62 Quotes On Writing

Finding inspiration as a writer can sometimes feel like searching for a needle in a haystack. The right words can ignite creativity, breathe life into characters, and transform a blank page into a literary masterpiece. Whether you're a seasoned novelist, a budding poet, or someone who simply loves to dabble in prose, the wisdom of those who have mastered the craft can be incredibly motivating. To guide and inspire your writing journey, we've curated a collection of the top 62 quotes on writing. These gems of insight and encouragement come from some of the most brilliant minds in literature, offering timeless advice and food for thought. Dive in, and let these words from fellow writers reignite your passion for the written word.

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

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

3. “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

4. “Actually, writers have no business writing about their own works. They either wax conceited, saying things like: 'My brilliance is possibly most apparent in my dazzling short story, "The Cookiepants Hypotenuse."' Or else they get unbearably cutesy: 'My cat Ootsywootums has given me all my best ideas, hasn't oo, squeezums?” - Connie Willis

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

6. “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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

15. “To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.” - Robert Frost

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

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

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

19. “Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing prose... anything goes.” - Cole Porter

20. “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

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

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

23. “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

24. “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

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

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

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

28. “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

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

30. “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

31. “...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

32. “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

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

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

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

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

37. “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

38. “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

39. “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

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

41. “The free-lance writer is one who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.” - Robert Benchley

42. “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

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

44. “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

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

46. “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

47. “Write to your fear.” - Dorothy Allison

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

49. “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

50. “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

51. “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

52. “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

53. “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

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

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

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

57. “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

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

59. “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

60. “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

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

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