The journey of writing is filled with moments of inspiration, challenge, and growth. To celebrate this creative process, we’ve gathered a curated collection of the top 110 writing process quotes from acclaimed authors, thinkers, and wordsmiths. Whether you’re just beginning your writing journey or seeking motivation to push through a block, these quotes offer wisdom and encouragement to keep your words flowing. Dive in and let these insights spark your creativity and passion for writing.
1. “I hate writing, I love having written.” - Dorothy Parker
2. “Mr. Earbrass has rashly been skimming through the early chapters, which he had not looked at for months, and now sees TUH for what it is. Dreadful, dreadful, DREADFUL. He must be mad to go on enduring the unexquisite agony of writing when it all turns out drivel. Mad. Why did n't he become a spy? How does one become one? He will burn the MS. Why is there no fire? Why are n't there the makings of one? How did he get in the unused room on the third floor?” - Edward Gorey
3. “People who think that grammar is just a collection of rules and restrictions are wrong. If you get to like it, grammar reveals the hidden meaning of history, hides disorder and abandonment, links things and brings opposites together. Grammar is a wonderful way of organising the world how you'd like it to be.” - Delphine de Vigan
4. “Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed; an architectural one, where it is constructed; and finally, a textile one, where it is woven.” - Walter Benjamin
5. “The mind I love most must have wild places, a tangled orchard where dark damsons drop in the heavy grass, an overgrown little wood, the chance of a snake or two, a pool that nobody fathomed the depth of, and paths threaded with flowers planted by the mind.” - Katherine Mansfield
6. “Writing became such a process of discovery that I couldn't wait to get to work in the morning: I wanted to know what I was going to say. ~Sharon O'Brien” - Sharon O'Brien
7. “If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.” - Dorothy Parker
8. “Writing like this is a little like milking a cow: the milk is so rich and delicious, and the cow is so glad you did it.” - Anne Lamott
9. “I write not because I want to but because I am destined to.” - Jules Haigler
10. “Being in the mood to write, like being in the mood to make love, is a luxury that isn't necessary in a long-term relationship. Just as the first caress can lead to a change of heart, the first sentence, however tentative and awkward, can lead to a desire to go just a little further.” - Julia Cameron
11. “Stories are the collective wisdom of everyone who has ever lived. Your job as a storyteller is not simply to entertain. Nor is it to be noticed for the way you turn a phrase. You have a very important job--one of the most important. Your job is to let people know that everyone shares their feelings--and that these feelings bind us. Your job is a healing art, and like all healers, you have a responsibility. Let people know they are not alone. You must make people understand that we are all the same.” - Brian McDonald
12. “we write every day, we fight every day, we think and scheme and dream a little dream every day. manuscripts pile up in the kitchen sink, run-on sentences dangle around our necks. we plant purple prose in our gardens and snip the adverbs only to thread them in our hair. we write with no guarantees, no certainties, no promises of what might come and we do it anyway. this is who we are.” - Tahereh Mafi
13. “Nobody reads a book to get to the middle.” - Mickey Spillane
14. “Writing is a struggle against silence.” - Carlos Fuentes
15. “Every word I write is like a drop of my blood. If it's flowed passionately and long, I need time to recover from the emotion spent before I begin a new story. My characters are aspects of my life. I have to respectfully and carefully move between them.” - Red Haircrow
16. “At one time I thought the most important thing was talent. I think now that — the young man or the young woman must possess or teach himself, train himself, in infinite patience, which is to try and to try and to try until it comes right. He must train himself in ruthless intolerance. That is, to throw away anything that is false no matter how much he might love that page or that paragraph. The most important thing is insight, that is ... curiosity to wonder, to mull, and to muse why it is that man does what he does. And if you have that, then I don't think the talent makes much difference, whether you've got that or not.[Press conference, University of Virginia, May 20, 1957]” - William Faulkner
17. “I'd written Smashed not because I was ambitious and not because writing down my feelings was cathartic (it felt more like playing one's own neurosurgeon sans anesthesia). No. I'd made a habit--and eventually a profession--of memoir because I hail from one of those families where shows of emotions are discouraged.” - Koren Zailckas
18. “Writing is the thing that props me up.” - Horton Foote
19. “Sifting through long forgotten stories of my childhood and writing on a daily basis, I became obsessed with following the threads of my memories, one leading to another. I start pulling on a single, seemingly trivial strand, only to discover it is attached to a longer strand; that one in turn is attached to an even bigger one. Sometimes, I find have tugged a whole, hidden tapestry of my past into view, one thread at a time.” - Alice Bag
20. “Well, writing novels is incredibly simple: an author sits down…and writes.Granted, most writers I know are a bit strange.Some, downright weird.But then again, you’d have to be.To spend hundreds and hundreds of hours sitting in front of a computer screen staring at lines of information is pretty tedious. More like a computer programmer. And no matter how cool the Matrix made looking at code seem, computer programmers are even weirder than authors.” - Christopher Hopper
21. “Heavy as such things areAfter the wordslide, the writing begins."From "Word Quake” - Eileen Granfors
22. “Today’s tangents will become tomorrow’s arcs, and unforeseen connections will tie up your loose ends in a way that will make you want to slap your head and holler at your accidental brilliance.” - Chris Baty
23. “A short story I have written long ago would barge into my house in the middle of the night, shake me awake and shout, 'Hey,this is no time for sleeping! You can't forget me, there's still more to write!' Impelled by that voice, I would find myself writing a novel. In this sense, too, my short stories and novels connect inside me in a very natural, organic way.” - Haruki Murakami
24. “If writing didn't require thinking then we'd all be doing it.” - Jeremiah Laabs
25. “I'm writing. The pages are starting to stack up. My morale is improving the more I feel like a writer.” - Neil Gaiman
26. “Menulis cerita pendek dan novel bukanlah sesuatu hal yang dapat aku lakukan dengan mudah dan menyenangkan.” - Erskine Caldwell
27. “Menulis fiksi adalah menuangkan perasaan dan semangat hidup dalam untaian kata-kata di atas kertas-sebuah usaha tanpa akhir untuk mendapatkan makna-makna yang berbeda” - Erskine Caldwell
28. “Collaborating on a film script involves two people sitting in a room separated by the silence of two minds working together.” - Darlene Craviotto
29. “I do not plan my fiction any more than I normally plan woodland walks; I follow the path that seems most promising at any given point, not some itinerary decided before entry.” - John Fowles
30. “Don't worry about what you're writing or whether it's good or even whether it makes sense.” - Lauren Oliver
31. “In the final exam in the Chaucer course we were asked why he used certain verbal devices, certain adjectives, why he had certain characters behave in certain ways. And I wrote, 'I don't think Chaucer had any idea why he did any of these things. That isn't the way people write.'I believe this as strongly now as I did then. Most of what is best in writing isn't done deliberately.” - Madeleine L'Engle
32. “It's all mine, it's all sacred.” - Jamie Weise
33. “The first thing you have to learn when you go into the arts is to learn to cope with rejection. If you can’t, you’re dead” - Warren Adler
34. “Dance above the surface of the world. Let your thoughts lift you into creativity that is not hampered by opinion.” - Red Haircrow
35. “Copies have been dethroned; the economic model built on them is collapsing. In a regime of superabundant free copies, copies are no longer the basis of wealth. Now relationships, links, connections, and sharing are. Value has shifted away from a copy toward the many ways to recall, annotate, personalize, edit, authenticate, display, mark, transfer, and engage a work. Art is a conversation, not a patent office. The citation of sources belongs to the realms of journalism and scholarship, not art. Reality can’t be copyrighted.” - David Shields
36. “Writing starts with living.” - L. L. Barkat
37. “We will need to find people who will provide a safe writing space for us, where criticism comes late and love and delight come early.—from Rumors of Water: Thoughts on Creativity & Writing” - L.L. Barkat
38. “Writing poetry is supernatural. Or, it should be.” - Katerina Stoykova Klemer
39. “There are three secrets to writing a novel. Unfortunately nobody knows what they are.” - W. Somerset Maugham
40. “For most of the process, nothing but faith, fueled by your own stubbornness, will be pulling you along. The work that you've done on the book so far won't be much comfort, because so much of it will be insufferable crap, until the very last moment, when you figure out how to fix it and everything comes together.” - Kristin Cashore
41. “I write to escape. I haven't managed it yet, but I'm working on it” - William Meikle
42. “You have to stop and freeze the moment," he told me I had told her. "You have to make yourself remember by repeating it in your head over and over. You have to write to preserve your sanity.” - Jenny Hubbard
43. “Any magazine-cover hack can splash paint around wildly and call it a nightmare, or a witches sabbath or a portrait of the devil; but only a great painter can make such a thing really scare or ring true. That's because only a real artist knows the anatomy of the terrible, or the physiology of fear.” - H.P. Lovecraft
44. “Writing is the dragon that lives underneath my floorboards. The one I incessantly feed for fear it may turn and devour my ass. Writing is the friend who doesn't return my phone calls; the itch I'm unable to scratch; a dinner invitation from a cannibal; elevator music for a narcoleptic. Writing is the hope of lifting all boats by pissing in the ocean. Writing isn't something that makes me happy like a good cup of coffee. It's just something I do because not writing, as I've found, is so much worse.” - Quentin R. Bufogle
45. “From the beginning, I did not intend to create a typical classic fantasy. I wanted an organic, harmonious world where my story could evolve. If this world needed gnomes, I put them in there. As for drevalyankas, pikshas, bolugs and other totally original creatures, they appeared there somehow by themselves in the course of events, and then just began "to get under the feet of the main heroes"...” - Irina Lopatina
46. “I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day.” - Ernest Hemingway
47. “Don't over edit. Don't second-guess yourself, or your ideas. Just write. Write every day, and keep at it. Don't get discouraged with the rejections. Tape them up on your office wall, to remind you of all the hard work you put in when you finally start getting published! It's all about persistence and passion. And have fun with it. Don't forget to have fun.” - Heather Grace Stewart
48. “On the Writing Process:"When in doubt, take it out.,” - Barbara DaCosta
49. “Also, I do seem attracted to trash, as if the clue--the clue--lies there. I'm always ferreting out elliptical points, odd angles. What I write doesn't make a whole lot of sense. There is fun and religion and psychotic horror strewn about like a bunch of hats. Also, there is a social or sociological drift--rather than toward the hard sciences, the overall impression is childish but interesting.” - Philip K. Dick
50. “I never waited for my Irish Cream coffee to be the right temperature, with a storm happening outside and my fireplace crackling ... I wrote every day, at home, in the office, whether I felt like it or not, I just did it.” - Stephen J. Cannell
51. “So it is that a writer writes many books. In each book, he intended several urgent and vivid points, many of which he sacrificed as the book's form hardened.” - Annie Dillard
52. “When the writing is good, a book becomes a mirror. The reader will see an uncanny familiarity and respond accordingly.” - Jen Knox
53. “If a writer starts worring about what he or she has left out or forgotten, they might not be able to write even a single line.” - Baby Halder
54. “I’m feeling a low regarding writing. I sometimes think I should finish working on my book of stripper poetry that I started, but other times I feel like it’s not worth it. Sometimes I think I should work on my comic book idea, and then other times I want to work on a website, and still other times I think I should be working on this memoir. That’s a lot of thinking about writing without a whole lot of writing going on.” - Sheila Hageman
55. “Your page stands against you and says to you that you are a thief.” - Martial
56. “Maybe that's when bad scripts are written, when you choose the theme first. I consider that I've something to say when I've thought of a person, a moment, a single beat of the heart, that I think is true and interesting, and therefore should be seen.” - Russell T. Davies
57. “Sometimes I scare myself at how easily I slip inside my mind and live vicariously through these characters.” - Teresa Mummert
58. “« L'écrit ça arrive comme le vent, c'est nu, c'est de l'encre, c'est l'écrit, et ça passe comme rien d'autre ne passe dans la vie, rien de plus, sauf elle, la vie. »” - Marguerite Duras
59. “I like what I do. Some writers have said in print that they hated writing and it was just a chore and a burden. I certainly don't feel that way about it. Sometimes it's difficult. You know, you always have this image of the perfect thing which you can never achieve, but which you never stop trying to achieve. But I think ... that's your signpost and your guide. You'll never get there, but without it you won't get anywhere.[Interview with Oprah Winfrey, June 5, 2007]” - Cormac McCarthy
60. “Susan Griffin describes it as a time when "there is no intrinsic authority to my words." "I...clean off my desk. I make telephone calls. I know I am avoiding the typewriter. I know that in my mind, where there might be words, there is simply a blankness. I may try to write and then my words bore me." But when the time is right, the waiting will have been worth it. "Because each time I write, each time the authentic words break through, I am changed. The older order that I was collapses and dies. I lose control. I do not know exactly what words will appear on the page. I follow language. I follow the sound of the words, and I am surprised and transformed by what I record." Excerpt from "Thoughts on Writing: A Diary," in The Writer on her Work.” - Judith Barrington
61. “You can always edit a bad page. You can't edit a blank page.” - Jodi Picoult
62. “...if you always move in certainty, your writing will be flat - creativity is a rugged terrain...” - John Geddes
63. “...it's not the medium that's the message - it's consciousness - the wonder of being able to wonder ...” - John Geddes
64. “...I make no apology about stirring the depths - every human longs to swim under water and see what lurks beneath ...” - John Geddes
65. “...when you're a writer, you become deeper and more uniquely distinct, the more you go inside yourself...” - John Geddes
66. “...I know Shakespeare said art is holding up a mirror to nature- but you're actually bending and refracting it through your interior dialogue ...” - John Geddes
67. “...language always occurs in a context - you can speak Elizabethan words, but to speak the language you have to put on the mindset...” - John Geddes
68. “... my early writing was a silent fury - at what or whom, I had no idea - but I shut it in until it burned my bones and now, I've let it out...” - John Geddes
69. “...consider yourself a functional character in someone else's novel - a background character - a person on the street - that's the perspective ...” - John Geddes
70. “Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn’t work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they’re done they’re done.” - Kurt Vonnegut
71. “Steven wrote to me today, saying, 'Don't you feel like sticking your head out of the window and yelling, "I DON'T KNOW WHAT I'M DOING!!!"' Yes, absolutely. Solidarity. Fear is always the same. Different worries with different scripts, but the same baseline fear.” - Russell T. Davies
72. “The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.” - Terry Pratchett
73. “I prefer the pen. There is something elemental about the glide and flow of nib and ink on paper.” - James Robertson
74. “I can't wait to get back to writing today so I can see what happens next Kim Cormack” - Kim Cormack
75. “All good writers write [terrible first drafts.] This is how they end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts. . . I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her. (Although when I mentioned this to my priest friend Tom, he said you can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.” - Anne Lamott
76. “A fiction writer weaves a fabric of lies in hopes of revealing deeper human truths.” - Wally Lamb
77. “(Dorothy) Dunnett is the master of the invisible, particularly in her later books. Where is this tension coming from? Why is this scene so agonizing? Why is this scene so emotional? Tension and emotion pervade the books, sometimes almost unbearably, yet when you look at the writing, at the actual words, there's nothing to show that the scene is emotional at all. I think it is because Dunnett layers her novels, meaning that each event is informed by what has come before (and what came before that, and what came before that) but Dunnett doesn't signpost in the text that this is happening, leaving it to the reader to bring the relevant information to the table” - S.U. Pacat
78. “Most—but not all—of the writers I knew then were young men who cherished their independence, were unconcerned about job security, and were serious about their writing. They didn’t want to be anyone’s employee if it interfered with their writing. They were halfway or all the way outside the mainstream and were often not interested in becoming part of the burgeoning corporate society. They had more freedom than your average American.” - Sterling Lord
79. “Bastam poucas palavras para escrever uma história e apenas uma pessoa para a ler.” - Fernando Guerreiro
80. “Isn't the writing of good prose an emotional excitement?""Yes, of course it is. At least, when you get the thing dead right and know it's dead right, there's no excitement like it. It's marvelous. It makes you feel like God on the Seventh Day – for a bit, anyhow.” - Dorothy Sayers
81. “Then I started to think in Lipp’s about when I had first been able to write a story about losing everything. It was up in Cortina d’Ampezzo when I had come back to join Hadley there after the spring skiing which I had to interrupt to go on assignment to Rhineland and the Ruhr. It was a very simple story called ‘Out of Season’ and I had omitted the real end of it which was that the old man hanged himself. This was omitted on my new theory that you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.” - Ernest Hemingway
82. “Confession: I don't want to be one of my characters. I'm mean to them sometimes. Really mean.” - Michelle M. Pillow
83. “People should know better than to be an ass in front of writers. We immortalize things. Lots of things. And we take liberties with character descriptions.” - Michelle M. Pillow
84. “...kapag binisita ka ng idea, gana o inspirasyon, kailangan mong itigil LAHAT ng ginagawa mo para lang di masayang ang pagkakataon. Walang “sandali lang” o “teka muna”. Dahil pag lumagpas ang maikling panahong yon, kahit mag-umpog ka ng ulo sa pader mahihirapan ka nang maghabol.” - Bob Ong
85. “The process of self-invention is never-ending; writer, like children, are always growing into their gifts. (Susan Larson in a "Times-Picayune" book review.” - Susan Larson
86. “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
87. “I believe that art is the highest expression of the human spirit. ~ I believe that we yearn to transcend the merely finite and ephemeral; to participate in something mysterious and communal called “culture” – and that this yearning is as strong in our species as the yearning to reproduce the species. ~ Through the local or regional, through our individual voices, we work to create art that will speak to others who know nothing of us. In our very obliqueness to one another, an unexpected intimacy is born.” - Joyce Carol Oates
88. “I’ve always said, ‘I have nothing to say, only to add.’ And it’s with each addition that the writing gets done. The first draft of anything is really just a track.” - Gore Vidal
89. “Constant work, constant writing and constant revision. The real writer learns nothing from life. He is more like an oyster or a sponge. What he takes in he takes in normally the way any person takes in experience. But it is what is done with it in his mind, if he is a real writer, that makes his art.” - Gore Vidal
90. “It's a bizarre but wonderful feeling, to arrive dead center of a target you didn't even know you were aiming for.” - Lois McMaster Bujold
91. “Don’t start right off writing the ‘Great American Novel’, that's too much pressure and you'll get disappointed; start with porn, it’s fun and a good way to get your feet wet.” - scavola
92. “A short story is a sprint, a novel is a marathon. Sprinters have seconds to get from here to there and then they are finished. Marathoners have to carefully pace themselves so that they don't run out of energy (or in the case of the novelist-- ideas) because they have so far to run. To mix the metaphor, writing a short story is like having a short intense affair, whereas writing a novel is like a long rich marriage.” - Jonathan Carroll
93. “Writingis therapeutic. It helps you cope with issues that seem gargantuan at the time.The process of expressing yourself about a problem, editing your thoughts, andwriting some more can help you control issues that you face.” - Guy Kawasaki
94. “I have a hardcore attitude: a “self-published, ghost-written book” is wrong because the concept behind self publishing is that you have knowledge or emotions that you want to express. Whenpeople read a book—particularly a self-published one—they have the right to expect that it’s the person’s writing, not cleaned-up dictation or slapping a name on a book that someone else wrote.” - Guy Kawasaki
95. “For writers, handing a manuscript off to an editor is like walking into a parole hearing. You’ve done the time but wonder if it’s going to satisfy the judge.” - Shandy L. Kurth
96. “Raise the bar. Don't duck under it.” - Peter James West
97. “I had found by experience that putting things down on paper helped to clear the mind in precisely the same way, as Mrs. Mullet had taught me, that an eggshell clarifies the consommé or the coffee, which, of course, is a simple matter of chemistry. The albumin contained in the eggshell has the property of collecting and binding the rubbish that floats in the dark liquid, which can then be removed and discarded in a single reeking clot: a perfect description of the writing process.” - Alan Bradley
98. “I was in the book, and the book was in my head, and as long as I stayed inside my head, I could go on writing the book. It was like living in a padded cell, but of all the lives I could have lived at that moment, it was the only one that made sense to me. I wasn't capable of being in the world, and I knew that if I tried to go back into it before I was ready, I would be crushed.” - Paul Auster
99. “I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they're going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there's going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don't know how many branches it's going to have, they find out as it grows. And I'm much more a gardener than an architect.” - George R.R. Martin
100. “Writers often torture themselves trying to get the words right. Sometimes you must lower your expectations and just finish it.” - Don Roff
101. “She would have thought that working and living in continuous happiness, harmony, and security day after day would lead to mental lethargy, that her writing would suffer from too much happiness, that she needed a balanced life with down days and miseries to keep the sharp edge on her work. But the idea that an artist needed to suffer to do her best work was a conceit of the young and inexperienced. The happier she grew, the better she wrote.” - Dean Koontz
102. “To all the talented young men who wander about feeling that there is nothing in the world for them to do, I should say: 'Give up trying to write, and, instead, try not to write. Go out into the world; become a pirate, a king in Borneo, a labourer in Soviet Russia; give yourself an existence in which the satisfaction of elementary physical needs will occupy almost all your energies.' I do not recommend this course of action to everyone, but only to those who suffer from the disease which Mr Krutch diagnoses. I believe that, after some years of such an existence, the ex-intellectual will fin that in spite of is efforts he can no longer refrain from writing, and when this time comes his writing will not seem to him futile.” - Bertrand Russell
103. “Research" is a wonderful word for writers. It serves as excuse for EVERYTHING” - Rayne Hall
104. “You pull a book from the shelf and there was an invention... Almost like cooking, I thought sleepily. Instead of heat transforming the ingredients, there's pure invention, the spark, the hidden element. What resulted was more than the sum of parts... At one level it was obvious enough how these separarte parts were tipped in and deployed. The mystery was in how they were blended into somthing cohesive and plausible, how the ingredients were cooked into something so delicious. As my thought scattered and I drifted toward the borders of oblivion, I thought I almost understood how it was done.” - Ian McEwan
105. “Starting your book is only the first five miles of a twenty-six-mile marathon that’s one-third of a triathlon (authoring, publishing, and entrepreneuring).” - Guy Kawasaki
106. “Write the ending first and then you'll know before the opening sentence that it's going to be a good book.” - Richelle E. Goodrich
107. “He who could write so easily, who could spend a thousand words down along his plunging fingers on the green-rubber keyboard of his machine, had stumbled like a first-grader over this single paragraph. A dozen times he had begun it and written into it a naked desperation; a dozen times he had begun it and written into it the frosted mathematics of logic. Finally he'd written out quickly the sentences that kept cropping up in all the versions. Those must be, to whatever censor there was in him, the most acceptable ones. He sealed it without rereading it and went out to mail it. An hour later he despised himself for having sent it.” - Laura Z. Hobson
108. “How to preside over your own internal disorder? Finding the "I" that can represent the pack of you is the first challenge of the memoirist.” - Tracy Kidder
109. “Indentations on the page, words, my friends, and I will share them with you.” - Victoria Sawyer
110. “I have often believed the pen to be a needle, and ink to be a thread. Each story is an intricately woven tapestry and with each word I invariably sew a piece of myself into the page.” - Shaun Hick
