112 Inspiring Writing Process Quotes

Diving into the world of writing can be both exhilarating and daunting, a journey filled with moments of inspiration and times of doubt. Whether you're a seasoned author entrenched in the depths of your latest novel or a newcomer staring at a blank page, the writing process can be a maze of creativity. What better way to navigate this complex landscape than by gleaning wisdom from those who have traversed it before? Through the minds of celebrated authors and revered thinkers, our curated collection of the top 112 inspiring writing process quotes offers a treasure trove of insights, reminders, and sparks of motivation. Each quote serves as a gentle nudge or a powerful shove, ensuring that whether it's the whisper of an idea or the roar of a completed piece, you're never alone in your writing journey.

1. “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

2. “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

3. “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

4. “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

5. “1. Write like you’ll live forever — fear is a bad editor.2. Write like you’ll croak today — death is the best editor.3. Fooling others is fun. Fooling yourself is a lethal mistake.4. Pick one — fame or delight.5. The archer knows the target. The poet knows the wastebasket.6. Cunning and excess are your friends.7. TV and liquor are your enemies.8. Everything eternal happens in a spare room at 3 a.m.9. You’re done when the crows sing.” - Ron Dakron

6. “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

7. “No book can ever be finished. While working on it we learn just enough to find it immature the moment we turn away from it” - Karl Popper

8. “Anyone moderately familiar with the rigours of composition will not need to be told the story in detail; how he wrote and it seemed good; read and it seemed vile; corrected and tore up; cut out; put in; was in ecstasy; in despair; had his good nights and bad mornings; snatched at ideas and lost them; saw his book plain before him and it vanished; acted people's parts as he ate; mouthed them as he walked; now cried; now laughed; vacillated between this style and that; now preferred the heroic and pompous; next the plain and simple; now the vales of Tempe; then the fields of Kent or Cornwall; and could not decide whether he was the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world.” - Virginia Woolf

9. “We can’t choose our poetic fathers any more than our biological ones — but we can choose how to come to terms with them.” - Rodger Kamenetz

10. “I'm not a writer. Ernest Hemingway was a writer. I just have a vivid imagination and type 90 WPM.” - Tiffany Madison

11. “I write not because I want to but because I am destined to.” - Jules Haigler

12. “In a very real way, one writes a story to find out what happens in it. Before it is written it sits in the mind like a piece of overheard gossip or a bit of intriguing tattle. The story process is like taking up such a piece of gossip, hunting down the people actually involved, questioning them, finding out what really occurred, and visiting pertinent locations. As with gossip, you can't be too surprised if important things turn up that were left out of the first-heard version entirely; or if points initially made much of turn out to have been distorted, or simply not to have happened at all.” - Samuel R. Delany

13. “Just as a good rain clears the air, a good writing day clears the psyche.” - Julia Cameron

14. “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

15. “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

16. “Bagiku, sehari tanpa menulis adalah sehari hilang, terbuang.” - Howard Fast

17. “Nobody reads a book to get to the middle.” - Mickey Spillane

18. “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

19. “Writing is the thing that props me up.” - Horton Foote

20. “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

21. “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

22. “Heavy as such things areAfter the wordslide, the writing begins."From "Word Quake” - Eileen Granfors

23. “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

24. “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

25. “If writing didn't require thinking then we'd all be doing it.” - Jeremiah Laabs

26. “I'm writing. The pages are starting to stack up. My morale is improving the more I feel like a writer.” - Neil Gaiman

27. “No writing is wasted. Did you know that sourdough from San Francisco is leavened partly by a bacteria called lactobacillus sanfrancisensis? It is native to the soil there, and does not do well elsewhere. But any kitchen can become an ecosystem. If you bake a lot, your kitchen will become a happy home to wild yeasts, and all your bread will taste better. Even a failed loaf is not wasted. Likewise, cheese makers wash the dairy floor with whey. Tomato gardeners compost with rotten tomatoes. No writing is wasted: the words you can't put in your book can wash the floor, live in the soil, lurk around in the air. They will make the next words better.” - Erin Bow

28. “Menulis cerita pendek dan novel bukanlah sesuatu hal yang dapat aku lakukan dengan mudah dan menyenangkan.” - Erskine Caldwell

29. “Kegiatan fisik dalam menulis fiksi bertolak belakang dengan hasil yang didapat. Kegiatan tersebut adalah duduk tegang dan jenuh sepanjang siang atau malam di depan meja dan mesin ketik, pada saat aku ingin berdiri dan pergi ke suatu tempat untuk melihat sesuatu yang aku yakini lebih menarik dibanding apa yang sedang aku kerjakan.” - Erskine Caldwell

30. “Collaborating on a film script involves two people sitting in a room separated by the silence of two minds working together.” - Darlene Craviotto

31. “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

32. “Don't worry about what you're writing or whether it's good or even whether it makes sense.” - Lauren Oliver

33. “But in the wake of 'Bullet,' all the guys wanted to know was, 'How's it doing? How's it selling?' How to tell them I didn't give a flying fuck how it was doing in the marketplace, that what I cared about was how it was doing in the reader's heart?” - Stephen King

34. “I gradually realized that I was seeing another example of creative ebb, another step by another art on the road that may indeed end in extinction.” - Stephen King

35. “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

36. “It's all mine, it's all sacred.” - Jamie Weise

37. “10 Steps to Becoming a Better WriterWrite.Write more.Write even more.Write even more than that.Write when you don’t want to.Write when you do.Write when you have something to say.Write when you don’t.Write every day.Keep writing.” - Brian Clark

38. “Dance above the surface of the world. Let your thoughts lift you into creativity that is not hampered by opinion.” - Red Haircrow

39. “I hope I don't write TOO many books! When I look at authors who have written too many books, I wonder to myself "When did they live?" I certainly want to write BECAUSE I live! I know I don't want to write in order to live! My writing is an overflow of the wine glass of my life, not a basin in which I wash out my ideals and expectations.” - C. JoyBell C.

40. “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

41. “Writing starts with living.—Rumors of Water: Thoughts on Creativity & Writing” - L.L. Barkat

42. “Writing starts with living.” - L. L. Barkat

43. “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

44. “Humility is an essential quality in writers who want to write well.” - Margaret Jean (Peggy) Langstaff

45. “Writing poetry is supernatural. Or, it should be.” - Katerina Stoykova Klemer

46. “There are three secrets to writing a novel. Unfortunately nobody knows what they are.” - W. Somerset Maugham

47. “I write to escape. I haven't managed it yet, but I'm working on it” - William Meikle

48. “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

49. “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

50. “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

51. “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

52. “On the Writing Process:"When in doubt, take it out.,” - Barbara DaCosta

53. “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

54. “Art is the overflow of emotion into action.” - Brian Raif

55. “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

56. “There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing... I am a recording instrument... I do not presume to impose “story” “plot” “continuity”... Insofar as I succeed in Direct recording of certain areas of psychic process I may have limited function... I am not an entertainer...” - William S. Burroughs

57. “When the writing is good, a book becomes a mirror. The reader will see an uncanny familiarity and respond accordingly.” - Jen Knox

58. “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

59. “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

60. “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

61. “Sometimes I scare myself at how easily I slip inside my mind and live vicariously through these characters.” - Teresa Mummert

62. “« 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

63. “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

64. “Man nekad nav patikušas latviešu rakstības daudzās filoloģiskās palīgzīmes, kas samaitā burtu un lappuses grafisko izskatu, Tagad es šis ķekšus tieši ienīdu. Ja mūsu rakstības veidotājiem būtu vairāk estētiskās izjūtas, tie ķekšus būtu atvietojuši ar burtu dubultojumiem, kā tas darīts daudzās citās valodās. Tas ļoti atvieglotu latviešu rakstu iespiešanu.” - Anšlavs Eglītis

65. “...if you always move in certainty, your writing will be flat - creativity is a rugged terrain...” - John Geddes

66. “...it's not the medium that's the message - it's consciousness - the wonder of being able to wonder ...” - John Geddes

67. “...I make no apology about stirring the depths - every human longs to swim under water and see what lurks beneath ...” - John Geddes

68. “...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

69. “...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

70. “...writing with ferocity is a gift, provided that ferocity is a monomaniacal devotion to pursuing the truth ...” - John Geddes

71. “... 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

72. “...the answer is not in the damn blank page - it's in the days or years before and you have to dredge it up - exhume the past again ...” - John Geddes

73. “...the secret to writing is to get your own pain - shout it out till it hurts your throat - weep it into your pillow - then write it down ...” - John Geddes

74. “...consider yourself a functional character in someone else's novel - a background character - a person on the street - that's the perspective ...” - John Geddes

75. “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

76. “... The Book is more important than your plans for it. You have to go with what works for The Book ~ if your ideas appear hollow or forced when they are put on paper, chop them, erase them, pulverise them and start again. Don't whine when things are not going your way, because they are going the right way for The Book, which is more important. The show must go on, and so must The Book.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

77. “The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.” - Terry Pratchett

78. “There is a ruthlessness to the creative act. It often involves a betrayal of the status quo.” - Alan Watt

79. “I prefer the pen. There is something elemental about the glide and flow of nib and ink on paper.” - James Robertson

80. “I can't wait to get back to writing today so I can see what happens next Kim Cormack” - Kim Cormack

81. “A fiction writer weaves a fabric of lies in hopes of revealing deeper human truths.” - Wally Lamb

82. “(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

83. “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

84. “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

85. “Confession: I don't want to be one of my characters. I'm mean to them sometimes. Really mean.” - Michelle M. Pillow

86. “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

87. “I do not distinguish between the construction of a book and that of a painting and I always proceed from the simple to the complex." - 1946” - Henri Matisse

88. “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

89. “In front of me 327 pages of the manuscript [Master and Margarita] (about 22 chapters). The most important remains - editing, and it's going to be hard. I will have to pay close attention to details. Maybe even re-write some things... 'What's its future?' you ask? I don't know. Possibly, you will store the manuscript in one of the drawers, next to my 'killed' plays, and occasionally it will be in your thoughts. Then again, you don't know the future. My own judgement of the book is already made and I think it truly deserves being hidden away in the darkness of some chest.[Bulgakov from Moscow to his wife on June 15 1938]” - Mikhail Bulgakov

90. “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

91. “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

92. “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

93. “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

94. “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

95. “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

96. “...the most beautiful things don't always make you happy - often they make you weep...” - John Geddes

97. “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

98. “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

99. “Raise the bar. Don't duck under it.” - Peter James West

100. “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

101. “Have you ever pondered the miracle of popcorn? It starts out as a tiny, little, compact kernel with magic trapped inside that when agitated, bursts to create something marvelously desirable. It’s sort of like those tiny, little thoughts trapped inside an author’s head that―in an excited explosion of words―suddenly become a captivating fairy tale!” - Richelle E. Goodrich

102. “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

103. “Writers often torture themselves trying to get the words right. Sometimes you must lower your expectations and just finish it.” - Don Roff

104. “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

105. “Research" is a wonderful word for writers. It serves as excuse for EVERYTHING” - Rayne Hall

106. “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

107. “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

108. “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

109. “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

110. “Indentations on the page, words, my friends, and I will share them with you.” - Victoria Sawyer

111. “you once said to would like to sit beside me while I write. Listen in that case I could not write at all. For writing means revealing one self to excess; that utmost of self-revelation and surrender, in which a human being, when involved with others, would feel he was losing himself, and from which, therefore, he will always shrink as long as he is in his right mind...That is why one can never be alone enough when one writes, why there can never be enough silence around one when one writes, why even night is not night enough.” - Susan Cain

112. “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