63 Quotes On Writing

Are you searching for a dash of inspiration to fuel your writing journey? Look no further! In this carefully curated collection, we bring you 63 of the most impactful quotes that capture the essence of writing. From timeless wisdom shared by literary giants to fresh insights from contemporary wordsmiths, these quotes serve as a powerful reminder of the magic and challenge inherent in the craft of writing. Whether you're battling writer's block, seeking motivation, or simply eager to refine your skills, let these words of wisdom ignite your creative spirit and guide you on your path to literary greatness.

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

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

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

4. “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

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

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

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

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

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

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

11. “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

12. “People without hope not only don't write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read them.” - Flannery O'Connor

13. “Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.” - William Wordsworth

14. “You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it.” - Adrienne Rich

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

16. “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

17. “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

18. “V.S. Pritchett's definition of a short story is 'something glimpsed from the corner of the eye, in passing.' Notice the 'glimpse' part of this. First the glimpse. Then the glimpse gives life, turned into something that illuminates the moment and may, if we're lucky -- that word again -- have even further ranging consequences and meaning. The short story writer's task is to invest the glimpse with all that is in his power. He'll bring his intelligence and literary skill to bear (his talent), his sense of proportion and sense of the fitness of things: of how things out there really are and how he sees those things -- like no one else sees them. And this is done through the use of clear and specific language, language used so as to bring to life the details that will light up the story for the reader. For the details to be concrete and convey meaning, the language must be accurate and precisely given. The words can be so precise they may even sound flat, but they can still carry; if used right they can hit all the notes.” - Raymond Carver

19. “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

20. “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

21. “I am a writer of books in retrospect. I talk in order to understand; I teach in order to learn” - Robert Frost

22. “The most important things to remember about back story are that (a) everyone has a history and (b) most of it isn’t very interesting.” - Stephen King

23. “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

24. “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

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

26. “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

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

28. “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

29. “...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

30. “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

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

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

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

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

35. “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

36. “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

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

38. “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

39. “- 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

40. “Never put off writing until you are better at it.” - Gary Henderson

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

42. “Is imagination dependent upon experience, or is experience influenced by imagination?” - Anita Shreve

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

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

45. “Writers were blessed stenographers taking divine dictation.” - Stephen King

46. “A writer is someone who has taught his mind to misbehave.” - Oscar Wilde

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

48. “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

49. “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

50. “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

51. “The one thing which seems to me quite impossible is to take into consideration the kind of book one is expected to write; surely one can only write the book that is there to be written.(Letter to Muriel St. Clare Byrne, 8 September 1935)” - Dorothy L. Sayers

52. “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

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

54. “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

55. “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

56. “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

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

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

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

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. “Words are powerful. Words make a difference. They can create and destroy. They can open doors and close doors. Words can create illusion or magic, love or destruction. … All those things.” - R.M. Engelhardt

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

63. “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