111 Inspiring Author Quotes

In the world of literature, words possess an extraordinary power to inspire, evoke change, and offer deep insights into the human experience. Every sentence penned by a masterful author is a window into their unique perspective, offering timeless wisdom and profound reflections. As readers, we become seekers of this wisdom, looking to these crafted words for guidance, motivation, and enlightenment. In this blog post, we bring you a specially curated collection of the top 111 inspiring quotes from renowned authors across different genres and eras. Whether you're in need of a creative spark or a moment of introspection, these quotes promise to resonate deeply, reminding us of the enduring magic and transformative power of the written word.

1. “The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.” - Vladimir Nabokov

2. “The real novelist, the perfectly simple human being, could go on, indefinitely imaging. ” - Virginia Woolf

3. “There is something fascinatingly awkward about an author photo. I'm drawn to those glossy shots in the back of books, mostly because the subjects never look happy to be there.” - Pamela Ribon

4. “I used to always read with a pen in my hand, as if the author and I were in a conversation. ” - Tara Bray Smith

5. “Give a poet a pen” - A. Jarrell Hayes

6. “It is no worse, because I write of it. It would be no better, if I stopped my most unwilling hand. Nothing can undo it; nothing can make it otherwise than as it was. ” - Charles Dickens

7. “When male authors write love stories, the heroine tends to end up dead.” - Susan Elizabeth Phillips

8. “Humanity was a passing notion to him; something he liked to try on for size and model in the dressing room, but never actually felt compelled to buy.” - Jane Bled

9. “We have all been empowered by the web: everyone with a keyboard can now effectively broadcast to a national audience. In a sense, it puts each of us on the same footing as the major media conglomerates, except for AOL, who now apparently own all our thoughts and teeth.” - John Hodgman

10. “Every well-written book is a light for me. When you write, you use other writers and their books as guides in the wilderness. ” - kate dicamillo

11. “The author who benefits you most is not the one who tells you something you did not know before, but the one who gives expression to the truth that has been dumbly struggling in you for utterance.” - Oswald Chambers

12. “Pregressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensity social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation” - Angela Davis

13. “But writers experience the world and themselves in a unique way. We look for meaning. We see it even when we are not paying attention, which is seldom because, as writers, paying attention is what we do. We are scribes to the ticking of the days, and we have a job to do. We are not at peace unless we are doing it.” - Larry Brooks

14. “This was what I came to found. The conquest of loneliness was the missing link that was one day going to make a decent novelist out of me. If you are out here and cannot close off the loves and hates of all that back there in the real world the memories will overtake you and swamp you and wilt your tenacity. Tenacity stamina... close off to everything and everyone but your writing. That s the bloody price. I don t know maybe it's some kind of ultimate selfishness. Maybe it's part of the killer instinct. Unless you can stash away and bury thoughts of your greatest love you cannot sustain the kind of concentration that breaks most men trying to write a book over a three or four year period.” - Leon Uris

15. “You can't become a star just by watching one on TV. Dream big and go for your goals!” - Koltn Burbank

16. “To be a writer is to embrace rejection as a way of life.” - Dana Stabenow

17. “Life's adventures make great reading!” - Denise Robbins

18. “If you wait to live you will never succeed. Living begins today and it begins within you.” - Asa Don Brown

19. “AuthorZoom- You do the writing, let us do the rest.” - Christopher Seufert

20. “Remain humble in your journey as an author and your audience will embrace you. Remain grateful for every publicity opportunity that comes your way, and the media will embrace you.” - Linda F. Radke

21. “Write what you know best. If you can't survive a cross-examination from a lawyer on the subject, you won't survive an interview with a journalist or anchorperson." Linda Radke, President of Five Star Publications.” - Linda F. Radke

22. “Even the most beautifully written, perfectly edited and well-designed books will fail if people aren't made aware of them!" ––Linda Radke, President of Five Star Publications, on the importance of public relations and marketing.” - Linda F. Radke

23. “May my heart be kind, my mind fierce, and my spirit brave.” - Kate Forsyth

24. “I'll write'em if you'll read'em” - Robert Lee Thompson

25. “Being a writer is a good, good thing.” - Shannon Hale

26. “The only happy author in this world is he who is below the care of reputation.” - Washington Irving

27. “New York City, city of exaggerations. Place of Herculean ascensions and perilous falls.” - Kurt Wenzel

28. “~Reading a book is like looking through a window!” - Zetta Hupf

29. “I crept in to find my father with pennies on his eyes - and looking closer I saw they were made of foil-covered chocolate. Of course I stole and ate them. Magical guilt? Tell me about it” - steve aylett

30. “Let your words be your voice. And let your voice be heard within the hearts of others.” - Anasia Nicole Hixon

31. “The difference is slight, to the influence of an author, whether he is read by five hundred readers, or by five hundred thousand; if he can select the five hundred, he reaches the five hundred thousand.” - Henry Adams

32. “I'm the first to admit that I don't write right. Now, relax and enjoy the show! The sideshow, that is.” - Lori R. Lopez

33. “There is no greater feeling of accomplishment than to create a world that solely exists in your imagination and be able to pull someone into this hidden place inside of my thoughts. To make someone care for a person that has manifested from my dreams, to make them hate me for putting them in danger, and for them to ask to be taken on another journey with me when it is all said and done is why I write.” - Teresa Mummert

34. “When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in the particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is "So it goes.” - Kurt Vonnegut

35. “Well, Betsy," he said, "your mother tells me that you are going to use Uncle Keith's trunk for a desk. That's fine. You need a desk. I've often noticed how much you like to write. The way you eat up those advertising tablets from the store! I never saw anything like it. I can't understand it though. I never write anything but checks myself. ""Bob!" said Mrs. Ray. "You wrote the most wonderful letters to me before we were married. I still have them, a big bundle of them. Every time I clean house I read them over and cry.""Cry, eh?" said Mr. Ray, grinning. "In spite of what your mother says, Betsy, if you have any talent for writing, it comes from family. Her brother Keith was mighty talented, and maybe you are too. Maybe you're going to be a writer."Betsy was silent, agreeably abashed."But if you're going to be a writer," he went on, "you've got to read. Good books. Great books. The classics.” - Maud Hart Lovelace

36. “Literature can stop my heart and execute me for a moment, allow me to become someone else.” - colum mccann

37. “Warfare is a series of tragedies enjoined by logistics.” - Kevin Carson

38. “The approach to digital culture I abhor would indeed turn all the world's books into one book, just as Kevin (Kelly) suggested. It might start to happen in the next decade or so. Google and other companies are scanning library books into the cloud in a massive Manhattan Project of cultural digitization. What happens next is what's important. If the books in the cloud are accessed via user interfaces that encourage mashups of fragments that obscure the context and authorship of each fragment, there will be only one book. This is what happens today with a lot of content; often you don't know where a quoted fragment from a news story came from, who wrote a comment, or who shot a video. A continuation of the present trend will make us like various medieval religious empires, or like North Korea, a society with a single book. The Bible can serve as a prototypical example. Like Wikipedia, the Bible's authorship was shared, largely anonymous, and cumulative, and the obscurity of the individual authors served to create an oracle-like ambience for the document as "the literal word of God." If we take a non-metaphysical view of the Bible, it serves as a link to our ancestors, a window. The ethereal, digital replacement technology for the printing press happens to have come of age in a time when the unfortunate ideology I'm criticizing dominates technological culture. Authorship - the very idea of the individual point of view - is not a priority of the new ideology. The digital flattening of expression into a global mush is not presently enforced from the top down, as it is in the case of a North Korean printing press. Instead, the design of software builds the ideology into those actions that are the easiest to perform on the software designs that are becoming ubiquitous. It is true that by using these tools, individuals can author books or blogs or whatever, but people are encouraged by the economics of free content, crowd dynamics, and lord aggregators to serve up fragments instead of considered whole expressions or arguments. The efforts of authors are appreciated in a manner that erases the boundaries between them.The one collective book will absolutely not be the same thing as the library of books by individuals it is bankrupting. Some believe it will be better; others, including me, believe it will be disastrously worse. As the famous line goes from Inherit the Wind: 'The Bible is a book... but it is not the only book' Any singular, exclusive book, even the collective one accumulating in the cloud, will become a cruel book if it is the only one available.” - Jaron Lanier

39. “When I die I hope it may be said:'Her suffering was black, but her books were read'.” - Shannon Alder

40. “An inspirational writer's life is an open book that never shuts. Choose your words carefully.” - Shannon Alder

41. “Trying to live up to yourself is the most trying thing.” - Ren Garcia

42. “What's cheaper than a gallon of gas? An ebook. Save a dollar, stay home and read!” - Shandy L. Kurth

43. “I believe that a writer is a person who writes. An author is a person who has written.” - Dean Wesley Smith

44. “The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.” - D.H. Lawrence

45. “Cowardice is the most terrible of vices.” - Mikhail Bulgakov

46. “If Fran Lebowitz and Ian Fleming had blessed the world with a love child it would have been author J. Fields Jr.” - Edward Medina

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

48. “...Love can give you the most exhilarating wonderful highs at times... ...Then there will be dives that will take all you have just to hold on... Quote on the Title Page of "Love TORN Asunder” - Elizabeth Funderbirk

49. “Miss, I'd gladly pay you to remove your clothes.” - David Scheier

50. “I believe that everyone should have a dream and believe in it. Make it real, bring it to life. You'll never regret trying. Trying is what strengthens your heart and delivers courage. Once you believe in yourself, nothing can stop you.” - Richard Denney

51. “The purpose of having the orphans study all these diverse fields was not for them to just become geniuses, but to become polymaths – meaning they would be geniuses in a wide variety of fields.” - James Morcan, Lance Morcan

52. “It was unhealthy to get too attached. Such things were best reserved for people who had a life expectancy” - Matthew S. Williams

53. “What are the messages that you are entertaining?” - Asa Don Brown

54. “A writer's age at the time of a work's composition is never irrelevant.” - Margaret Atwood

55. “I’m 100% certain of the quality of story I’m writing until I finish the outline and actually begin to write. At this point, I’m 100% certain the story sucks and I will never show it to another living soul. Until I type “THE END.” At this point, I’m 50% certain it sucks, 50% certain it’s brilliant, and 100% certain if I don’t show it to someone I will spontaneously combust.” - Renee Miller

56. “When you write, you are telling a story...to yourself. When you revise, you are telling a story to yourself...over and over again.” - Kai Strand

57. “To be a highflier and a name to conjure with, you must decide your dimension, plan your path, master the moment, focus on the future, determine your degree, push your persistence and leadyour life.” - Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

58. “I'm pretty much looking for beauty all the time. It just seems like some days the light is better to see it.” - Melodie Ramone

59. “On having a backup plan: "Always a good plan anytime you want to follow your dream - I love writing, acting, and psychiatry - there are crazy people everywhere which means I can take my career anywhere my dream needs to go.” - Samantha Steele

60. “Bring on the controversy. I write real life. It's harsh and sometimes gritty, but it's real. Why should we tip toe around that?” - Shandy L. Kurth

61. “...I happen to be the kind of author who in starting to work on a book has no purpose than to get rid of that book....” - Vladimir Nabokov

62. “Time is a funny thing, it can give and it can take away; and a single moment in time can truly change one’s life forever! The best kind of love is unexpected, unexplainable, undeniable, and unimaginable.Your sweet scent will forever be with me, reminding me of the love we once shared. I will breathe in the memories until we meet again.Before you act on what you have been told, consider your source. It may simply be assumption on their part, and that can be far from fact.Why stand back and wait for someone to fail when you can stand up and offer your support?Love is when the sound of your partner’s snoring lulls you to sleep, and it acts as a reminder that they are there by your side.Building a wall around your heart is a voluntary imprisonment to which only you have the key. Open your heart to life’s possibilities!” - Donna L. Jones

63. “WHEN THE ALMIGHTY HAS PREDESTINED YOU, THERE IS NOONE IN THIS PHYSICAL LIFE THAT CAN BLOCK YOUR BLESSINGS.....” - Muffin

64. “Rewriting is the crucible where books are born.” - Cathryn Louis

65. “Although human beings are incapable of talking about themselves with total honesty, it is much harder to avoid the truth while pretending to be other people. They often reveal much about themselves in a very straightforward way. I am certain that I did. There is nothing that says more about its creator than the work itself.” - Akira Kurosawa

66. “The one ironclad rule is that I have to try. I have to walk into my writing room and pick up my pen every weekday morning.” - Anne Tyler

67. “You know you're a writer when the words don't stop!” - Joyce Middleton

68. “The gold of life is for those bold and brave in life.” - Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

69. “Ending a series is a difficult one .......where should a story that you have followed for so long end? When do you step away from the characters and let the readers decide their fate from there? When they can stand on their own is my only answer for that.” - Shandy L. Kurth

70. “The best part about being a writer is getting the last word.” - Shannon L. Alder

71. “A writer who has perfect writing skills and zero honesty is not an author but a sales person.” - Sandra Chami Kassis

72. “They fought because they loved the dance, and the weight of a sword in their hands. The clash and spark of metal and hiss of flame was like music written just for them. They fought for glory, but not for blood. They were Weirlind, heirs of the warrior's stone. And they always slept better with blades beneath their beds.” - The Warrior Heir Cinda Williams Chima pg. 426

73. “I am more optimistic, both about reading and about books. There will always be non-readers, bad readers, lazy readers – there always were. Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced, present reader.” - Julian Barnes

74. “I like to read and write because it is the ONLY thing that takes my mind off of the real world and my spinning worries. It is a time I can be free of anxiety, worry, and stress. When my life gets hectic I HAVE to read and write or I'll drown.” - Shandy L. Kurth

75. “I look forward to seeing more of this author's writings. Linda Strong” - Vicki M. Taylor

76. “In the Presence of Love...there are Miracles...Live Love, Give Love and Miracle will follow Miracle and wonders will never cease.” - Deborah Brooks

77. “The hours spent forming a written work can make one obsessive, distracted, compulsive, and neurotic even, especially when it comes to those rare, precious occasions of streaming pure inspiration. To have a muse moment interrupted - to watch her scuttle back into hiding with unshared insight remaining on the tip of her tongue - is a wicked irritation. When a writer's eyes glaze over, when she stares off at nothing or appears to be memorizing the lines on a blank page, when she falls asleep at the desk... tiptoe softly. For a writer's greatest desire is to receive inspiration; her greatest nightmare, to have tossed to the wind what could have been captured in words.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

78. “The unification of worlds is an author's priority, as one of them surely resides forbidden to the public.” - Paul Andreas Wunderlich

79. “My main task as an artist is to show you either what you have never seen before -- or to show you what you have seen countless times, in a way you've never seen it.” - Mike Duron

80. “I am always positive, prosperous-minded and filled with self-confidence.” - LaNina King

81. “Poetry is no rocket science, a good poet writes from his heart!” - Saru Singhal

82. “I love when I finish reading a chapter that I wrote and my cheeks hurt from smiling and all I can utter is, 'Wow.'” - Richelle E. Goodrich

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

84. “My cat mocks me frequently. It's the universe's way of keeping me from getting too big of an ego.” - Michelle M. Pillow

85. “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

86. “Advice from a Romance Writer: Guys, make your woman feel pretty even on an 'off' day. Trust me, good things will come of it.” - Michelle M. Pillow

87. “Someone described a writer's world as tormented, and I had to laugh.  A tormented writer?  I personally wouldn't have put those two words together.  Emotions have the power to torment a soul, yes, I agree to that.  But writers, through the formation of our characters, delve so often into the depths of a vast range of emotions that we earn the advantage.  For we've examined every little thrumming, fracture, spark, pang, and darkening of the heart to a point that we understand and appreciate the necessity and strength of emotions as well as the cause and effects manipulating them.  We understand.  We can imagine.  We sympathize.  Our knowledge is power over the torment of emotional ignorance.  I would suggest that those truly tormented are the readers of our works because those poor souls shall never know with such clarity and sentiment all the tiny little details that make our characters breath, move, and live before our very eyes.  Perhaps, if torment does lurk among writers, it comes simply through knowing more about an imagined friend than can ever be adequately expressed in words.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

88. “Creative writing is your ability to develop your inner tension, your libido, your supply of energy and electric charge, turning the charge into an image or thought, and wording the thought, thus contributing all the activity of your mind to the immortal culture of humankind and subsequently to your own immortality.” - Lara Biyuts

89. “Out of the millions who write, only very few manage to create an impact.” - Saru Singhal

90. “It was a flight, a kind of fleeing, a kind of falling, falling higher and higher, spinning off the edge of the earth and beyond the sun and through the vast silent vacuum where there were no burdens and where everything weighed exactly nothing.” - Tim O'Brien

91. “Life's too short, drive it like ya stole it!” - Debra L. Hartmann

92. “inspiration is not a thing, its every thing, open your eyes and inspiration is everywhere.” - L.L. Caulton

93. “An author is like a jeweller, with words as their gemstones and imagination the precious metals.” - Steve Smy

94. “Literary style is like crystal-ware: the cleaner the wineglass, the brighter the brilliance. As a reader, I agree with those who believe that a colour of the dress, which a character has on, as well as any enumeration and description of dishes at dinner or in the kitchen should be mentioned only in case if all this has a strong consequent relation to the plot, but as an author, I can’t help mentioning all this, with no particular reason, just for love for my characters, desiring to give them something nice and pleasant. Melancholy grows a platinum rose. Affection grows a double rose.” - Lara Biyuts

95. “The crazy thing about poetry is how its simplicity makes it complicated.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

96. “If you're not writing, you're wronging.” - Kevin James Breaux

97. “A well-developed and versed character will write the story for you.” - A.R. Voss

98. “Do not compare yourself with anybody. Compare yourself with yourself, for yourself and by yourself. We are all uniquely pottered and purposed by our creator!” - Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

99. “It is an awesome tragedy in this life that, when asking what a person is and they reply doctor or lawyer or engineer, we don't say "Well thats a nice little hobby, but why don't you take up writing or painting or music?” - D.A. Botta

100. “Ideally, love is unconditional; practically, it is more often the opposite.” - T.F. Hodge

101. “We live in the information age and the sheer volume of it being available everywhere, creates a need for information that has value. Yes, we can look anything up on Google but who has the time? Can we trust that the information comes from a trustworthy source? Your experience has given you a deep knowing of your subject matter. You have insights and ideas that others may not figure out on their own. You are holding a roadmap that has great value to someone. What has been stopping you from sharing your knowledge? Perhaps you have been afraid to put yourself out there because of a fear of rejection? Let me get straight to the point. Get over it right now! Ponder the following quote for a moment and then move on with the decision to write rather than not to write, because not to write is not “to be”. You deny yourself and your audience. You have had an incredible journey to get to where you are and have amassed experience and knowledge. Now combine that with your unique voice and be heard. You are already an expert. Accept it.” - Kytka Hilmar-Jezek

102. “Like any author worth a shit - she parted with a piece of her soul.” - CJ Roberts

103. “Writing Cave means it's Coffee O'Clock...Who am I kidding? It's always Coffee O'Clock!” - Tammy-Louise Wilkins

104. “I reached into the pile and pulled out a few connected chips and then was about to shove them into my mouth, when I saw what appeared to be the face of an angel sitting next to me. And, if it was in fact my actual guardian angel, then it probably would have been poor form not to offer a few chips to extend an olive branch.” - Phil Wohl

105. “For some reason, when people meet me and find out I'm a writer they always ask if I write children's books. Um... please don't let your kids read my books. Well, unless your kids are in their 30s or something...then yeah, they're old enough. LOL” - Michelle M. Pillow

106. “The obsession with correct political belief and expression in art is stultifying the genre as it is necessarily exclusive. We are losing our voice in artificial, forced homogeny posing as tolerance. Propaganda-disguised-as-story drives readers away as agenda takes the place of wonder, excitement, character. and conflict.” - Scott M. Roberts

107. “There is a brilliant novel in all of us. Some imagine it…others live it. Authors dwell in an auspicious life by having the ability to fuse the two.” - Carl Henegan

108. “Do not wait and hope to be discovered...make yourself so you cannot be denied!” - Jamie McCall

109. “See it, learn it, do it ALL.” - Jamie McCall

110. “Your smile is your logo, your personality is your business card, how you leave others feeling after having an experience with you becomes your trademark.” - Jay Danzie

111. “Inspirations are priceless & limitless.” - Jay Danzie