. ~ Flannery O’Connor.
Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works. ~ Virginia Woolf.
Indeed, learning to write may be part of learning to read. For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading. ~ Eudora Welty.
I’ve found the best way to revise your own work is to pretend that somebody else wrote it and then to rip the living shit out of it. ~ Don Roff.
The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book. ~ Samuel Johnson.
Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don’t see any. ~ Orson Scott.
Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance. ~ James Baldwin.
So these were the 100 Quotes about Writing.
If you like these quotes, then you can also read our other posts on Resilience Quotes and Adversity Quotes and Productivity Quotes and Joy Quotes.
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