116 Quotes On Writing

Writing can be a solitary endeavor, but the wisdom of those who have tread this path before us provides invaluable guidance and inspiration. Whether you're a seasoned author, a budding novelist, or someone who writes for the sheer joy of it, delving into the thoughts of literary giants and contemporary writers alike can spark creativity and lend insight through the inevitable hurdles. In this post, we've handpicked a compilation of the top 116 quotes on writing—words that will motivate, challenge, and perhaps even reshape the way you approach your craft. Join us on this journey through the minds of those who have mastered the art of putting pen to paper, and let their words kindle your passion for writing.

1. “Easy reading is damn hard writing.” - Nathaniel Hawthorne

2. “You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.” - Jack London

3. “Running a close second [as a writing lesson] was the realization that stopping a piece of work just because it's hard, either emotionally or imaginatively, is a bad idea. Sometimes you have to go on when you don't feel like it, and sometimes you're doing good work when it feels like all you're managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position.” - Stephen King

4. “A slavish concern for the composition of words is the sign of a bankrupt intellect. Be gone, odious wasp! You smell of decayed syllables.” - Norton Juster

5. “I am simply of the opinion that you cannot be taught to write. You have to spend a lifetime in love with words.” - Craig Claiborne

6. “Write what should not be forgotten.” - Isabel Allende

7. “Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.” - Stephen King

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

9. “A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?” - George Orwell

10. “And there was that poor sucker Flaubert rolling around on his floor for three days looking for the right word.” - Dorothy Parker

11. “There's an epigram tacked to my office bulletin board, pinched from a magazine -- "Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté.” - Margaret Atwood

12. “Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.” - Anne Lamott

13. “Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time... The wait is simply too long.” - Leonard Bernstein

14. “The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector.” - Hemingway, Ernest

15. “A good book isn't written, it's rewritten.” - Phyllis A. Whitney

16. “I have stolen ideas from every book I have ever read.” - Philip Pullman

17. “Don't say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream.” - Mark Twain

18. “The pen is the tongue of the mind.” - Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

19. “Great books write themselves, only bad books have to be written.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

20. “I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.” - Robert Louis Stevenson

21. “There are books full of great writing that don't have very good stories. Read sometimes for the story... don't be like the book-snobs who won't do that. Read sometimes for the words--the language. Don't be like the play-it-safers who won't do that. But when you find a book that has both a good story and good words, treasure that book.” - Stephen King

22. “Only a mediocre person is always at his best. ” - W. Somerset Maugham

23. “You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

24. “Writing gives you the illusion of control, and then you realize it's just an illusion, that people are going to bring their own stuff into it.” - David Sedaris

25. “Books aren't written - they're rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn't quite done it.” - Michael Crichton

26. “All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.” - Leo Tolstoy

27. “A novel rough draft is like bread dough; you need to beat the crap out of it for it to rise.” - Chris Baty

28. “Throw up into your typewriter every morning. Clean up every noon.” - Raymond Chandler

29. “Be obscure clearly.” - E.B. White

30. “A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it.” - Mark Twain

31. “People without hope not only don't write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read them.” - Flannery O'Connor

32. “Give me just enough information so that I can lie convincingly.” - Stephen King

33. “You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it.” - Adrienne Rich

34. “I don't think anybody can teach anybody anything. I think that you learn it, but the young writer that is as I say demon-driven and wants to learn and has got to write, he don't know why, he will learn from almost any source that he finds. He will learn from older people who are not writers, he will learn from writers, but he learns it -- you can't teach it.” - William Faulkner

35. “Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious."[Ten rules for writing fiction, The Guardian, 20 February 2010 (with Diana Athill, Margaret Atwood, Roddy Doyle, Helen Dunmore, Geoff Dyer, Anne Enright, Richard Ford, Jonathan Franzen, Esther Freud, Neil Gaiman, David Hare, and AL Kennedy)]” - P. D. James

36. “If you've got a message, send a telegram.” - Samuel Goldwyn

37. “I write because I love how I feel to have written.” - Carol Lynch Williams

38. “Evan Connell said once that he knew he was finished with a short story when he found himself going through it and taking out commas and then going through the story again and putting the commas back in the same places. I like that way of working on something. I respect that kind of care for what is being done. That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones, with the punctuation in the right places so that they an best say what they are meant to say. If the words are heavy with the writer's own unbridled emotions, or if they are imprecise and inaccurate for some other reason -- if the worlds are in any way blurred -- the reader's eyes will slide right over them and nothing will be achieved. Henry James called this sort of hapless writing 'weak specification'.” - Raymond Carver

39. “V.S. Pritchett's definition of a short story is 'something glimpsed from the corner of the eye, in passing.' Notice the 'glimpse' part of this. First the glimpse. Then the glimpse gives life, turned into something that illuminates the moment and may, if we're lucky -- that word again -- have even further ranging consequences and meaning. The short story writer's task is to invest the glimpse with all that is in his power. He'll bring his intelligence and literary skill to bear (his talent), his sense of proportion and sense of the fitness of things: of how things out there really are and how he sees those things -- like no one else sees them. And this is done through the use of clear and specific language, language used so as to bring to life the details that will light up the story for the reader. For the details to be concrete and convey meaning, the language must be accurate and precisely given. The words can be so precise they may even sound flat, but they can still carry; if used right they can hit all the notes.” - Raymond Carver

40. “I suggest to my students that they write under a pseudonym for a week. That allows young men to write as women, and women as men. It allows them a lot of freedom they don't have ordinarily.” - Joyce Carol Oates

41. “There are some books that refuse to be written. They stand their ground year after year and will not be persuaded. It isn't because the book is not there and worth being written -- it is only because the right form of the story does not present itself. There is only one right form for a story and if you fail to find that form the story will not tell itself.” - Mark Twain

42. “Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!” - Edna Ferber

43. “Giving a reader a sex scene that is only half right is like giving her half of a kitten. It is not half as cute as a whole kitten; it is a bloody, godawful mess.” - Howard Mittelmark

44. “I am a writer of books in retrospect. I talk in order to understand; I teach in order to learn” - Robert Frost

45. “If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?” - Joyce Carol Oates

46. “The most important things to remember about back story are that (a) everyone has a history and (b) most of it isn’t very interesting.” - Stephen King

47. “I’m not particularly keen on writing which exhaustively describes the physical characteristics of the people in the story and what they’re wearing… I can always get a J. Crew catalogue… …So spare me, if you please, the hero’s ‘sharply intelligent blue eyes’ and ‘outthrust determined chin’.” - Stephen King

48. “Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure only death can stop it.” - Ernest Hemingway

49. “I am really very grateful for this Award. It is one of the first given to a woman, and to two women at that. When I first started getting work published, I used to have wistful thoughts at the way all important awards were given to men. Women, I used to think, could be as innovative, imaginative and productive as possible - and women were the ones mostly at work in the field of fantasy for children and young adults - but only let a man enter the field, and people instantly regarded what he had to say and what he did as more Important. He got respectful reviews as well as awards, even if what he was doing - which it often was - was imitating the women. But you have changed all that. Thank you for being so enlightened.Women, large-minded, formidable women, have played an almost exclusive part in helping my career. I have hardly ever dealt with a man - at least, when it came to publishing: ” - Diana Wynne Jones

50. “A writer in someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is.” - Orhan Pamuk

51. “It's amazing that a man who is dead can talk to people through these pages. As long as this books survives, his ideas live.” - Christopher Paolini

52. “Stories are about secrets. We all have them. Secret dreams, fantasies, hopes and sometimes even desires. Occasionally a dream becomes reality and then maybe there are a million reasons for not telling anybody about it.” - Rob Hopcott

53. “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

54. “Your writing is never as good as you hoped; but never as bad as you feared.” - Bertrand Russell

55. “Writing is one of the few careers for which you essentially train yourself, the other two major ones being juggling and pickpocketing.” - Maureen Johnson

56. “Use the right word, not its second cousin.” - Mark Twain

57. “All the stories I would like to write persecute me. When I am in my chamber, it seems as if they are all around me, like little devils, and while one tugs at my ear, another tweaks my nose, and each says to me, 'Sir, write me, I am beautiful.” - Umberto Eco

58. “Don't tell me the moon is shining, show me the glint of light on broken glass.” - Bernard Cornwall

59. “...but every person who does serious time with a keyboard is attempting to translate his version of the world into words so that he might be understood.” - Betsy Lerner

60. “Be yourself. Above all, let who you are, what you are, what you believe, shine through every sentence you write, every piece you finish.” - John Jakes

61. “The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is worth any number of old ladies.” - William Faulkner

62. “I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.” - Ernest Hemingway

63. “Really, becoming a writer sounds more like a mental illness than a professional choice.” - Shannon Hale

64. “Being an author, is being a dictator. (in a good way)” - Pseudonymous Bosch

65. “O for a Muse of fire, that would ascendThe brightest heaven of invention,A kingdom for a stage, princes to actAnd monarchs to behold the swelling scene!Then should the warlike Harry, like himself,Assume the port of Mars; and at his heels,Leash'd in like hounds, should famine, sword and fireCrouch for employment. But pardon, and gentles all,The flat unraised spirits that have daredOn this unworthy scaffold to bring forthSo great an object: can this cockpit holdThe vasty fields of France? or may we cramWithin this wooden O the very casquesThat did affright the air at Agincourt?O, pardon! since a crooked figure mayAttest in little place a million;And let us, ciphers to this great accompt,On your imaginary forces work.Suppose within the girdle of these wallsAre now confined two mighty monarchies,Whose high upreared and abutting frontsThe perilous narrow ocean parts asunder:Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts;Into a thousand parts divide on man,And make imaginary puissance;Think when we talk of horses, that you see themPrinting their proud hoofs i' the receiving earth;For 'tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings,Carry them here and there; jumping o'er times,Turning the accomplishment of many yearsInto an hour-glass: for the which supply,Admit me Chorus to this history;Who prologue-like your humble patience pray,Gently to hear, kindly to judge, our play.” - William Shakespeare

66. “It's not about you, it's about the story. It's not about the folks who raise an eyebrow because you're not yet published or not yet J.K. Rowling. It's not about what that lady at church may think or, for that matter, the critics. It's not about the fact that you can't please everyone, and it's sure as heck not about the odds. In the immortal words of Gold Five, "Stay on target." You may or may not be the one who destroys the Death Star. But you're a hero if you get out of your own way, put it all on the line, and try.” - Cynthia Leitich Smith

67. “Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite.” - Edward Albee

68. “But it's writing, damn it, not washing the car or putting on eyeliner. If you can take it seriously, we can do business. If you can't or won't, it's time for you to close the book and do something else. Wash the car, maybe.” - Stephen King

69. “In sum, do not insult me with the beheadings, finger choppings or the lung-deflations you plan for my works. I need my head to shake or nod, my hand to wave or make into a fist, my lungs to shout or whisper with. I will not go gently onto a shelf, degutted, to become a non-book. All you umpires, back to the bleachers. Referees, hit the showers. It's my game. I pitch, I hit, I catch. I run the bases. At sunset I've won or lost. At sunrise, I'm out again, giving it the old try. And no one can help me. Not even you.” - Ray Bradbury

70. “I am sifting my memories, the way men pan the dirt under a barroom floor for the bits of gold dust that fall between the cracks. It's small mining-- small mining. You're too young a man to be panning memories, Adam. You should be getting yourself some new ones, so that the mining will be richer when you come to age.” - John Steinbeck

71. “So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads.” - Dr. Seuss

72. “The main thing is to WRITE. Some days it might be 2000 words. Some days you might tinker with two sentences until you get them just right. Both days belong in the writing life. Some days you may watch a ‘Doctor Who’ marathon or become immersed in a book that is so good you can’t stop reading. Some days you may be in love or in mourning. Those days belong in the writing life, too. Live them without guilt.” - L.K. Madigan

73. “The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.” - Thomas Wolfe

74. “- I don't want to be a writer so I can write about my life. I want to be a writer to escape from it. + Then you shouldn't be a writer.” - Candace Bushnell

75. “Never put off writing until you are better at it.” - Gary Henderson

76. “Grammar is...the pole you grab to get your thoughts up on their feet and walking.” - Stephen King

77. “You must write for yourself, above all. That is your only hope of creating something beautiful.” - Gustave Flaubert

78. “The two things I enjoy the most about writing are the first page of a book and the last. What's in between is very hard work.” - Rachel Gibson

79. “That is one thing I am sure of amid my many uncertainties regarding the literary vocation: deep inside, a writer feels that writing is the best thing that ever happened to him, or could ever happen to him, because as far as he is concerned, writing is the best possible way of life, never mind the social, political, or financial rewards of what he might achieve through it.” - Mario Vargas Llosa

80. “A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.” - Albert Camus

81. “Read a lot, write a lot is the great commandment.” - Stephen King

82. “I'd love to write some porn, but I don't know if I have the right engines. When I was a young man and I was tempted to write porn, imaginary parents would appear over my shoulder and read what I was writing; just about the point that I managed to banish the imaginary parents, real children would lean over my shoulder and read what I was writing.” - Neil Gaiman

83. “Writers were blessed stenographers taking divine dictation.” - Stephen King

84. “A writer is someone who has taught his mind to misbehave.” - Oscar Wilde

85. “We need good titles.” - Henry Miller

86. “Writing is a lonely job. Having someone who believes in you makes a lot if difference. They don't have to makes speeches. Just believing is usually enough.” - Stephen King

87. “Sometimes you have to go on when you don't feel like it, and sometimes you're doing good work when it feels like all you're managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position.” - Stephen King

88. “Whenever I'm asked what advice I have for young writers, I always say that the first thing is to read, and to read a lot. The second thing is to write. And the third thing, which I think is absolutely vital, is to tell stories and listen closely to the stories you're being told.” - John Green

89. “Most of us have a soundtrack running in the background of our lives. I access that soundtrack when I write.” - Robin Helm

90. “In a way, “failure” is just another word for “the journey,” for not being there yet but on the way. It’s the road we walk on to get wherever it is we’re trying to go.” - Sara Zarr

91. “The one thing which seems to me quite impossible is to take into consideration the kind of book one is expected to write; surely one can only write the book that is there to be written.(Letter to Muriel St. Clare Byrne, 8 September 1935)” - Dorothy L. Sayers

92. “We're pupils of the religions—Catholic, Protestant, Jewish . . . Well, the Christian religions. Those who directed French education down through the centuries were the Jesuits. They taught us how to make sentences translated from the Latin, well balanced, with a verb, a subject, a complement, a rhythm. In short—here a speech, there a preach, everywhere a sermon! They say of an author, “He knits a nice sentence!” Me, I say, “It's unreadable.” They say, “What magnificent theatrical language!” I look, I listen. It's flat, it's nothing, it's nil. Me, I've slipped the spoken word into print. In one sole shot.” - Louis-Ferdinand Celine

93. “Stories. Character. Dialouge. Entire worlds created on the page. Worlds that could sweep you away or frighten you, make you laugh or cry. Worlds that allowed you to escape to another country or time. Worlds built piece by piece of ink and punctuation.” - Jamie Michaels

94. “I really didn't write it with any intention of being published. If I'd known that was going to happen, I would have written something more sensible, because now I have to dress up as a pirate for book signings... I would have done a novel about a man who hangs around with a gaggle of models.” - Gideon Defoe

95. “I would like to tell you that I wrote my book to push back artistic boundaries. But I didn't. I wrote it to impress a girl.” - Gideon Defoe

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

97. “Barangkali aku hanya punya satu atau dua kehidupan untuk kujalani, tapi bukan berarti aku hanya punya satu cerita untuk kusampaikan.” - Teresa Medeiros

98. “Writing is 1 percent inspiration, and 99 percent elimination.” - Louise Brooks

99. “When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don't mean utterly, but kill most of them--then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are far apart.” - Mark Twain

100. “Authors, he thought. Even the sane ones are nuts.” - Dan Brown

101. “I think the best stories always end up being about the people rather than the event, which is to say character-driven.” - Stephen King

102. “The man is in his work,read it if you want to know about him.” - R.M. Engelhardt

103. “To Grandma,for being my first editor and giving me the best writing advice I’ve ever received: “Christopher, I think you should wait until you’re done with elementary school before worrying about being a failed writer.” - Chris Colfer

104. “I have completed and uncompleted screenplays, but they both fall into the category of “unsold.” I’ve seen quite a few movies where the screenplays seemed to be in the “uncompleted” category yet still got sold and made into movies, so I generally refer too all screenplays as “sold” or “unsold.” But that’s just my own filing system.” - Gary Reilly

105. “I don’t know why the publishers in New York don’t take a tip from Hollywood and just publish the outlines of novels rather than the completed books. Let the audience use their imaginations, as my Maw always says about radio. I would much prefer to read an outline of War and Peace than slog through eight hundred thousand words. Why do I need Tolstoy to describe snow? I can imagine snow, whether Russian snow or just regular snow. But book publishers seem to think that the authors should do all the work, and the readers should be waited on hand-and-foot like a buncha goddamn prima donnas.” - Gary Reilly

106. “Most of the ideas I’ve gotten for novels or screenplays have occurred to me while I was either shaving or taking a bath. A number have occurred to me while I was driving 127. I rarely get ideas when seated in front of my typewriter, which I find ironic because I have always suspected that typing somehow plays a key role in writing.” - Gary Reilly

107. “The pen to a writer is like a cigarette to a smoker; they need it to take the edge off.” - Kellie Elmore

108. “I write because I am a writer, not because I want to get anything out of it.” - H Raven Rose

109. “Any writer who puts his words and thoughts out into the public is going to be criticized.” - Thomas Moore

110. “My reason for being an author? Because I love to write - it fulfills me. But the fact that I entertain others by doing it is a lovely bonus.” - Chasta Schneider

111. “Pay attention, and use your imagination.” - R.M. Engelhardt

112. “I have found that a writer is formed not so much by their experiences but by the way in which they view and capture those experiences.” - H Raven Rose

113. “I hope that I capture something in my work that is about the elusive, the magical and powerful and the transformative. The writing in itself is transformative for me.” - H Raven Rose

114. “Remember The Poem ...” - R.M. Engelhardt

115. “For me the poem and the poetry open mic isn’t about competition and it never will be. Honestly? It's wrong. The open mic is about 1 poet, one fellow human being up on a stage or behind a podium sharing their work regardless of what form or style they bring to it. In other words? The guy with the low slam score is more than likely a far better poet-writer than the guy who actually won. But who are you? I ? Or really anyone else to judge them? The Poetry Slam has become an overgrown, over used monopoly on American literature and poetry and is now over utilized by the academic & public school establishments. And over the years has sadly become the "McDonalds Of Poetry". We can only hope that the same old stale atmosphere of it all eventually becomes or evolves into something new that translates to and from the written page and that gives new poets with different styles & authentic voices a chance to share their work too.” - R.M. Engelhardt

116. “Another drink, another sentence, and the writing continues on. . . .” - Dennis R. Miller