104 Inspiring Writing Quotes

In the journey of writing, few things are as powerful as the words of those who have tread this path before us. Whether you're an aspiring author grappling with the blank page, a seasoned writer searching for a spark of creativity, or simply an admirer of the craft looking to bask in the wisdom of literary greats, inspiration can often be found in the insights and reflections of others. This curated collection of the top 104 inspiring writing quotes promises to ignite your imagination, fuel your passion, and remind you why the pen is indeed mightier than the sword. Dive in and let these timeless words guide you through the beautiful, ever-evolving world of writing.

1. “History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.” - Winston S. Churchill

2. “There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.” - Charles Dickens

3. “The only thing worth writing about is people. People. Human beings. Men and women whose individuality must be created, line by line, insight by insight. If you do not do it, the story is a failure. [...] There is no nobler chore in the universe than holding up the mirror of reality and turning it slightly, so we have a new and different perception of the commonplace, the everyday, the 'normal', the obvious. People are reflected in the glass. The fantasy situation into which you thrust them is the mirror itself. And what we are shown should illuminate and alter our perception of the world around us. Failing that, you have failed totally.” - Harlan Ellison

4. “It is dark. You cannot see. Only the hint of stars out the broken window. And a voice as old as the Snake from the Garden whispers, 'I will hold your hand.” - John Wick

5. “You can fix anything but a blank page.” - Nora Roberts

6. “No iron can stab the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place.” - Isaac Babel

7. “That kind of thinking [that writers must alleviate their guilt for leading a creative life] is based on the idea that the creative life is somehow self-indulgent. Artists and writers have to understand and live the truth that what we are doing is nourishing the world. William Carlos Williams said, "It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there." You can't eat a book, right, but books have saved my life more often than sandwiches. And they've saved your life... But we don't say, oh, Maya Angelou should have silenced herself because other people have other destinies. It's interesting, because artists are always encouraged to feel guilty about their work. Why? Why don't we ask predatory bankers how they alleviate their guilt? ” - Ariel Gore

8. “Membaca dan menulis membuatmu menjadi.” - Helvy Tiana Rosa

9. “I don't teach writing. I teach patience. Toughness. Stubbornness. The willingness to fail. I teach the life. The odd thing is most of the things that stop an inexperienced writer are so far from the truth as to be nearly beside the point. When you feel glosbal doubt about your talent, that is your talent. People who have no talent don't have any doubt.” - Richard Bausch

10. “In the glad old days, before the rise of modern morbidities...it used to be thought a disadvantage to be misunderstood.” - G.K. Chesterton

11. “I confess to wincing every so often at a poorly chosen word, a mangled sentence, an expression of emotion that seems indulgent or overly practiced. I have the urge to cut the book by fifty pages or so, possessed as I am with a keener appreciation for brevity.” - Barack Obama

12. “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” - Virginia Woolf

13. “Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I'm always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system.” - Flannery O'Connor

14. “Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs."[Time Magazine, October 31, 1977]” - John Osborne

15. “The beginning and the end are never really the journey of discovery for me. It is the middle that remains a puzzle until well into the writing. That's how life is most of the time, isn't it? You know where you are and where you hope to wind up. It's the getting there that's challenging.” - Anna Quindlen

16. “Get black on white.” - Guy de Maupassant

17. “I can't imagine a romance novel published today where the hero rapes the heroine and she falls in love with him.” - Julia Quinn

18. “The novel cannot submit to authority.” - Julian Gough

19. “The thing all writers do best is find ways to avoid writing.” - Alan Dean Foster

20. “Don't write so that you can be understood, write so that you can't be misunderstood.” - William Howard Taft

21. “If a writer writes poems and short stories and novels, but nobody ever reads them, is she really a writer?” - Jennifer Weiner

22. “Writing:It starts at the keyboard,and it ends at the far corners of the universe. --Paako” - Vincent Lowry

23. “Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It's a way of understanding it.” - Lloyd Alexander

24. “a good writer should draw the reader in by starting in the middle of the story with a hook, then go back and fill in what happened before the hook. Once you have the reader hooked, you can write whatever you want as you slowly reel them in.” - Roland Smith

25. “My Muse sits forlornShe wishes she had not been bornShe sits in the coldNo word she says is ever told.” - Stevie Smith

26. “When I write I am trying to express my way of being in the world. This is primarily a process of elimination: once you have removed all the dead language, the second-hand dogma, the truths that are not your own but other people's, the mottos, the slogans, the out-and-out lies of your nation, the myths of your historical moment - once you have removed all that warps experience into a shape you do not recognise and do not believe in - what you are left with is something approximating the truth of your own conception.” - zadie smith

27. “To fly/steal is woman’s gesture, to steal into language to make it fly.” - Hélène Cixous

28. “All my life and all my experience, the events that have befallen me, the people I have known, all my memories, dreams, fantasies, everything I have ever read, all of that has been chucked onto the compost heap, where over time it has rotted down to a dark, rich, organic mulch. The process of cellular breakdown makes it unrecognizable. Other people call it the imagination. I think of it as a compost heap. Every so often I take an idea, plant it in the compost, and wait. It feeds on the black stuff that used to be a life, takes its energy for its own. It germinates,. Takes root. Produces shoots. And so on and so forth, until one fine day I have a story, or a novel....Readers are fools. They believe all writing is autobiographical. And so it is, but not in the way they think. The writer's life needs time to rot away before it can be used to nourish a work of fiction. It must be allowed to decay.” - Diane Setterfield

29. “Think of Shakespeare and Melville and you think of thunder, lightning, wind. They all knew the joy of creating in large or small forms, on unlimited or restricted canvases. These are the children of the gods.” - Ray Bradbury

30. “In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. The angles of vision are skewed. When a booby trap explodes, you close your eyes and duck and float outside yourself. .. The pictures get jumbled, you tend to miss a lot. And then afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed.” - Tim O'Brien

31. “Life is painful and disappointing. It is useless, therefore, to write new realistic novels. We generally know where we stand in relation to reality and don’t care to know any more.” - Michel Houellebecq

32. “Good ideas stay with you until you eventually write the story.” - Brian Keene

33. “Do you think that Hemingway knew he was a writer at twenty years old? No, he did not. Or Fitzgerald, or Wolfe. This is a difficult concept to grasp. Hemingway didn't know he was Ernest Hemingway when he was a young man. Faulkner didn't know he was William Faulkner. But they had to take the first step. They had to call themselves writers. That is the first revolutionary act a writer has to make. It takes courage. But it's necessary” - Pat Conroy

34. “Writing practice brings us back to the uniqueness of our own minds and an acceptance of it. We all have wild dreams, fantasies, and ordinary thoughts. Let us to feel the texture of them and not be afraid of them.Writing is still the wildest thing I know.” - Natalie Goldberg

35. “That economics has a considerable conceptual apparatus with an appropriate terminology can not be a serious ground for complaint. Economic phenomena, ideas, instruments of analysis exist. They require names. Education in economics is, in considerable measure, an introduction to this terminology and to the ideas that it denotes. Anyone who has difficulties with the ideas should complete his education or, following an exceedingly well-beaten path, leave the subject alone. It is sometimes said that the economist has a special obligation to make himself understood because his subject is of such great and popular importance. By this rule the nuclear physicist would have to speak in monosyllables.” - John Kenneth Galbraith

36. “A novel is no different than graffiti in a bathroom stall, it's just more pretentious.” - Christy Leigh Stewart

37. “In fact, one could argue that the skill of the fiction writer boils down to the ability to exploit intensity.” - James Scott Bell

38. “Women want love to be a novel. Men, a short story.” - Daphne du Maurier

39. “A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor.” - Ring Lardner

40. “A writing may be lost; a lie may be written; but what the eye has seen is truth and remains in the mind!” - Joseph Conrad

41. “Do not put statements in the negative form.And don't start sentences with a conjunction.If you reread your work, you will find on rereading that agreat deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing.Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.Unqualified superlatives are the worst of all.De-accession euphemisms.If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.Last, but not least, avoid cliches like the plague.” - William Safire

42. “Her maktul katilinde yaşamaya devam eder.” - Elif Şafak

43. “When you read a manuscript that has been damaged by water, fire, light or just the passing of the years, your eye needs to study not just the shape of the letters but other marks of production. The speed of the pen. The pressure of the hand on the page. Breaks and releases in the flow. You must relax. Think of nothing. Until you wake into a dream where you are at once a pen flying of vellum and the vellum itself with the touch of ink tickling your surface. Then you can read it. The intention of the writer, his thoughts, his hesitations, his longings and his meaning. You can read as clearly as if you were the very candlelight illuminating the page as the pen speeds over it.” - Diane Setterfield

44. “All plots are cliche.” - Jincy Willett

45. “A novelist is a person who lives in other people's skins.” - E.L. Doctorow

46. “(N)ot writing was hard work, almost as hard as writing.” - Jincy Willett

47. “Forget it. Never explain; never apologize. You can either write posthumously or you can't.” - Christopher Hitchens

48. “I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.” - Kurt Vonnegut

49. “The world doesn't fully make sense until the writer has secured his version of it on the page. And the act of writing is strangely more lifelike than life.” - Betsy Lerner

50. “If you want to see the consequences of ideas, write a story. If you want to see the consequences of belief, write a story in which somebody is acting on the ideas or beliefs that she has. ” - Charles Baxter

51. “I only knew what was in my mind, and I wished to express it clearly” - Ulysses S. Grant

52. “If there's a will, there's a way!I feel larger than LIFE--and look up to the stars who shine down on me and have become my own personal cheerleaders....as my fingers tap on my computer late into the night..” - Donna Scrima-Black

53. “i write, because not breathing is not an option.” - Monice Mitchell Simms

54. “History is gossip that's been legitimized, and that's really the case when you get into some of the Roman historians. Wow! They'd be right at home on reality tv.” - Esther Friesner

55. “You see, in my view 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."[Becoming a Writer/ The List, O Magazine, November 2009]” - Junot Diaz

56. “Have more than one idea on the go at any one time. If it's a choice between writing a book and doing nothing I will always choose the latter. It's only if I have an idea for two books that I choose one rather than the other. I ­always have to feel that I'm bunking off from something.” - Geoff Dyer

57. “This is the other secret that real artists know and wannabe writers don’t. When we sit down each day and do our work, power concentrates around us. The Muse takes note of our dedication. She approves. We have earned favor in her sight. When we sit down and work, we become like a magnetized rod that attracts iron filings. Ideas come. Insights accrete.” - Steven Pressfield

58. “I mean, what can you say about how you write your books? What I mean is, first you've got to think of something, and then when you've thought of it you've got to force yourself to sit down and write it. That's all." ~ Mrs. Oliver” - Agatha Christie

59. “Should he make a note? He felt for the smooth shape of his pen in his pocket. 'Theme for a novel: The contrary pull ... " No. If this notion were real, he needn't make a note. A notion on which a note had to be made would be stillborn anyway, his notebook was a parish register of such, born and dead on the same page. Let it live if it can. ("Novelty")” - John Crowley

60. “We live and breathe words. .... It was books that made me feel that perhaps I was not completely alone. They could be honest with me, and I with them. Reading your words, what you wrote, how you were lonely sometimes and afraid, but always brave; the way you saw the world, its colors and textures and sounds, I felt--I felt the way you thought, hoped, felt, dreamt. I felt I was dreaming and thinking and feeling with you. I dreamed what you dreamed, wanted what you wanted--and then I realized that truly I just wanted you.” - Cassandra Clare

61. “Do you prefer fermented or distilled?This is a trick question. It doesn’t matter how much you like wine, because wine is social and writing is anti-social. This is a writer’s interview, writing is a lonely job, and spirits are the lubricant of the lonely. You might say all drinking is supposed to be social but there’s a difference, at one in the morning while you’re hunched over your computer, between opening up a bottle of Chardonnay and pouring two-fingers of bourbon into a tumbler. A gin martini, of course, splits the difference nicely, keeping you from feeling like a deadline reporter with a smoldering cigarette while still reminding you that your job is to be interesting for a living. Anyone who suggests you can make a martini with vodka, by the way, is probably in need of electroconvulsive therapy.” - Stuart Connelly

62. “People think, Hey, I love kids, I want to write children’s books. But they think children are happy. That’s their first mistake. [Messinger, Jonathan. "Guilt for dinner: The Mo Willems interview." Hipsqueak. 5 May 2011. Web. 18 November 2011.]” - Mo Willems

63. “Learn to write by doing it. Read widely and wisely. Increase your word power. Find your own individual voice though practicing constantly. Go through the world with your eyes and ears open and learn to express that experience in words.” - P.D. James

64. “One should never use exclamation points in writing. It is like laughing at your own joke.” - Mark Twain

65. “Revenge is a dish best served published!” - Lisa Kovanda

66. “Content is King. Promotion is Queen” - Bob Mayer

67. “Language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought; words will tell you things you never thought or felt before.” - W.H. Auden

68. “As a fantasist, I well understand the power of escapism, particularly as relates to romance. But when so many stories aimed at the same audience all trumpet the same message – And Lo! There shall be Two Hot Boys, one of them your Heart’s Intended, the other a vain Pretender who is also hot and with whom you shall have guilty makeouts before settling down with your One True Love – I am inclined to stop viewing the situation as benign and start wondering why, for instance, the heroines in these stories are only ever given a powerful, magical destiny of great importance to the entire world so long as fulfilling it requires male protection, guidance and companionship, and which comes to an end just as soon as they settle their inevitable differences with said swain and start kissing.I mean to invoke is something of the danger of mob rule, only applied to narrative and culture. Viz: that the comparative harmlessness of individuals does not prevent them from causing harm en masse. Take any one story with the structure mentioned above, and by itself, there’s no problem. But past a certain point, the numbers begin to tell – and that poses a tricky question. In the case of actual mobs, you’ll frequently find a ringleader, or at least a core set of agitators: belligerent louts who stir up feeling well beyond their ability to contain it. In the case of novels, however, things aren’t so clear cut. Authors tell the stories they want to tell, and even if a number of them choose to write a certain kind of narrative either in isolation or inspired by their fellows, holding any one of them accountable for the total outcome would be like trying to blame an avalanche on a single snowflake. Certainly, we may point at those with the greatest (arguable) influence or expostulate about creative domino effects, but as with the drop that breaks the levee, it is impossible to try and isolate the point at which a cluster of stories became a culture of stories – or, for that matter, to hold one particular narrative accountable for the whole.” - Foz Meadows

69. “A great many people have come up to me and asked how I manage to get so much work done and still keep looking so dissipated.” - Robert Benchley

70. “Story is honorable and trustworthy; plot is shifty, and best kept under house arrest.” - Stephen King

71. “Dip your hands into life, scoop up memories, dreams, questions and ideas and weave them into stories.” - Naomi Kinsman

72. “Writing is beautiful, like putting on a gold suit and going to sleep in it.” - Mark Leidner

73. “It is easier to write a book with footnotes than the same book written so that children can understand it.” - Fulton J. Sheen

74. “The historian records, but the novelist creates.” - E.M. Forster

75. “Write until your fingers break. It may be the cure for everything.” - Kelly O'Connor McNees (Author)

76. “The vocation of each writer is to describe the world as he or she sees it; anything more than that is advertising.” - Hanif Kureishi

77. “Writing in a diary is a really strange experience for someone like me. Not only because I’ve never written anything before, but also because it seems to me that later on neither I nor anyone else will be interested in the musings of a thirteen-year old schoolgirl. Oh well, it doesn’t matter. I feel like writing, and I have an even greater need to get all kinds of things off my chest.” - Anne Frank

78. “What’s writing anyway, but us ghosts in here singing?” - Michael Stutz

79. “If you want help in starting to write memoirs, you don't want to fall into the clutches of a famous writer who has been hired to teach at a writing workshop solely because of his name's ability to attract students, rather than because of any teaching skill. You should not have to grapple with someone who secretly thinks you should be writing about his life rather than your own.” - Judith Barrington

80. “Statements make sense for somebody who needs advice. I’m not giving advice. I don’t instruct. At my best, I delight. That’s my job.” - Ron Koertge

81. “I believe that half the trouble in the world comes from people asking 'What have I achieved?' rather than 'What have I enjoyed?' I've been writing about a subject I love as long as I can remember--horses and the people associated with them, anyplace, anywhere, anytime. I couldn't be happier knowing that young people are reading my books. But even more important to me is that I've enjoyed so much the writing of them.” - Walter Farley

82. “Fiction and non-fiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons I do not fully understand, fiction dances out of me. Non-fiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning.” - Arundhati Roy

83. “Apparently the law of Inertia affects writing too.” - A.A. Cheshire

84. “What people dont know about you people create. Imagination is a part of being human. They fill in the unknowns with assumptions and not facts. Every man and woman is a mystery unrevealed.” - R.M. Engelhardt

85. “Your current circumstances are part of your redemption story He is writing.” - Evinda Lepins

86. “I read not so long ago about the construction of a large telescope in Chile's Atacama Desert, where rainfall can average a millimetre a year and the air is fifty times as dry as the air in Death Valley. Needless to say, skies over the Atacama are pristine. The pilgrim astronomer ventures to the earth’s ravaged reaches in order to peer more keenly at other worlds, and I suppose the novelist is up to something similar.” - Brad Leithauser

87. “It's my attempt to remain invisible, not distract the reader from the story with obvious writing.” - Elmore Leonard

88. “Literature might be called the art of story, and story might in turn be called a universal language, for every culture we know of has a tradition of storytelling. No doubt stories have touched your life, too, from bedtime stories you may have heard as a child to news stories you see on TV or read in a newspaper. We might even say that a major goal of living is to created the story of our own lives, a story we hope to take pleasure and pride in telling.” - Andrea A. Lunsford

89. “Coming up with ideas is the easiest thing on earth. Putting them down is the hardest.” - Rod Serling

90. “Sound gives life to our words just as well as the images they conjure up and the sound is there, whether or not we read them aloud.” - A.A. Patawaran

91. “I wish life were a fiction novel. Then everyone would have to do what I say.” - Michelle M. Pillow

92. “The artist and the mother are vehicles, not originators. They don't create the new life, they only bear it. This is why birth is such a humbling experience. The new mom weeps in awe at the little miracle in her arms. She knows it came out of her but not from her, through her but not of her.” - Steven Pressfield

93. “I tell my students that when you write, you should pretend you’re writing the best letter you ever wrote to the smartest friend you have. That way, you’ll never dumb things down. You won’t have to explain things that don’t need explaining. You’ll assume an intimacy and a natural shorthand, which is good because readers are smart and don’t wish to be condescended to. I think about the reader. I care about the reader. Not “audience.” Not “readership.” Just the reader.” - Jeffrey Eugenides

94. “Some writers, notably Anton Chekov, argue that all characters must be admirable, because once we've looked at anyone deeply enough and understood their motivation we must identify with them rather than judge them.” - Scarlett Thomas

95. “I try to write a certain amount each day, five days a week. A rule sometimes broken is better than no rule.” - Herman Wouk

96. “One of my favourite things to do when I write is to bring a sense of wonder to a normal everyday setting... Yes, there are magical elements, but there are also very down-to-earth elements and often what shines through isn’t the magic, but the lanterns that the characters light against the dark... If you substitute the words “fairy tale” or “myth” for “fantasy,” the reason I use these elements in my own work is that they create resonances that illuminate solutions to the real world struggle without the need for an authorial voice to point them out. Magic never solves the problems–we have to do that on our own–but in fiction it allows the dialogue to have a much more organic approach than the talking heads one can encounter in fiction that doesn’t utilize the same tools.[from the interview Year’s Best 2012: Charles de Lint on “A Tangle of Green Men”]” - Charles de Lint

97. “And lucky indeed is the writer who has grown up in Ireland, for the English spoken there is so amusing and musical. (“How to Write with Style”. Essay, 1985)” - Kurt Vonnegut

98. “Writing is a deeply spiritual act that can have a profound effect upon the practitioner.” - Phyllis Theroux

99. “There were times, in the beginning, when I used my journal as a wailing wall, but I learned not to immortalize the darkness. Rereading it was counterproductive. What I needed was a place in which to collect the light.” - Phyllis Theroux

100. “My writing style has changed dramatically over the years, growing increasingly clean and exact. I like to think that I'm still improving -- that each book I write is a new personal best.” - Barbara Delinsky

101. “Words have the greatest power to inflict everlasting pain. Words have the greatest power to heal the soul.” - Aneta Cruz

102. “I have closed my study door on the world and shut myself away with people of my imagination. For nearly sixty years I have eavesdropped with impunity on the lives of people who do not exist. I have peeped shamelessly into hearts and bathroom closets. I have leaned over shoulders to follow the movements of quills as they write love letters, wills and confessions. I have watched as lovers love, murderers murder and childern play their make-believe. Prisons and brothels have opened their doors to me; galleons and camel trains have transported me across sea and sand; centuries and continents have fallen away at my bidding. I have spied upon the misdeeds of the mighty and witnessed the nobility of the meek. I have bent so low over sleepers in their beds that they might have felt my breath on their faces. I have seen their dreams.” - Diane Setterfield

103. “You’ll learn that the key to a great book is editing — grinding, buffing, and polishing — not writing.” - Guy Kawasaki

104. “I spent years in a graduate literature program learning what makes great writing, and the only conclusion we came to was that the future of graduate literature programs was safe because nobody is ever going to agree on what makes great writing.” - Brandon Sanderson