Writing has the power to inspire, challenge, and transform both the writer and the reader. Whether you’re seeking motivation to put pen to paper or simply looking for a spark of creativity, these carefully selected quotes from some of the greatest writers and thinkers will encourage you to keep expressing your unique voice. Dive into this collection of 72 inspiring writing quotes and let their wisdom fuel your passion for storytelling.
1. “It is dark. You cannot see. Only the hint of stars out the broken window. And a voice as old as the Snake from the Garden whispers, 'I will hold your hand.” - John Wick
2. “I just knew there were stories I wanted to tell.” - Octavia E. Butler
3. “Then you should say what you mean," the March Hare went on. "I do," Alice hastily replied; "at least--at least I mean what I say--that's the same thing, you know." "Not the same thing a bit!" said the Hatter. "You might just as well say that "I see what I eat" is the same thing as "I eat what I see"!” - Lewis Carroll
4. “There is creative reading as well as creative writing.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson
5. “When I think of all the harm [the Bible] has done, I despair of ever writing anything to equal it.” - Oscar Wilde
6. “As every writer knows... there is something mysterious about the writer's ability, on any given day, to write. When the juices are flowing, or the writer is 'hot', an invisible wall seems to fall away, and the writer moves easily and surely from one kind of reality to another... Every writer has experienced at least moments of this strange, magical state. Reading student fiction one can spot at once where the power turns on and where it turns off, where the writer writes from 'inspiration' or deep, flowing vision, and where he had to struggle along on mere intellect.” - John Champlin Gardner Jr.
7. “There is such a place as fairyland - but only children can find the way to it. And they do not know that it is fairyland until they have grown so old that they forget the way. One bitter day, when they seek it and cannot find it, they realize what they have lost; and that is the tragedy of life. On that day the gates of Eden are shut behind them and the age of gold is over. Henceforth they must dwell in the common light of common day. Only a few, who remain children at heart, can ever find that fair, lost path again; and blessed are they above mortals. They, and only they, can bring us tidings from that dear country where we once sojourned and from which we must evermore be exiles. The world calls them its singers and poets and artists and story-tellers; but they are just people who have never forgotten the way to fairyland.” - L.M. Montgomery
8. “That's how it is with art. Mere humans who root through their refrigerators at three o'clock in the morning are incapable of such writing.” - Haruki Murakami
9. “We are all pencils in the hand of God.” - Mother Teresa
10. “To present a whole world that doesn’t exist and make it seem real, we have to more or less pretend we’re polymaths. That’s just the act of all good writing.” - William Gibson
11. “For those whose ganglia were formed pre-TV, the mimetic deployment of pop-culture icons seems at best an annoying tic and at worst a dangerous vapidity that compromises fiction's seriousness by dating it out of the Platonic Always, where it ought to reside.” - Jonathan Lethem
12. “Ours is a culture and a time immensely rich in trash as it is in treasures.” - Ray Bradbury
13. “If you are alone, tell some stories to yourself. This is a different kind of pleasure and it has, indeed, its reward. I have tasted a little of everything, and I have truly never enjoyed anything more.” - Charles Nodier
14. “When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.” - Virginia Woolf
15. “I'm very much aware in the writing of dialogue, or even in the narrative too, of a rhythm. There has to be a rhythm with it … Interviewers have said, you like jazz, don’t you? Because we can hear it in your writing. And I thought that was a compliment.” - Elmore Leonard
16. “Like most novelists, I like to do exactly the opposite of what I'm told. It's in my nature as a novelist. Novelists can't trust anything they haven't seen with their own eyes or touched with their own hands. (Jerusalem Prize acceptance speech, JERUSALEM POST, Feb. 15, 2009)” - Haruki Murakami
17. “None of this excuses anyone from mastering the basic ideas and terminology of economics. The intelligent layman must expect also to encounter good economists who are difficult writers even though some of the best have been very good writers. He should know, moreover, that at least for a few great men ambiguity of expression has been a positive asset. But with these exceptions he may safely conclude that what is wholly mysterious in economics is not likely to be important.” - John Kenneth Galbraith
18. “A best-seller is the gilded tomb of a mediocre talent” - Logan Pearsall Smith
19. “I write because I must. It's not a choice or a pastime, it's an unyeilding calling and my passion.” - Elizabeth Reyes
20. “One is seduced and battered in turn. The result is presumably wisdom. Wisdom! We are clinging to life like lizards.Why is it so difficult to assemble those things that really matter in life and to dwell among them only? I am referring to certain landscapes, persons, beasts, books, rooms, meteorological conditions, fruits. In fact, I insist on it.A letter is like a poem, it leaps into life and shows very clearly the marks, perhaps I should say thumbprints, of an unwilling or unready composer.” - James Salter
21. “Hear me now or regret it later: Everything you write must be read aloud. Once all the context items are in place, this is the final test for any written piece...Do not neglect your sense of hearing in the process of writing and reading. As a longtime teacher of English as a foreign language, I can tell you on good authority that you have been listening to the English language at least five or six years longer than you have been writing and reading. And, most probably, your ears also had eighteen or more years of familiarity with the language before you began to read or write with a writer's sensibility. For these reasons, your ears know when things sound okay, good, beautiful, strange, awkward, or just plain bad, before your eye can pick up on such things...Your written voice should burn with the fire of fervent prayer, soothe like a friend's voice during a late-night phone call, alure like a lover's whisper. You must, through your accessible, infinitely read-aloudable voice, make your audience into an insatiable reader of your words.” - Jiro Adachi
22. “If you want to concentrate deeply on some problem, and especially some piece of writing or paper-work, you should acquire a cat. Alone with the cat in the room where you work ... the cat will invariably get up on your desk and settle placidly under the desk lamp ... The cat will settle down and be serene, with a serenity that passes all understanding. And the tranquility of the cat will gradually come to affect you, sitting there at your desk, so that all the excitable qualities that impede your concentration compose themselves and give your mind back the self-command it has lost. You need not watch the cat all the time. Its presence alone is enough. The effect of a cat on your concentration is remarkable, very mysterious.” - Muriel Spark
23. “The material's out there, a calm lake waiting for us to dive in.” - Beverly Lowry
24. “I write and that way rid myself of me and then at last I can rest.” - Clarice Lispector
25. “I'm drawn to write about upstate New York in the way in which a dreamer might have recurring dreams. My childhood and girlhood were spent in upstate New York, in the country north of Buffalo and West of Rochester. So this part of New York state is very familiar to me and, with its economic difficulties, has become emblematic of much of American life.” - Joyce Carol Oates
26. “Sex is hard to write about because you lose the universal and succumb to the particular. We all have our different favorites. Good sex is impossible to write about. Lawrence and Updike have given it their all, and the result is still uneasy and unsure. It may be that good sex is something fiction just can't do--like dreams. Most of the sex in my novels is absolutely disastrous. Sex can be funny, but not very sexy.” - Martin Amis
27. “Before I published any of my own stories, I read a great many stories by people as passionate about writing as I was, and I learned something from everyone I read -- something most important what I should not try to write.” - Dorothy Allison
28. “Siobhan said that when you are writing a book you have to include some descriptions of things. I said that I could take photographs and put them in the book. But she said the idea of a book was to describe things using words so that people could read them and make a picture in their own head.” - Mark Haddon
29. “A novel takes the courage of a marathon runner, and as long as you have to run, you might as well be a winning marathon runner. Serendipity and blind faith faith in yourself won't hurt a thing. All the bastards in the world will snicker and sneer because they haven't the talent to zip up their flies by themselves. To hell with them, particularly the critics. Stand in there, son, no matter how badly you are battered and hurt.” - Leon Uris
30. “Without living, how can you know? Without knowing, how can you speak?” - J.E. Seanachaí
31. “İnsanoğlu nedense anlayamadığı şeylere kötülemeye meyilli.” - Elif Şafak
32. “Our creative dreams are subject to grudge-holding when we decide that other people somehow have made their dreams real and we have not.” - Susan Ariel Rainbow Kennedy (SARK)
33. “It’s not that they’re small, the fair folk. Especially not the queen of them all, Mab of the flashing eyes and the slow smile with lips that can conjure your heart under the hills for a hundred years. It’s not that they’re small. It’s that we’re so far away.” - Neil Gaiman
34. “Modern tragic writers have to write short stories; if they wrote long stories…cheerfulness would creep in. Such stories are like stings; brief, but purely painful.” - G.K. Chesterton
35. “All a poet can do today is warn.” - Wilfred Owen
36. “And every good artist knows that the gift comes from somewhere else, and it's there for a reason, and that's to make the world a better place.” - James Lee Burke
37. “I only knew what was in my mind, and I wished to express it clearly” - Ulysses S. Grant
38. “The pen is mightier than the sword unless it's a real sword in which case the guy with the pen should run away fast.” - Roger Eschbacher
39. “Write what will stop your breath if you don’t write.” - Grace Paley
40. “I write across several genres. I’m a slut for words. I can’t keep it in my literary pants.” - Fierce Dolan
41. “Fancies are like shadows...you can't cage them, they're such wayward, dancing things.” - L.M. Montgomery
42. “Actors are all about entrances, but writers are all about exits.” - Vincent H. O'Neil
43. “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
44. “Only a few of us are going to be willing to break our own hearts by trading in the living beauty of imagination for the stark disappointment of words.” - Ann Patchett
45. “Discipline and constant work are the whetstones upon which the dull knife of talent is honed until it becomes sharp enough, hopefully, to cut through even the toughest meat and gristle.” - Stephen King
46. “Yeah, I know what your English Professor tried to tell you. But if your English Professor could make a living writing fiction, they would have been doing it.” - Dean Wesley Smith
47. “[The writer] has to be the kind of man who turns the world upside down and says, lookit, it looks different, doesn’t it?” - Morris L. West
48. “The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering.” - Tom Waits
49. “But I also believe there is enormous value in the piece of writing that goes no further than the one person for whom it was intended, that no combination of written words is more eloquent than those exchanged in letters between lovers or friends, or along the pale blue lines of private diaries, where people take communion with themselves.” - Betsy Lerner
50. “Since I became a novelist I have discovered that I am biased. Either I think a new novel is worse than mine and I don’t like it, or I suspect it is better than my novels and I don’t like it.” - Umberto Eco
51. “grows like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mould of the mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps.” - J.R.R. Tolkien
52. “My earliest poems appear almost skeletal to me now - it seems I've learned to add meat, muscle and a nice suit of clothes.” - Wanda Lea Brayton
53. “It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.” - Robert Hass
54. “My English teacher said that a writer is the worst judge of his own work.” - Ilsa J. Bick
55. “Poets, like fighters, both reap the benefits of roadwork.” - Cameron Conaway
56. “An unthinkable thought is not one that hasn't occurred to somebody, nor is it a thought that somebody considers to be wrong. An unthinkable thought threatens a person's entire existence and is therefore subversive and consequently can be thought of and has been thought of, but has been pushed out of the mind's currency and subsumed into its margins where it festers. Dark nights of the soul are lit by inconceivable ideas. Any story may draw its source from the power of an unthinkable thought.” - Charles Baxter
57. “My imagination was running amok again. Twice in one night. This never happens when I’m sitting in front of a typewriter.” - Gary Reilly
58. “I have an idea and a first line -- and that suggests the rest of it. I have little concept of what I’m going to say, or where it’s going. I have some idea of how long it’s going to be -- but not what will happen or what the themes will be. That’s the intrigue of doing it -- it’s a process of discovery. You get to discover what you’re going to say and what it’s going to mean.” - T.C. Boyle
59. “See this? I wrote this piece two years ago, after my parents died. I was angry. I was hurt. I wrote down exactly what I was feeling. When I read it now, I don't share those same feelings. Do I regret writing it? No. Because there's a chance that someone in this very room may relate to this. It might mean something to them.” - Colleen Hoover
60. “I write because I love it, not because I excel at it. But because I write, I shall slowly excel at it.” - Richelle E. Goodrich
61. “This is what books only aimed to do and never could. Give you the glint of someone else's sunrise, what living is really like, you get old and it hurts to bend your elbow; your friends start to die, you can’t get fresh fruit in the shops.” - Geoff Ryman
62. “Art is the bridge across the gap between peoples and cultures. Writing is one of the arts that can help link people.” - Charles Ray
63. “An idea is a feat of association, and the height of it is a good metaphor.” - Robert Frost
64. “The scribe was a strict teacher and he did not accept anything less than perfect...Like a mother sensing the baby quickening within her, suddenly, to me, the letters were no longer hostile and unwieldly. I had command of them, with my head and with my hand...The words struck, as clear and as pure as a bell peal on a winter morning.” - Theresa Breslin
65. “Coming up with ideas is the easiest thing on earth. Putting them down is the hardest.” - Rod Serling
66. “If you’re dating a writer and they don’t write about you — whether it’s good or bad — then they don’t love you. They just don’t. Writers fall in love with the people we find inspiring.” - Jamie Anne Royce
67. “If you can’t be of good character, write a good character.” - Rosen Trevithick
68. “...no good writing flows from a polluted well - you can write about monsters, but you can't be one...” - John Geddes
69. “...I retreat into my fictional world where everything makes sense - but even there I can't even control what people do...” - John Geddes A Familiar Rain
70. “The strongest should come first in comedy because once a character is really established as funny everything he does is funny.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald
71. “You know your heart and soul are stapled to that manuscript, but what we see are the words on the paper” - Teresa Nielsen Haydense
72. “Our body does get old, but our spirit, never. If we write well enough, we might even live forever.” - A.A. Patawaran
