134 Inspiring Writing Quotes

In the vast world of literature, where words have the power to transport us to different realms, showcase the depths of human emotion, and ignite our creativity, a few well-chosen quotes can make all the difference. Whether you're an aspiring writer seeking motivation, a seasoned author in need of a reminder of your purpose, or simply a lover of the written word, our curated collection of the top 134 inspiring writing quotes is here to uplift and inspire you. Dive into the wisdom of renowned authors and let their words fuel your next masterpiece.

1. “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

2. “What difference does it make if you live in a picturesque little outhouse surrounded by 300 feeble minded goats and your faithful dog? The question is: Can you write?” - Ernest Hemingway

3. “Nothing quite has reality for me till I write it all down--revising and embellishing as I go. I'm always waiting for things to be over so I can get home and commit them to paper.” - Erica Jong

4. “Nothing's a better cure for writer's block than to eat ice cream right out of the carton.” - Don Roff

5. “There's no such thing as perfect writing, just like there's no such thing as perfect despair.” - Haruki Murakami

6. “I just knew there were stories I wanted to tell.” - Octavia E. Butler

7. “After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.” - Philip Pullman

8. “Literature was not born the day when a boy crying "wolf, wolf" came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels; literature was born on the day when a boy came crying "wolf, wolf" and there was no wolf behind him.” - Vladimir Nabokov

9. “If you write books, you go on one page at a time. We turn from all we know and all we fear. We study catalogues, watch football games, choose Sprint over AT&T. We count the birds in the sky and will not turn from the window when we hear the footsteps behind as something comes up the hall; we say yes, I agree that clouds often look like other things - fish and unicorns and men on horseback - but they are really only clouds. Even when the lightning flashes inside them we say they are only clouds and turn our attention to the next meal, the next pain, the next breath, the next page.This is how we go on.” - Stephen King

10. “JEANI need him like the axe needs the turkey.HARRINGTONDon't be vulgar, Jean. Let us be crooked, but never common.” - Preston Sturges

11. “I could not think without writing.” - Jean Piaget

12. “A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled.” - Raymond Chandler

13. “The generalizing writer is like the passionate drunk, stumbling into your house mumbling: I know I'm not being clear, exactly, but don't you kind of feel what I'm feeling?” - George Saunders

14. “IntoxicatedWith the madnessI'm in love withMy sadnessBullshit beggars, enchanted kingdomFashion victims through their charcoaled teeth” - Billy Corgan

15. “All the time she writing the world had continued.” - Virginia Woolf

16. “Who you are contributes to your poetry in a number of important ways, but you shouldn't identify with your poems so closely that when they are cut, you're the one that bleeds.” - Dorianne Laux

17. “End with an image and don't explain.” - Stanley Kunitz

18. “Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing.” - E.L. Doctorow

19. “If you want to change the world, pick up your pen and write.” - Martin Luther

20. “Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.” - Truman Capote

21. “All I need is a sheet of paperand something to write with, and thenI can turn the world upside down.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

22. “If a man comes to the door of poetry untouched by the madness of the Muses, believing that technique alone will make him a good poet, he and his sane compositions never reach perfection, but are utterly eclipsed by the performances of the inspired madman.” - Socrates

23. “When I write, I don't translate for white readers.... Dostoevski wrote for a Russian audience, but we're able to read him. If I'm specific, and I don't overexplain, then anyone can overhear me.” - Toni Morrison

24. “The ‘experimental’ writer, then, is simply following the story’s commands to the best of his human ability. The writer is not the story, the story is the story. See? Sometimes this is very hard to accept and sometimes too easy. On the one hand, there’s the writer who can’t face his fate: that the telling of a story has nothing at all to do with him; on the other hand, there’s the one who faces it too well: that the telling of the story has nothing at all to do with him” - Thomas Ligotti

25. “I would not employ an author to referee a Ping-Pong match. By their very nature they are biased and bloody-minded. Better put a fox in a henhouse than to ask an author to judge his peers. (in a letter to the Governor General about the GA's Literary Awards & his issue--among others--with the judging system, 1981)” - Jack McClelland

26. “Mr Earbrass was virtually asleep when several lines of verse passed through his mind and left it hopelessly awake. Here was the perfect epigraph for TUH:A horrid ?monster has been [something] delay'dBy your/their indiff'rence in the dank brown shadeBelow the garden...His mind's eye sees them quoted on the bottom third of a right-hand page in a (possibly) olive-bound book he read at least five years ago. When he does find them, it will be a great nuisance if no clue is given to their authorship.” - Edward Gorey

27. “After a long while he sat upright with great effort, exhaled a sigh and reached for a clean sheet of lined paper, smoothing it out on the desk. He unscrewed the lid of his fountain pen, laid it perpendicular to his paper, and began to write. Often he compared his writing to white water. He had only to leap in to be dragged away on its rapids, thrown this way and that with his own will rendered impotent. While writing he found the words came from the muscles in his hands, the feel of the shaft of his pen, the locked joint of his elbow. the scratching noise of the nib marking paper and, underneath all that, some coordinating impulse in his guts. Certainly not from his mind.” - Ali Shaw

28. “It's as hard to get from almost finished to finished as to get from beginning to almost done.” - Elinor Fuchs

29. “What things there are to write, if one could only write them! My mind is full of gleaming thoughts; gay moods and mysterious, moth-like meditations hover in my imagination, fanning their painted wings. They would make my fortune if I could catch them; but always the rarest, those freaked with azure and the deepest crimson, flutter away beyond my reach.” - Logan Pearsall Smith

30. “An artist is someone who can hold two opposing viewpoints and still remain fully functional.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

31. “Just because we're fictional characters doesn't mean you can pick us up and move us anywhere you want.--the people of Lake Woebegon” - Garrison Keillor

32. “Books aren’t made in the way that babies are: they are made like pyramids, There’s some long-pondered plan, and then great blocks of stone are placed one on top of the other, and it’s back-breaking, sweaty, time consuming work. And all to no purpose! It just stands like that in the desert! But it towers over it prodigiously. Jackals piss at the base of it, and bourgeois clamber to the top of it, etc. Continue this comparison.” - Gustave Flaubert

33. “In my profession it isn’t a question of telling good literature from bad. Really good literature is seldom appreciated in its own day. The best authors die poor, the bad ones make money — it’s always been like that. What do I, an agent, get out of a literary genius who won’t be discovered for another hundred years? I’ll be dead myself then. Successful incompetents are what I need.” - Walter Moers

34. “There is an art of reading, as well as an art of thinking, and an art of writing.” - Isaac D'Israeli

35. “A lie was something you told because you were mean or a coward. A story was something you made up out of something that might have happened. Only you didn't tell it like it was, you told it like you thought it should have been.” - Betty Smith

36. “To me, all creativity is magic. Ideas start out in the empty void of your head - and they end up as a material thing, like a book you can hold in your hand. That is the magical process. It's an alchemical thing. Yes, we do get the gold out of it but that's not the most important thing. It's the work itself.” - Alan Moore

37. “The hospital bulked darkly in the darkness.” - William T. Vollmann

38. “To you I am neither man nor woman. I come before you as an author only. It is the sole standard by which you have a right to judge me--the sole ground on which I accept your judgment.” - Charlotte Brontë

39. “What I try to do is write. I may write for two weeks ‘the cat sat on the mat, that is that, not a rat,’.... And it might be just the most boring and awful stuff. But I try. When I’m writing, I write. And then it’s as if the muse is convinced that I’m serious and says, ‘Okay. Okay. I’ll come.” - Maya Angelou

40. “She looked at her hand: Just some hand, holding a cheap pen. Some girls’ hand. She had nothing to do with that hand. Let that hand do whatever it wanted to.” - Cynthia Voigt

41. “If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn't matter a damn how you write.” - W. Somerset Maugham

42. “Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple “I must,” then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your whole life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse. Then come close to Nature. Then, as if no one had ever tried before, try to say what you see and feel and love and lose......Describe your sorrows and desires, the thoughts that pass through your mind and your belief in some kind of beauty - describe all these with heartfelt, silent, humble sincerity and, when you express yourself, use the Things around you, the images from your dreams, and the objects that you remember. If your everyday life seems poor, don’t blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is not poverty and no poor, indifferent place. And even if you found yourself in some prison, whose walls let in none of the world’s sounds – wouldn’t you still have your childhood, that jewel beyond all price, that treasure house of memories? Turn your attentions to it. Try to raise up the sunken feelings of this enormous past; your personality will grow stronger, your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes by, far in the distance. - And if out of this turning-within, out of this immersion in your own world, poems come, then you will not think of asking anyone whether they are good or not. Nor will you try to interest magazines in these works: for you will see them as your dear natural possession, a piece of your life, a voice from it. A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it.” - Rainer Maria Rilke

43. “Ideas come at any moment -- except when you demand them. Most ideas come while I'm physically active, at the gym, with friends, gardening, so I always carry pen and paper.My first draft is always written in longhand. But once the first dozen chapters, more like short stories, are written, then momentum builds until I can't leave the project until it's done.” - Chuck Palahniuk

44. “In my craft or sullen artExercised in the still nightWhen only the moon ragesAnd the lovers lie abedWith all their griefs in their arms,I labour by singing lightNot for ambition or breadOr the strut and trade of charmsOn the ivory stagesBut for the common wagesOf their most secret heart.Not for the proud man apartFrom the raging moon I writeOn these spindrift pagesNor for the towering deadWith their nightingales and psalmsBut for the lovers, their armsRound the griefs of the ages,Who pay no praise or wagesNor heed my craft or art.” - Dylan Thomas

45. “Create a guidebook of creative dreamsYou can use a blank book or just blank paper clipped together. Put photographs or scraps from magazines in that represent your creative dreams. Draw, scribble, or paint in between the images. Make a list of creative dreams you've thought of or admire in others. ” - Susan Ariel Rainbow Kennedy (SARK)

46. “He loved that she eschewed cursive for print, as he did. Cursive, more than anything, betrayed a person's age.” - Sheri Holman

47. “(T)hey were at ease with each other, which was essential to a productive workshop.” - Jincy Willett

48. “The only end of writing is to enable readers better to enjoy life or better to endure it.” - Samuel Johnson

49. “If I didn't have writing, I'd be running down the street hurling grenades in people's faces.” - Paul Fussell

50. “If I didn't know the ending of a story, I wouldn't begin. I always write my last lines, my last paragraph first, and then I go back and work towards it. I know where I'm going. I know what my goal is. And how I get there is God's grace.” - Katherine Ann Porter

51. “Stop talking about it and just WRITE!” - CK Webb

52. “If you’re going to be a writer, the first essential is just to write. Do not wait for an idea. Start writing something and the ideas will come. You have to turn the faucet on before the water starts to flow.” - Louis L'Amour

53. “We all know writing is a reclusive, lonely endeavour. It just is. But nobody writes alone.” - Iain Reid

54. “Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.” - Stephen King

55. “I write to reach eternity” - James Jones

56. “It was only after two years' work that it occurred to me that I was a writer. I had no particular expectation that the novel would ever be published, because it was sort of a mess. It was only when I found myself writing things I didn't realise I knew that I said, 'I'm a writer now.' The novel had become an incentive to deeper thinking. That's really what writing is—an intense form of thought.” - Don DeLillo

57. “The only impeccable writers are those who never wrote.” - William Hazlitt

58. “It can be depressing when no one takes interest, and a lack of response makes the writer question why they’re writing at all. To have one’s writing rejected is like you, yourself, are being rejected. ” - Lizz Clements

59. “I only knew what was in my mind, and I wished to express it clearly” - Ulysses S. Grant

60. “We lose everything because everything remains except us. And therefore any form of posterity may be an affront, and perhaps any memory, as well.” - Javier Marías

61. “If you have a story that seems worth telling, and you think you can tell it worthily, then the thing for you to do is to tell it, regardless of whether it has to do with sex, sailors or mounted policemen.” - Dashiell Hammett

62. “It's wonderful to look back at our old writing and cringe. It simply means we have grown and can write better now. And you found some parts you can be proud of, so when you throw the old writing on the floor and stomp on it, remember to celebrate those seeds of genius and be glad that you're still writing.” - Jeanne Voelker

63. “In less than an hour I have to hold class for a group of idiot freshmen. And, on a desk in the living room, is a mountain of midterm examinations with essays I must suffer through, feeling my stomach turn at their paucity of intelligence, their adolescent phraseology. And all that tripe, all those miles of hideous prose, had been would into an eternal skein in his head. And there it sat unraveling into his own writing until he wondered if he could stand the thought of living anymore. I have digested the worst, he thought. Is it any wonder that I exude it piecemeal? (“Mad House”)” - Richard Matheson

64. “Ptají se známého spisovatele, co právě píše. Odpoví, že cestopis o Jižní Africe. „Jak to? Vždyť jste tam nikdy nebyl!“ „A byl snad Dante v pekle?” - neznámý

65. “So you got rid of your astonishment that someone could write so much more dynamically than you. You stopped cherishing your aloneness and poetic differentness to your delicately flat little bosom. You said: she's to good to forget. How about making her a friend and competitor — you could learn alot from her. So you'll try. So maybe she'll laugh in your face. So maybe she'll beat you hollow in the end. So anyhow, you'll try, and maybe, possibly, she can stand you. Here's hoping!” - Sylvia Plath

66. “I'm a writer and this is what I do no matter what name we put to it. Year by year, the world is turning into a darker and stranger place than any of us could want. This is the only thing I do that has potential to shine a little further than my immediate surroundings. For me, each story is a little candle held up to the dark of night, trying to illuminate the hope for a better world where we all respect and care for each other.” - Charles de Lint

67. “It has been well said that an author who expects results from a first novel is in a position similar to that of a man who drops a rose petal down the Grand Canyon of Arizona and listens for the echo.” - P.G. Wodehouse

68. “If you have a dream, keep it. But write it down and take appropriate actions to see it manifest.” - T.F. Hodge

69. “Novelty. Security. Novelty wouldn't be a bad title. It had the grandness of abstraction, alerting the reader that large and thoughtful things were to be bodied forth. As yet he had no inkling of any incidents or characters that might occupy his theme; perhaps he never would. He could see though the book itself, he could feel its closed heft and see it opened, white pages comfortably large and shadowed gray by print; dense, numbered, full of meat. He sensed a narrative voice, speaking calmly and precisely, with immense assurance building, building; a voice too far off for him to hear, but speaking. ("Novelty")” - John Crowley

70. “Murphy is a writer's best friend, but you have to keep an eye on him, or he'll steal the silver.” - Patricia C. Wrede

71. “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

72. “A true writer is someone the gods have called to the task.” - Robert Louis Stevenson

73. “I have a sense of exile from thought, a nostalgia of the quiet room and balanced mind. I am a writer, and there comes a time when that which I write has to belong to me, has to be written alone and in silence, with no one looking over my shoulder, no one telling me a better way to write it. It doesn't have to be great writing, it doesn't even have to be terribly good. It just has to be mine.” - Raymond Chandler

74. “Goals are dreams with a deadline.” - Napolean Hill

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

76. “We are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter” - Allen Ginsberg

77. “To make a deliberate falsification for personal gain is the last, worst depth to which either scholar or artist can descend in work or life.(Letter to Muriel St. Clare Byrne, 8 September 1935)” - Dorothy L. Sayers

78. “Sure, it's simple writing for kids…just as simple as bringing them up.” - Ursula K. LeGuin

79. “It's best to have your tools with you. If you don't, you're apt to find something you didn't expect and get discouraged.” - Stephen King

80. “Everything I've written up to this point is crap. Now I'm going to write the real one” - Ted Dekker

81. “[W]hat is one to say of the writer who lies when he writes that he is lying?” - j.m.g. le clezio

82. “If you wish to be a writer, write.” - Epictetus

83. “I have sat here at my desk, day after day, night after night, a blank sheet of paper before me, unable to lift my pen, trembling and weeping too.” - Susan Hill

84. “And why don't you write? Write! Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it. I know why you haven't written. (And why I didn't write before the age of twenty-seven.) Because writing is at once too high, too great for you, it's reserved for the great-that is for "great men"; and it's "silly."Besides, you've written a little, but in secret. And it wasn't good, because it was in secret, and because you punished yourself for writing, because you didn't go all the way, or because you wrote, irresistibly, as when we would masturbate in secret, not to go further, but to attenuate the tension a bit, just enough to take the edge off. And then as soon as we come, we go and make ourselves feel guilty-so as to be forgiven; or to forget, to bury it until the next time.” - Hélène Cixous

85. “At the evident risk of seeming ridiculous, I want to begin by saying that I have tried for much of my life to write as if I was composing my sentences to be read posthumously. I hope this isn't too melodramatic or self-centred a way of saying that I attempt to write as if I did not care what reviewers said, what peers thought, or what prevailing opinions may be.” - Christopher Hitchens

86. “I don't think everyone wants to create the great American novel, but we all have a dream of telling our stories-of realizing what we think, feel, and see before we die. Writing is a path to meet ourselves and become intimate.” - Natalie Goldberg

87. “For the length of time it takes to write a book, you need to believe that you’re the only writer in existence; the only one who matters. You need to shut yourself away and allow the creativity to build up, not leak out through worry and comparisons and doubt.” - Martin Cosgrove

88. “I’ve always believed writing ads is the second most profitable form of writing. The first is ransom notes…” - Phil Dusenberry

89. “Writing means not just staring ugliness in the face, but finding a way to embrace it.” - Veronica Roth

90. “There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong.” - Neil Gaiman

91. “Writers Are Insane. For months we are lone wolves locked in our caves. Then overnight we become publicity hounds. It's a schizophrenic business.” - Robert Mykle

92. “It is almost possible to measure a writer's skill by the dexterity with which he repeats, and yet avoids monotony.” - George G. Williams

93. “take a writer away from his typewriterand all you have leftisthe sicknesswhich started himtypingin thebeginning” - Charles Bukowski

94. “Writing isn't easy because you have to relieve the most painful moments of your life, over and over again, and then you have to write them down, hoping that they’ll matter to someone else other than yourself.” - Cristian Mihai

95. “The best thing about writing fiction is that moment where the story catches fire and comes to life on the page, and suddenly it all makes sense and you know what it’s about and why you’re doing it and what these people are saying and doing, and you get to feel like both the creator and the audience. Everything is suddenly both obvious and surprising… and it’s magic and wonderful and strange.” - Neil Gaiman

96. “I'm a fiction writer not by choice, but by necessity. It's the only way I can say what I want without having to admit it's the truth.” - Jack Tate

97. “I write to keep the characters in my head from driving me crazy.” - A.A. Cheshire

98. “But I tell you, nothing is pointless, and nothing is meaningless if the artist will face it. And it’s his business to face it. He hasn’t got the right to sidestep it like that. Human life itself may be almost pure chaos, but the work of the artist—the only thing he’s good for—is to take these handfuls of confusion and disparate things, things that seem to be irreconcilable, and put them together in a frame to give them some kind of shape and meaning. Even if it’s only his view of a meaning. That’s what he’s for—to give his view of life. Surely, we understand very little of what is happening to us at any given moment. But by remembering, comparing, waiting to know the consequences, we can sometimes see what an event really meant, what it was trying to teach us.” - Katherine Ann Porter

99. “All the friends in the world are in the fountain of a pen.” - Michelle Franklin

100. “The more we are willing to separate from distraction and step into the open arms of boredom, the more writing will get on the page.” - Ann Patchett

101. “Flow is something the reader experiences, not the writer.” - Verlyn Klinkenborg

102. “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

103. “How do you write about something, even something real and painful-like suicide-when all of the writing that's been done on that subject has robbed you of any originality of expression?” - Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

104. “I’ve always believed that as an author, I do 50% of the work of storytelling, and the reader does the other 50%. There’s no way I can control the story you tell yourself from my book. Your own experiences, preferences, prejudices, mood at the moment, current events in your life, needs and wants influence how you read my every word.” - Shannon Hale

105. “WRITER'S NIGHTMARE""I felt a grip on my arm that shook my body, forcefully pulling me toward a tunnel of darkness.   The threat of consciousness stole my steady breath. For a moment I believed myself to be under siege; ripped from the sky in mid flight, my wings useless against the monstrous claws shredding my reality. I struggled to remain, to be left alone, aloft.  Reaching with wings that through the power of imagination were suddenly feathered arms, I grabbed at the air.  My hands clutched at something solid.  Wooden.  A desk.  My head spun as I held the furniture, suffering the illusion of falling.  "I was flying," I gasped, realizing suddenly that it had all been a dream. "My best fantasy ever." Lifting my head from its resting spot on the writing desk, I worked mentally to secure the fading images, hoping to capture their essence to memory before they faded away forever.  Bitterness tainted my heart against the hand that had jerked me into sensibility.  Why was I always so callously awakened while doing my best work?  Why not let me dream?” - Richelle E. Goodrich

106. “Ah, I do so love this charmingly rustic, elvin kingdom!-Baozhai” - Mar Mai

107. “I don't know what I was hoping for. Some small praise, I guess. A bit of encouragement. I didn't get it. Miss Parrish took me aside one day after school let out. She said she'd read my stories and found them morbid and dispiriting. She said literature was meant to uplift the heart and that a young woman such as myself ought to turn her mind to topics more cheerful and inspiring than lonely hermits and dead children."Look around yourself, Mathilda," she said. "At the magnificence of nature. It should inspire joy and awe. Reverence. Respect. Beautiful thoughts and fine words."I had looked around. I'd seen all the things she'd spoken of and more besides. I'd seen a bear cub lift it's face to the drenching spring rains. And the sliver moon of winter, so high and blinding. I'd seen the crimson glory of a stand of sugar maples in autumn and the unspeakable stillness of a mountain lake at dawn. I'd seen them and loved them. But I'd also seen the dark of things. The starved carcasses of winter deer. The driving fury of a blizzard wind. And the gloom that broods under the pines always. Even on the brightest days.” - Jennifer Donnelly

108. “I wrote. I wrote all the things I couldn’t say to him. I wrote about how much I believed in us. I wrote about how much I trusted God. I wrote that I was praying for him. I wrote down all the jokes I could remember, which weren’t many.” - Kimberly Novosel

109. “If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good” - Ezra Pound

110. “Words are precious things meant to create, to imagine, to dream with.” - Elizabeth Chandler

111. “I'm a struggling writer, I'm struggling to convince people I'm a writer.” - Tom Conrad

112. “...writing surrounds us: it's not something we do just in school or on the job but something that is as familiar and everyday as a pair of worn sneakers or the air we breathe.” - Andrea A. Lunsford

113. “I don’t know if you have had the same experience, but the snag I always come up against when I’m telling a story is this dashed difficult problem of where to begin it.” - P.G. Wodehouse

114. “I’ve never written for kids… I’m just trying to tap into the kid in myself & just go with my taste.” - Andrew Stanton

115. “It wasn't until I was 37 that I grasped the great truth that you've got to write your own books and nobody else's, and then everything followed from there.” - William Golding

116. “Even when I ran my bar I followed the same policy. A lot of customers came to the bar. If one in ten enjoyed the place and said he'd come again, that was enough. If one out of ten was a repeat customer, then the business would survive. To put it another way, it didn't matter if nine out of ten didn't like my bar. This realization lifted a weight off my shoulders. Still, I had to make sure that the one person who did like the place really liked it. In order to make sure he did, I had to make my philosophy and stance clear-cut, and patiently maintain that stance no matter what. This is what I learned through running a business.” - Haruki Murakami

117. “There's not enough coffee in the world to fuel all the books I want to write” - Chris Stocking

118. “Writing has always been a serious business for me. I felt it was a moral obligation. A major concern of the time was the absence of the African voice. Being part of that dialogue meant not only sitting at the table but effectively telling the African story from an African perspective - in full earshot of the world.” - Chinua Achebe

119. “I never plan. I never know what the next page is going to be..... But that’s the fun of writing a novel or a story, because I don’t know what’s going to happen next.” - Haruki Murakami

120. “A writer's mind is a place where demons fight angels in disguise.” - Ram Vignesh

121. “Some writers, notably Anton Chekov, argue that all characters must be admirable, because once we've looked at anyone deeply enough and understood their motivation we must identify with them rather than judge them.” - Scarlett Thomas

122. “Whether or not you employ humor in dealing with difficult subjects, the tone of the writing is of the utmost importance. Personally, I can read about almost any subject if I feel a basic trust in, and respect for, the writer. The voice must have authority. But more than that, I must know that the writer is all right. If she describes a suicide attempt or a babysitter's cruelty to her, or a time of acute loneliness, I need to feel that the writer, not the character who survived the experience, is in control of telling the story....The tone of such pieces may be serious, ironic, angry, sad, or almost anything except whiny. There must be no hidden plea for help - no subtle seeking of sympathy. The writer must have done her work, made her peace with the facts, and be telling the story for the story's sake. Although the writing may incidentally turn out to be another step in her recovery, that must not be her visible motivation: literary writing is not therapy. Her first allegiance must be to the telling of the story and I, as the reader, must feel that I'm in the hands of a competent writer who needs nothing from me except my attention.” - Judith Barrington

123. “Sit and quiet yourself. Luxuriate in a certain memory and the details will come. Let the images flow. You'll be amazed at what will come out on paper. I'm still learning what it is about the past that I want to write. I don't worry about it. It will emerge. It will insist on being told.” - Frank McCourt

124. “You start into it, inflamed by an idea, full of hope, full indeed of confidence. If you are properly modest, you will never write it at all, so there has to be one delicious moment when you have thought of something, know just how you are going to write it, rush for a pencil, and start buoyed up with exaltation. You then get into difficulties, don’t see your way out, and finally manage to accomplish more or less what you first meant to accomplish, though losing confidence all the time. Having finished it, you know it is absolutely rotten. A couple of months later, you wonder if it may not be all right after all.” - Agatha Christie

125. “If it pleases you and you can write at all, it's gonna please somebody else.” - Charlaine Harris

126. “In other words, if Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy showed more than their fair share of pathology it was due less to the requirements of their creative work than to the personal sufferings caused by the unhealthy conditions of a Russian society nearing collapse. If so many American poets and playwrights committed suicide or ended up addicted to drugs and alcohol it was not their creativity that did it but an artistic scene that promised much, gave few rewards and left nine out of ten artists neglected if not ignored.” - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

127. “It took me a long time to realise that there are two kinds of writing: the one you write and the one that writes you. The one that writes you is dangerous. You go where you don’t want to go. You look where you don’t want to look.” - Jeanette Winterson

128. “The key to good writing is to leave Boo Radley in the house until the end of the story.” - Michael P. Naughton

129. “The professional learns to recognize envy-driven criticism and to take it for what it is: the supreme compliment. The critic hates most that which he would have done himself if he had had the guts.” - Steven Pressfield

130. “I've never yet run out of ideas what to write about... only out of time to write it in.” - Rayne Hall

131. “Words have the greatest power to inflict everlasting pain. Words have the greatest power to heal the soul.” - Aneta Cruz

132. “Variety is definitely the spice of life but I love writing office romances (I was a secretary before I became a writer), because it's every girl's dream to meet that gorgeous hunky boss who sweeps her off her feet and takes her out of her dull routine.” - Helen Brooks

133. “In getting from Windsor to Detroit there is a choice between a free tunnel and a toll bridge, which turned out to be a short ride for a dollar, which I mentioned to the toll-collector who said, 'One of those things,' impelling me to remark to my cousin, 'Almost everything said by people one sees for only an instant is something like poetry. Precise, incisive, and just right, and the reason seems to be that there isn't time to talk prose. This suggests several things, the most important of which is probably that a writer ought not to permit himself to feel that he has all the time in the world in which to write his story or play or novel. He ought to set himself a time-limit, and the shorter the better. And he ought to do a lot of other things while he is working within this time-limit, so that he will always be under pressure, in a hurry, and therefore have neither the inclination nor the time to be fussy, which is the worst thing that happens to a book while it's being written.” - William Saroyan

134. “There comes a time in your life when you have to choose to turn the page, write another book or simply close it.” - Shannon L. Alder