116 Writing Advice Quotes

Writing is an art form that transcends boundaries, allowing us to express thoughts, emotions, and stories in a way that resonates deeply with readers. Whether you're a seasoned author or an aspiring writer, seeking inspiration and guidance from those who have mastered the craft can be incredibly beneficial. In this collection, we've gathered 116 of the most insightful and motivating writing advice quotes from renowned authors, poets, and literary icons. These words of wisdom are sure to spark your creativity, help you navigate the challenges of the writing process, and remind you of the magic that lies within the written word. Dive in and let these quotes serve as your guiding light on your writing journey.

1. “Don't say it was delightful; make us say delightful when we've read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers Please will you do the job for me.” - C.S. Lewis

2. “Maugham then offers the greatest advice anyone could give to a young author: "At the end of an interrogation sentence, place a question mark. You'd be surprised how effective it can be.” - Woody Allen

3. “Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I'd have the facts.” - Harper Lee

4. “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” - Ernest Hemingway

5. “Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious. When you're conscious and writing from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth, you have the ability to throw the lights on for your reader. He or she will recognize his or her life and truth in what you say, in the pictures you have painted, and this decreases the terrible sense of isolation that we have all had too much of.” - Anne Lamott

6. “As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand.” - Ernest Hemingway

7. “Write without pay until somebody offers to pay.” - Mark Twain

8. “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

9. “A man's grammar, like Caesar's wife, should not only be pure, but above suspicion of impurity.” - Edgar Allan Poe

10. “But let the wise be warned against too great readiness at explanation: it multiplies the sources of mistake, lengthening the sum for reckoners sure to go wrong.” - George Eliot

11. “Don't get it right, get it written.” - Ally Carter

12. “If something inside of you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act—truth is always subversive.” - Anne Lamott

13. “Prose is architecture, not interior decoration.” - Ernest Hemingway

14. “When I met a truly beautiful girl, I would tell her that if she spent the night with me, I would write a novel or a story about her. This usually worked; and if her name was to be in the title of the story, it almost always worked. Then, later, when we'd passed a night of delicious love-making together, after she’d gone and I’d felt that feeling of happiness mixed with sorrow, I sometimes would write a book or story about her. Sometimes her character, her way about herself, her love-making, it sometimes marked me so heavily that I couldn't go on in life and be happy unless I wrote a book or a story about that woman, the happy and sad memory of that woman. That was the only way to keep her, and to say goodbye to her without her ever leaving.” - Roman Payne

15. “Giving a reader a sex scene that is only half right is like giving her half a kitten. It is not half as cute as a whole kitten; it is a bloody, godawful mess. A half-good sex scene is not half as hot; it actually moves into the negative numbers, draining any heat from the surrounding material.” - Sandra Newman

16. “I have a great many opinions about writing, but I'm afraid that all of them are unprintable” - Alfred Lansing

17. “it's been my experience that most writers don't talk about their craft--they just do it” - Alfred Lansing

18. “On the whole, I think you should write biographies of those you admire and respect, and novels about human beings who you think are sadly mistaken.” - Penelope Fitzgerald

19. “Let grammar, punctuation, and spelling into your life! Even the most energetic and wonderful mess has to be turned into sentences.” - Terry Pratchett

20. “It's okay to write crap. Just don't try publishing it while it's still crap.” - S.M. Blooding

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

22. “Next morning I went over to Paul’s for coffee and told him I had finished. “Good for you,” he said without looking up. “Start the next one today.” - Steven Pressfield

23. “Start telling the stories that only you can tell, because there’ll always be better writers than you and there’ll always be smarter writers than you. There will always be people who are much better at doing this or doing that - but you are the only you.Tarantino - you can criticize everything that Quentin does - but nobody writes Tarantino stuff like Tarantino. He is the best Tarantino writer there is, and that was actually the thing that people responded to - they’re going ‘this is an individual writing with his own point of view’.There are better writers than me out there, there are smarter writers, there are people who can plot better - there are all those kinds of things, but there’s nobody who can write a Neil Gaiman story like I can.” - Neil Gaiman

24. “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

25. “When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.” - Raymond Chandler

26. “Get down, get naked, get savage.” - Ron Carlson

27. “Writing is like a lump of coal. Put it under enough pressure and polish it enough and you might just end up with a diamond. Otherwise, you can burn it to keep warm.” - A.J. Dalton

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

29. “You can only write by putting words on a paper one at a time.” - Sandra Brown

30. “Only something extremely dire and disabling will ever stop a real writer from writing. Retirement is never an option.” - Warren Adler

31. “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

32. “Be prepared to work hard to be a writer.” - Sandra Brown

33. “Life is not a submarine.” - Anne Lamott

34. “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

35. “People say to write about what you know. I'm here to tell you, no one wants to read that, cos you don't know anything. So write about something you don't know. And don't be scared, ever.” - Toni Morrison

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. “Fiction---good fiction, anyway---is dream made flesh, given purpose and drive, and set on a quest to show us the best in us and to give us the power and the tools to dream beyond reality's 'merely good enough' to a vision of what is truly great......and then to give us the stories of men and women of character who in turn inspire those of us who dare to reach for the truly great within ourselves.THAT is why you write fiction.” - Holly Lisle

39. “Writers are born, not created.” - Tim Campbell

40. “Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.” - Neil Gaiman

41. “The true writer, the born writer, will scribble words on scraps of litter, the back of a bus tickets, on the wall of a cell.” - David Nicholls

42. “When I am grown up I shall carry a notebook—a fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases.” - Virginia Woolf

43. “From my writer's workshop, "Know when it's time to put everything you've got on the page. Then, rip open a vein and do it!” - Heather Burch

44. “Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite:"Fool!" said my muse to me, "look in thy heart, and write.” - Philip Sidney

45. “It's a great lesson about not being too precious about your writing. You have to try your hardest to be at the top of your game and improve every joke you can until the last possible second, and then you have to let it go. You can't be that kid standing at the top of the waterslide, overthinking it...You have to let people see what you wrote.” - Tina Fey

46. “Don't look back until you've written an entire draft, just begin each day from the last sentence you wrote the preceding day. This prevents those cringing feelings, and means that you have a substantial body of work before you get down to the real work which is all in ... the edit."[Ten rules for writing fiction (part two), The Guardian, 20 February 2010]” - Will Self

47. “Ten good lines out of four hundred, Emily—comparatively good, that is—and all the rest balderdash—balderdash, Emily.""I—suppose so," said Emily faintly.Her eyes brimmed with tears—her lips quivered. She could not help it. Pride was hopelessly submerged in the bitterness of her disappointment. She felt exactly like a candle that somebody had blown out."What are you crying for? demanded Mr. Carpenter.Emily blinked away tears and tried to laugh."I—I'm sorry—you think it's no good—" she said.Mr. Carpenter gave the desk a mighty thump."No good! Didn't I tell you there were ten good lines? Jade, for ten righteous men Sodom had been spared.""Do you mean—that—after all—" The candle was being relighted again."Of course, I mean. If at thirteen you can write ten good lines, at twenty you'll write ten times ten—if the gods are kind. Stop messing over months, though—and don't imagine you're a genius, either, if you have written ten decent lines. I think there's something trying to speak through you—but you'll have to make yourself a fit instrument for it. You've got to work hard and sacrifice—by gad, girl, you've chosen a jealous goddess. And she never lets her votaries go—not even when she shuts her ears forever to their plea.” - L.M. Montgomery

48. “Imagination? It is the one thing beside honesty that a good writer must have. The more he learns from experience the more he can imagine.” - Ernest Hemingway

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

50. “No good story is quite true.” - Leslie Stephen

51. “about clichés. Avoid them like the plague.” - Khaled Hosseini

52. “I never presume to give advice on writing. I think the best way to learn to write is to read booksand stories by bood writers. It's a hard thing to preach about. As Thelonious Monk once said abouthis field, "Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.” - Maureen Dowd

53. “Try any goddam thing you like, no matter how boringly normal or outrageous. If it works, fine. If it doesn't, toss it. Toss it even if you love it.” - Stephen King

54. “People say that writers write for money. From my own experience that's not true. I write for me. I publish for money.” - Greg Curtis

55. “To be a successful fiction writer you have to write well, write a lot … and let ‘em know you’ve written it! Then rinse and repeat.” - Gerard de Marigny

56. “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

57. “Language does not always have to wear a tie and lace-up shoes. The object of fiction isn't grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story … to make him/her forget, whenever possible, that he/she is reading a story at all.” - Stephen King - On Writing

58. “I'm going to write a novel and get it published. I'm going to do it because writing a novel is worthwhile and because I have the talent to do it.I'm going to do it because I have something important to say to the world.I refuse to let anything get in my way.” - Randy Ingermanson

59. “. . . But then you will want to put that {publication} behind you right away. You will want to recover the obscurity you swim best through. You've got eternal youth there. You'll never be satisfied. If you get lucky, it will be a darkness so pure it will mirror not the 'self,' but the mysterious 'other.” - Louis B. Jones

60. “Writing a book is a blood sport. If it doesn't hurt when you're done, you're probably doing something wrong.” - Kevis Hendrickson

61. “Keep working. Keep trying. Keep believing. You still might not make it, but at least you gave it your best shot. If you don’t have calluses on your soul, this isn’t for you. Take up knitting instead.” - David Eddings

62. “I have an idea and a first line -- and that suggests the rest of it. I have little concept of what I’m going to say, or where it’s going. I have some idea of how long it’s going to be -- but not what will happen or what the themes will be. That’s the intrigue of doing it -- it’s a process of discovery. You get to discover what you’re going to say and what it’s going to mean.” - T.C. Boyle

63. “Shut up, Ray.” - Henry Kuttner

64. “...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

65. “...you do violence with your words if you force them - art is given - the words received, moment by moment from unseen hands - call it a Muse ...” - John Geddes

66. “...some writers closet themselves - I write wherever I am because that's where life is happening ...” - John Geddes

67. “You cherry-pick events that are relevant to the story question and construct a gauntlet of challenge (read: the plot) that will force the protagonist to put his money where his mouth is. Think baptism by ever-escalating fire.” - Lisa Cron

68. “Each thing you add to your story is a drop of paint falling into clear water; it spreads through and colors everything.” - Lisa Cron

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. “... 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

72. “Perhaps the hardest thing in all literature— at least I have found it so: by no voluntary effort can I accomplish it: I have to take it as it comes— is to write anything original. And perhaps the easiest is, when once an original line has been struck out, to follow it up, and to write any amount more to the same tune.” - Lewis Carroll

73. “...a writer should not so much write as embroider on paper; the work should be painstaking, laborious.” - Anton Chekhov

74. “Writing is the act of discovery.” - Natalie Goldberg

75. “Avoid stock expressions (like the plague, as William Safire used to say) and repetitions. Don't say that as a boy your grandmother used to read to you, unless at that stage of her life she really was a boy, in which case you have probably thrown away a better intro. If something is worth hearing or listening to, it's very probably worth reading. So, this above all: Find your own voice.” - Christopher Hitchens

76. “I've tried to explain to people that I don't 'love' writing any more than I 'love' breathing. It's something I do and it's something I need. If I thought about it as a love/hate thing, I probably would have quit long ago. And then died.” - Allison M. Dickson

77. “Upon the one thing every writer absolutely must have, and that is intellectual curiosity.” - Phillip Athans

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

79. “Poetic license is not a license to scribe recklessly.” - C. Kennedy

80. “Bastam poucas palavras para escrever uma história e apenas uma pessoa para a ler.” - Fernando Guerreiro

81. “Speed is not always a constituent to great work, the process of creation should be given time and thought.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

82. “Hindi para sa tamad ang pagsusulat dahil pag 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 Stainless Longganisa

83. “...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

84. “I tell everyone who asks me about writing...almost everyone has an idea for a book, and some even have a great ending, but it's that 290 or so pages in between that are tough!” - Brooklyn Hudson

85. “The beautiful unruliness of literature is what makes it so much fun to wander through: you read Jane Austen and you say, oh, that is IT. And then you turn around and read Sterne, and you say, Man, that is IT. And then you wander across a century or so, and you run into Kafka, or Calvino, or Cortazar, and you say, well that is IT. And then you stroll through what Updike called the grottos of Ulysses, and after that you consort with Baldwin or Welty or Spencer, or Morrison, or Bellow or Fitzgerald and then back to W. Shakespeare, Esq; the champ, and all the time you feel the excitement of being in the presence of IT. And when you yourself spend the good time writing, you are not different in kind than any of these people, you are part of that miracle of human invention. So get to work. Get on with IT, no matter how difficult IT is. Every single gesture, every single stumble, every single uninspired-feeling hour, is worth IT." Richard Bausch” - Kathy Fish

86. “Writing is a muscle. Smaller than a hamstring and slightly bigger than a bicep, and it needs to be exercised to get stronger. Think of your words as reps, your paragraphs as sets, your pages as daily workouts. Think of your laptop as a machine like the one at the gym where you open and close your inner thighs in front of everyone, exposing both your insecurities and your genitals. Because that is what writing is all about.” - Colin Nissan

87. “...if you want your own distinctive voice, you first have to become someone...” - John Geddes

88. “...my writing is a wild mustang - more thunderous than a lightning storm -and all my skill which I call art, is devoted to simply staying on...” - John Geddes

89. “...is the writer a prophet or priest - does he show the truth or serve the truth?...” - John Geddes

90. “...it's merely writing, but you have to adjust your ear – I speak quietly – I sob – I whisper...” - John Geddes

91. “...people quote proverbs without realizing they're really in awe of the authority of their truth and the power of their expression...” - John Geddes

92. “...how many writers still dare compare a woman to Nature, like Campion? - there is a garden in her face - how lovely...” - John Geddes

93. “Go where the pain is, go where the pleasure is.” - Anne Rice

94. “Don't let yourself slip and get any perfect characters... keep them people, people, people, and don't let them get to be symbols.” - Ernest Hemingway

95. “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

96. “I honestly think in order to be a writer, you have to learn to be reverent. If not, why are you writing? Why are you here? Let's think of reverence as awe, as presence in and openness to the world. The alternative is that we stultify, we shut down. Think of those times when you've read prose or poetry that is presented in such a way that you have a fleeting sense of being startled by beauty or insight, by a glimpse into someone's soul. All of a sudden everything seems to fit together or at least to have some meaning for a moment. This is our goal as writers, I think; to help others have this sense of -- please forgive me -- wonder, of seeing things anew, things that can catch us off guard, that break in on our small, bordered worlds.” - Anne Lamott

97. “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

98. “If you can't stand your own company alone in a room for long hours, or, when it gets tough, the feeling of being in a locked cell, or, when it gets tougher still, the vague feeling of being buried alive--then don't be a writer.” - Graham Swift

99. “Problem, purpose, conflict, goal. Use them. Think about them while you are in the planning phase of your novel; keep these elements at the back of your mind to guide you while you write. When you have written a scene, make sure they are all there, or that if one or another is missing, it is intentional and the effect is what you want.” - Phyllis A. Whitney

100. “There are two moments worthwhile in writing, the one when you start and the other when you throw it in the waste-paper basket.” - Samuel Beckett

101. “One should write only those books from whose absence one suffers. In short: the ones you want on your own desk.” - Marina Tsvetaeva

102. “Be daring, take on anything. Don’t labor over little cameo works in which every word is to be perfect. Technique holds a reader from sentence to sentence, but only content will stay in his mind.” - Joyce Carol Oates

103. “If you want to write, you can. Fear stops most people from writing, not lack of talent, whatever that is. Who am I? What right have I to speak? Who will listen to me if I do? You’re a human being, with a unique story to tell, and you have every right. If you speak with passion, many of us will listen. We need stories to live, all of us. We live by story. Yours enlarges the circle.” - Richard Rhodes

104. “Prefer the familiar word to the far-fetched. Prefer the concrete word to the abstract. Prefer the single word to the circumlocution. Prefer the short word to the long. Prefer the Saxon word to the Romance.” - Henry Fowler

105. “Often when he was teaching me to write in Greek, the Fox would say, "Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that is the whole art and joy of words." A glib saying.” - C.S. Lewis

106. “You can’t just come out and say what you have to say. That’s what people do on airplanes, when a man plops down next to you in the aisle seat of your flight to New York, spills peanuts all over the place (back when the cheapskate airlines at least gave you peanuts), and tells you about what his boss did to him the day before. You know how your eyes glaze over when you hear a story like that? That’s because of the way he’s telling his story. You need a good way to tell your story.” - Adair Lara

107. “Write as though your life depended on it.” - Jill Telford

108. “An author needs a lot more than one person to succumb to his literary seductive charms, but, like Saul, he must realize that he doesn't have to--and indeed cannot--capture the hearts of every possible reader out there. No matter who the writer, his ideal intended audience is only a small faction of all the living readers. Name the most widely read authors you can think of--from Shakespeare, Austen, and Dickens to Robert Waller, Stephen King, and J.K. Rowling--and the immense majority of book-buyers out there actively decline to read them.” - Thomas McCormack

109. “Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating.” - Pixar's 22 Rules of Storytelling

110. “Biographies are best when written chronologically. Boring people don't make for good biographies.” - Deana J. Driver

111. “Let us not neglect the forbidden. Let us not sophisticate ourselves out of the cheap thrill and chill of it: the story told for perversity's sake, and all the better for that; the image created because an artist gets tired of reasons sometimes, and wants to dredge up some picture he's been haunted by, and parade it like a new tattoo. I go with it, readily.” - Clive Barker

112. “Maybe those sailors will write bad poems, but the same men would have kept dull diaries, too. The problem has to do not with the evidence but with the witness. The point is not the adventure but the adventurer. Reality cannot be directly rendered. Reality is a pile of bricks that can assume many forms.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

113. “The beauty of Goodreads is that you know you’re sowing in a field where everyone, by definition and self-selection, loves to read.” - Guy Kawasaki

114. “Do you know what the difference is between PR and advertising? Advertising is when you say how great you are. PR is when other people say how great you are. PR is better.” - Guy Kawasaki

115. “Good writing just isn't that common.” - Eric Flint

116. “It is only when you open your veins and bleed onto the page a little that you establish contact with your reader. If you do not believe in the characters or the story you are doing at that moment with all your mind, strength, and will, if you don't feel joy and excitement while writing it, then you're wasting good white paper, even if it sells, because there are other ways in which a writer can bring in the rent money besides writing bad or phony stories.” - Paul Gallico