75 Writers On Writing Quotes

Writers have a unique way of capturing the essence of the human experience, of painting vivid pictures with words, and of delving into the depths of emotion and thought. They possess an uncanny ability to transform the mundane into the extraordinary and the simple into the profound. In this curated collection of the top 75 quotes on writing, you'll find insights, wisdom, and inspiration from some of the most celebrated authors and literary minds. Whether you're an aspiring writer, a seasoned author, or simply a lover of the written word, these quotes offer a glimpse into the minds and processes of those who have mastered the craft of writing. Dive in and let these words fuel your own creative journey.

1. “I've always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it's a bit like fucking, which is only fun for amateurs. Old whores don't do much giggling.” - Hunter S. Thompson

2. “When it's in a book I don't think it'll hurt any more ...exist any more. One of the things writing does is wipe things out. Replace them.” - Marguerite Duras

3. “Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader's recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book's truth.” - Marcel Proust

4. “I have no taste for either poverty or honest labor, so writing is the only recourse left for me.” - Hunter S. Thompson

5. “A writer's life is never boring when you have imaginary friends to play with!” - Christie Silvers

6. “Ink, a Drug.” - Vladimir Nabokov

7. “Writing is not a searching about in the daily experience for apt similes and pretty thoughts and images… It is not a conscious recording of the day’s experiences ‘freshly and with the appearance of reality’… The writer of imagination would find himself released from observing things for the purpose of writing them down later. He would be there to enjoy, to taste, to engage the free world, not a world which he carries like a bag of food, always fearful lest he drop something or someone get more than he.” - William Carlos Williams

8. “In order to write the book you want to write, in the end you have to become the person you need to become to write that book.” - Junot Diaz

9. “People have many cruel expectations from writers. People expect novelists to live on a hill with three kids and a spouse, people expect children's story writers to never have sex, and people expect all great poets to be dead. And these are all very difficult expectations to fulfill, I think.” - C. JoyBell C.

10. “We writers constantly try to build up our own confidence by getting published, making sales, winning prizes, joining cliques or proclaiming theories. The passion to write constantly strips this vanity aside and forces us to confront that loneliness and the uncertainty with which human beings, in the end, live and die.” - Boria Sax

11. “I realize that some of you may have come in hopes of hearing tips on how tobecome a professional writer. I say to you, "If you really want to hurt yourparents, and you don't have the nerve to be a homosexual, the least you cando is go into the arts. But do not use semicolons. They are transvestitehermaphrodites, standing for absolutely nothing. All they do is show you'vebeen to college.” - Kurt Vonnegut

12. “Writing, music, sculpting, painting, and prayer! These are the three things that are most closely related! Writers, musicians, sculptors, painters, and the faithful are the ones who make things out of nothing. Everybody else, they make things out of something, they have materials! But a written work can be done with nothing, it can begin in the soul! A musical piece begins with a harmony in the soul, a sculpture begins with a formless, useless piece of rock chiseled and formed and molded into the thing that was first conceived in the sculptor's heart! A painting can be carried inside the mind for a lifetime, before ever being put onto paper or canvass! And a prayer! A prayer is a thought, a remembrance, a whisper, a communion, that is from the soul going to what cannot be seen, yet it can move mountains! And so I believe that these five things are interrelated, these five kinds of people are kin.” - C. JoyBell C.

13. “A writer fails, not when a reader is not moved; but when, as a reader, the writer is not moved.” - Gerard de Marigny

14. “I write to believe in goodness.” - Red Haircrow

15. “Murphy is a writer's best friend, but you have to keep an eye on him, or he'll steal the silver.” - Patricia C. Wrede

16. “Writers do not have the privilege of sleep. There is always a story coming alive in their heads, constantly composing. Whether they choose it or not.” - Jamie Weise

17. “The difference between real life and a story is that life has significance, while a story must have meaning.The former is not always apparent, while the latter always has to be, before the end.” - Vera Nazarian

18. “I believe that a writer is a person who writes. An author is a person who has written.” - Dean Wesley Smith

19. “Dance above the surface of the world. Let your thoughts lift you into creativity that is not hampered by opinion.” - Red Haircrow

20. “I hope I don't write TOO many books! When I look at authors who have written too many books, I wonder to myself "When did they live?" I certainly want to write BECAUSE I live! I know I don't want to write in order to live! My writing is an overflow of the wine glass of my life, not a basin in which I wash out my ideals and expectations.” - C. JoyBell C.

21. “Those who write are writers. Those who wait are waiters.” - A. Lee Martinez

22. “Though this child came in with nothing but excess baby fat, chemical brain waves, and mother and son bodily toxins on his legs, he had a fate fit for a modern day demigod.” - David Scheier

23. “You see, I believe that you cannot be taught to 'write.' You can be taught grammar and punctuation, but you cannot be taught to be a writer. That has to come from within.” - Robert J. Randisi

24. “The first thing that distinguishes a writer is that he is most alive when alone.” - Martin Amis (Author)

25. “If you're a writer, you'll know it by the distinct feeling of only being able to breathe properly when alone with your characters. All other times, I'm panting--just pining for the next time I can be with them.” - Karen Luellen

26. “Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite:"Fool!" said my muse to me, "look in thy heart, and write.” - Philip Sidney

27. “I write whenever it suits me. During a creative period I write every day; a novel should not be interrupted.” - Francois Mauriac

28. “A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.” - Cyril Connolly

29. “Don’t try to be different. Just be good. To be good is different enough.” - Arthur Freed

30. “All you have to do is put one word after another, and remember how great it feels to be a writer.” - Stephanie Lennox

31. “Art is too often discounted as a secondary priority. The writer is necessary to society.” - Kayla Rae Whitaker

32. “Sooner or later every writer evolves his own definition of a story.Mine is: A reflection of life plus beginning and end (life seems not to have either) and a meaning.” - Mary O'Hara

33. “There are lots of guys out there who write a better prose line than I do and who have a better understanding of what people are really like and what humanity is supposed to mean – hell, I know that.” - Stephen King

34. “Judging your early artistic efforts is artist abuse.” - Julia Cameron

35. “Dear Aspiring Writer, you are not ready. Stop. Put that finished story away and start another one. In a month, go back and look at the first story. RE-EDIT it. Then send it to a person you respect in the field who will be hard on you. Pray for many many many red marks. Fix them. Then put it away for two weeks. Work on something else. Finally, edit one last time. Now you are ready to sub your first work.Criticism is hard to take at first. Trust me, I've been there. But learn to think of crit marks as a knife. Each one is designed to cut away the bad and leave a scar. Scars prove you've lived, learned and walked away a winner. Any writer who tells you they don't need edits is lying. I don't care if they have 100 books out. Edits make you grow and if you aren't growing as a writer, you are dead.” - Inez Kelley

36. “I think the reason why I don't read so much, is because as I have observed, whole books all boil down to a drop of essence. You can read a book full of ten thousand words and at the end, sum it up in one sentence; I am more for the one sentence. I am more for the essence. It's like how you need a truckload of roses to extract one drop of rose oil; I don't want to bother with the truckload of roses because I would rather walk away with the drop of rose oil. So in my mind, I have written two hundred books. Why? Because I have with me two hundred vials with one drop of essence in each!” - C. JoyBell C.

37. “Images are not quite ideas, they are stiller than that, with less implication outside themselves. And they are not myth, they do not have the explanatory power; they are nearer to pure story. Nor are they always metaphors; they do not say this is that, they say this is.” - Robert Hass Twentieth Century Pleasures Prose on Poetry

38. “There is nothing harder to estimate than a writer's time, nothing harder to keep track of. There are moments—moments of sustained creation—when his time is fairly valuable; and there are hours and hours when a writer's time isn't worth the paper he is not writing anything on.” - E.B. White

39. “Writing nonfiction means I tell people's stories for them, not because they're special but because we all are.” - Jo Deurbrouck

40. “Writers are like actors too. For every story we create, we must get under the skin of the characters and role play with our writing.” - Jyoti Arora

41. “... The Book is more important than your plans for it. You have to go with what works for The Book ~ if your ideas appear hollow or forced when they are put on paper, chop them, erase them, pulverise them and start again. Don't whine when things are not going your way, because they are going the right way for The Book, which is more important. The show must go on, and so must The Book.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

42. “You want to be a writer, don't know how or when? Find a quiet place, use a humble pen.” - Paul Simon

43. “But then all writers smoke, don't they? And drink? And sit in front of computer screens till their arteries clog and muscles atrophy?” - T.C. Boyle

44. “Flora was in that state where the spirit may be willing but the flesh is weak and wishes to go on holiday - and where the flesh in most cases wins hands down with a packed suitcase. It did so now. So she did what many a researcher both great and insignificant does when they are stuck. She yawned while contemplating how to catch the Muse by surprising Her. Almost invariably, the Muse has seen it all before - and also yawns.” - Mavis Cheek

45. “There is no literature and art without paranoia. Probably there would be even civilization. Paranoia is the world. It is the attempt to make sense of what has not.” - Thomas Pynchon

46. “I live within my daydreams and nightmares; through that, I have learned to create, and I never cease from doing so.” - Shannon A Thompson

47. “The hardest thing about being a writer is convincing your wife that lying on the sofa is work.” - John Hughes

48. “If you really have talent, you know, you'll go on writing - whatever people say to you.” - Christopher Isherwood

49. “There is an audience for everything; our job as writers is to do the work and provide readers with a choice.” - Elizabeth Hernandez

50. “People approach writers, assuming we pull a perfect text out of our nose each time (well spelled). Spelling is the least of it.” - Sara Levine

51. “To sit down so often with nothing to say,-to say something so often, almost without consciousness of saying and without any remembrance or having said,-is a power of which I will not violate my modesty by boasting; but I do not believe everyone has it.” - Michael Kelahan

52. “Writing isn't difficult. Writing well is difficult. What is most difficult is being with the interior experience that manifests as resistance to writing.” - H Raven Rose

53. “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

54. “The writing in itself is transformative for me.” - H Raven Rose

55. “The design of a book is the pattern of a reality controlled and shaped by the mind of a writer.” - John Steinbeck

56. “Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.” - W.H. Auden

57. “A writer needs to ingest love to be passionate. Passion is a metabolite of love, and good writing is an active metabolite of passion.” - Roman Payne

58. “Write, write, write! Get your you-know-what in the chair and write more books: write the books of your heart and don’t let stress steal your joy.” - Sarra Cannon

59. “Memory is the mother of the muses, prototype Artist. As a rule picks and highlights what is important, omitting what is accidental or trivial. Occasionally, however, is mistaken as all the other artists. Nevertheless it is what I take as a guide page.” - Frank Harris

60. “Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge); by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee, and are therefore more honored in their day than prophets); and by futurologists (salaried). Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying.” - Ursula K. Le Guin

61. “Write like a motherfucker.” - Cheryl Strayed

62. “If a book falls in the woods and nobody read it, was it ever written?” - Neil Leckman

63. “Because here’s the thing: No matter how much one tells stories of magical beasts or impossible worlds, in the end, it is always the world of here and now one is writing about. The better one understands that world, the more powerful the stories will be.” - Steven Brust

64. “A great writer picks up on those things that matter. It’s almost like their radar is attuned to the most significant moments.” - Alain De Botton

65. “...I have this one nasty habit. Makes me hard to live with. I write......writing is antisocial. It's as solitary as masturbation. Disturb a writer when he is in the throes of creation and he is likely to turn and bite right to the bone... and not even know that he's doing it. As writers' wives and husbands often learn to their horror......there is no way that writers can be tamed and rendered civilized. Or even cured. In a household with more than one person, of which one is a writer, the only solution known to science is to provide the patient with an isolation room, where he can endure the acute stages in private, and where food can be poked in to him with a stick. Because, if you disturb the patient at such times, he may break into tears or become violent. Or he may not hear you at all... and, if you shake him at this stage, he bites...” - Robert Heinlen

66. “There is no moral to my song,I praise no right, I blame no wrong;I tell of things that I have seen,I show the man that I have beenAs simply as a poet canWho knows himself poet and man.” - Thomas MacDonagh

67. “Changing imagination into fiction is what I love to do.” - Eveli Acosta

68. “Why do I write? Out of fear. Out of fear that the memory of the people I write about might go lost. Out of fear that the memory of myself might get lost. Or even just to be shielded by a story, to slip inside a story and stop being recognizable, controllable, subject to blackmail.” - Fabrizio De André

69. “I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they're going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there's going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don't know how many branches it's going to have, they find out as it grows. And I'm much more a gardener than an architect.” - George R.R. Martin

70. “The only way to be inclined to write is to write to your inclination.” - Terry Lander

71. “Biographies are best when written chronologically. Boring people don't make for good biographies.” - Deana J. Driver

72. “As writers we intend to make a difference, to alter people's lives for the greater good. . .this is why we write, to have an impact on society, to put a personal stamp on history. . .Art and literature are the legacies we leave to succeeding generations. We'll be forgotten, but our books and essays, our stories and poems can survive us. . .” - Lee Gutkind

73. “Never take yourself too seriously. Learn to let go and let the words flow.” - Caron Kamps Widden

74. “Great writers create; writers of smaller gifts copy” - Somerset Maugham

75. “The very persons who have taken away my time and space are those who have given me something to say.” - Katherine Paterson