3 Tips For Writing Quotes

Crafting the perfect quote can be a powerful tool for capturing an audience's attention, conveying complex ideas succinctly, and leaving a lasting impression. Whether you're seeking to inspire, motivate, or illustrate a point, well-written quotes can serve as memorable highlights in speeches, articles, or social media posts. In this post, we'll explore three essential tips for writing impactful quotes that resonate with your audience. Whether you're an aspiring writer, content creator, or simply someone who appreciates the art of words, these tips will help you hone your skills and create quotes that stand the test of time.

1. “Once you start thinking about the lies people tell when they don't know they're telling them, the truths people reveal when they think they're lying, then you can start to build a world.” - Sarah Rees Brennan

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

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

4. “I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb.” - Herman Melville

5. “I have always wanted to write a book that ended with the word 'mayonnaise.” - Richard Brautigan

6. “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

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

8. “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

9. “Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators.” - Abraham Lincoln

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

17. “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

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

19. “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” - Virginia Woolf

20. “Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.” - Mark Twain

21. “It is impossible to discourage the real writers - they don't give a damn what you say, they're going to write.” - Sinclair Lewis

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

23. “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

24. “The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.” - Blaise Pascal

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. “When King Lear dies in act five, do you know what Shakespeare has written? He has written, 'He dies.' No more. No fanfare, no metaphor, no brilliant final words. The culmination of the most influential piece of dramatic literature is, 'He dies.' Now I am not asking you to be happy at my leaving but all I ask you to do is to turn the page and let the next story begin.-- Mr. Magorium” - Suzanne Weyn

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

32. “If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed to trap them before they escape.” - Ray Bradbury

33. “Read like a butterfly, write like a bee.” - Philip Pullman

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

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

36. “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

37. “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

38. “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

39. “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

40. “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

41. “In the deepest hour of the night, confess to yourself that you would die if you were forbidden to write. And look deep into your heart where it spreads its roots, the answer, and ask yourself, must I write?” - Rainer Maria Rilke

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

43. “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

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

45. “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

46. “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

47. “As to the adjective: when in doubt, strike it out.” - Mark Twain

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

49. “Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.” - Truman Capote

50. “A book is not completed till it's read.” - Salman Rushdie

51. “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

52. “If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space.” - Joyce Carol Oates

53. “...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

54. “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

55. “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

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

57. “When someone is mean to me, I just make them a victim in my next book.” - Mary Higgins Clark

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

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

60. “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

61. “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

62. “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

63. “All I ask is that you do as well as you can, and remember that, while to write adverbs is human, to write he said or she said is divine.” - Stephen King

64. “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

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

66. “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

67. “- 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

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

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

70. “I am an author of Christian Fantasy. My first 7 books were Christian Romance, but I came over to the Dark Side when I heard there were cookies.” - Donita K. Paul

71. “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

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

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

74. “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

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

76. “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

77. “It's possible, in a poem or a short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things-- a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring-- with immense, even startling power. It is possible to write a line of seemingly innocuous dialogue and have it send a chill along the reader's spine-- the source of artistic delight, as Nabokov would have it. That's the kind of writing that most interests me.” - Raymond Carver

78. “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

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

80. “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

81. “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

82. “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

83. “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

84. “If I don't write it, they can't buy it.” - Connie Cox

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

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

87. “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

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

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

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

91. “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

92. “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

93. “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

94. “It’s a funny thing about writing. You get so balled up in a story idea that you lose your perspective and forget that human being might read your words someday.” - Gary Reilly

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

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

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

98. “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

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

100. “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

101. “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

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

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