45 Writing Quotes

Words have the power to inspire, transform, and ignite a passion within us. For writers, they are the very essence of our craft, the tools with which we sculpt our ideas and emotions. Whether you're a seasoned author or just beginning your journey, the wisdom of those who have walked this path before can offer invaluable insights and motivation. In this post, we've curated a collection of the top 45 writing quotes from renowned authors, poets, and thinkers. Each quote encapsulates the beauty, struggle, and triumph of the writing process, serving as a guiding light and a source of encouragement for writers at every stage. So grab your notebook and pen, and let's embark on this inspiring journey together.

1. “You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.” - Madeleine L'Engle

2. “I wasn't born to cook or clean,but to read and write,if you don't like me the way I am,then go fly a kite.” - Besa Kosova

3. “For me, I think it was a little easier to write thinking that nobody was listening.” - Dan Kennedy

4. “Only write a story that only you can write. ” - Alysha Speer

5. “I choose to write because it's perfect for me. It's an escape, a place I can go to hide. It's a friend, when I feel out casted from everyone else. It's a journal, when the only story I can tell is my own. It's a book, when I need to be somewhere else. It's control, when I feel so out of control. It's healing, when everything seems pretty messed up.And it's fun, when life is just flat-out boring.” - Alysha Speer

6. “I don't write like this in order to show how clever and well read I am--though I am rather clever and well read as a matter of fact.” - John Heath-Stubbs

7. “Remain humble in your journey as an author and your audience will embrace you. Remain grateful for every publicity opportunity that comes your way, and the media will embrace you.” - Linda F. Radke

8. “Write what you know best. If you can't survive a cross-examination from a lawyer on the subject, you won't survive an interview with a journalist or anchorperson." Linda Radke, President of Five Star Publications.” - Linda F. Radke

9. “There is no greater feeling of accomplishment than to create a world that solely exists in your imagination and be able to pull someone into this hidden place inside of my thoughts. To make someone care for a person that has manifested from my dreams, to make them hate me for putting them in danger, and for them to ask to be taken on another journey with me when it is all said and done is why I write.” - Teresa Mummert

10. “Find your quiet center of life and write from that to the world.” - Sarah Orne Jewett

11. “I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish… You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger.” - Simone de Beauvoir

12. “What you listen in heart, are echoes of the past.What you write today, will be echoed in the future.” - Toba Beta

13. “The more I write the more I learn about writing. It is easy to say what looks good or sound good on paper until you experience it for yourself.” - Jeanette Michelle

14. “I haven’t had writer’s block. I think it’s because my process involves writing very badly.” - Jennifer Egan

15. “I have no idea why I write. The old standards are: I like to express my feelings, stretch my imagination, earn money.” - S E Hinton

16. “When I write, I feel like an armless leg less man with a crayon in his mouth.” - Vonnegut

17. “Professional writers write to fit” - Pamela Glass Kelly

18. “You need to establish a degree of privacy and solitude in order to write” - Pamela Glass Kelly

19. “Any magazine-cover hack can splash paint around wildly and call it a nightmare, or a witches sabbath or a portrait of the devil; but only a great painter can make such a thing really scare or ring true. That's because only a real artist knows the anatomy of the terrible, or the physiology of fear.” - H.P. Lovecraft

20. “The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always.” - Arthur Miller

21. “Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed. The aesthetic motive is very feeble in a lot of writers, but even a pamphleteer or writer of textbooks will have pet words and phrases which appeal to him for non-utilitarian reasons; or he may feel strongly about typography, width of margins, etc. Above the level of a railway guide, no book is quite free from aesthetic considerations.” - George Orwell

22. “Who am I? I'm just a writer. I write things down. I walk through your dreams and invent the future. Sure, I sink the boat of love, but that comes later. And yes, I swallow glass, but that comes later.” - Richard Siken

23. “My goal is not to have everlasting fame, it is simply to write the stories that are asking me to write them and to share them with the people that want to hear them.” - Elizabeth Hernandez

24. “If you can write; then you are a writer - Rayvon L Browne” - Rayvon L. Browne

25. “If writers stopped writing about what happened to them, then there would be a lot of empty pages.” - Elaine Liner

26. “Stop writing what you know and start writing what you want to know.” - Tiffany Reisz

27. “...you fantasize about me reading my poems to you - it doesn't work that way - I write down everything later - living is not an after-thought...” - John Geddes

28. “...open the access to your heart and write down what your voice is whispering...” - John Geddes

29. “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

30. “You have to follow your own voice. You have to be yourself when you write. In effect, you have to announce, 'This is me, this is what I stand for, this is what you get when you read me. I'm doing the best I can - buy me or not - but this is who I am as a writer.” - David Morrell

31. “Writing is like being in love. You never get better at it or learn more about it. The day you think you do is the day you lose it. Robert Frost called his work a lover's quarrel with the world. It's ongoing. It has neither a beginning nor an end. You don't have to worry about learning things. The fire of one's art burns all the impurities from the vessel that contains it.” - James Lee Burke

32. “My characters are quite as real to me as so-called real people; which is one reason why I'm not subject to what is known as loneliness. I have plenty of company.” - William S. Burroughs

33. “On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must throw them away.” - Annie Dillard

34. “What a writer has to do is write what hasn't been written before or beat dead men at what they have done.” - Ernest Hemingway

35. “You can never know enough about your characters” - W. Somerset Maugham

36. “Being goal-oriented instead of self-oriented is crucial. I know so many people who want to be writers. But let me tell you, they really don't want to be writers. They want to have been writers. They wish they had a book in print. They don't want to go through the work of getting the damn book out. There is a huge difference.” - James Michener

37. “It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have.” - Flannery O'Connor

38. “A writer out of loneliness is trying to communicate like a distant star sending signals. He isn't telling, or teaching, or ordering. Rather, he seeks to establish a relationship with meaning, of feeling, of observing. We are lonesome animals. We spend all our live trying to be less lonesome. And one of our ancient methods is to tell a story, begging the listener to say, and to feel, "Yes, that's the way it is, or at least that's the way I feel it. You're not as alone as you thought." To finish is sadness to a writer, a little death. He puts the last word down and it is done. But it isn't really done. The story goes on and leaves the writer behind, for no story is ever done.” - John Steinbeck

39. “Writing, when properly managed, (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation.” - Laurence Sterne

40. “By the end, you should be inside your character, actually operating from within somebody else, and knowing him pretty well, as that person knows himself or herself. You're sort of a predator, an invader of people.” - William Trevor

41. “A novelist's characters must be with him as he lies down to sleep, and as he wakes from his dreams. He must learn to hate them and to love them.” - Anthony Trollopel

42. “I try to write a certain amount each day, five days a week. A rule sometimes broken is better than no rule.” - Herman Wouk

43. “Don't say you're a writer if you're not writing. Even if you're writing, don't call yourself a writer. Say instead, 'I write.' It's the verb that's important, not the noun.” - Patti Digh

44. “It's not the writing part that's hard. What's hard is sitting down to write.What keeps us from sitting down is Resistance.” - Steven Pressfield

45. “The artist must be like that Marine. He has to know how to be miserable. He has to love being miserable.” - Steven Pressfield