86 Writing Advice Quotes

There's something truly magical about the art of writing. Whether you're weaving intricate tales of fiction or penning heartfelt memoirs, the essence of storytelling captures the human experience in ways nothing else can. But even the most seasoned writers occasionally find themselves in need of a spark or a fresh perspective. That's where the wisdom of those who have mastered the craft can be a guiding light. We've curated a collection of the top 86 writing advice quotes to inspire and motivate you on your creative journey. Dive in, and let the words of famed authors and literary giants be the muse that propels your writing to new heights.

1. “Don't say it was delightful; make us say delightful when we've read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers Please will you do the job for me.” - C.S. Lewis

2. “Maugham then offers the greatest advice anyone could give to a young author: "At the end of an interrogation sentence, place a question mark. You'd be surprised how effective it can be.” - Woody Allen

3. “Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I'd have the facts.” - Harper Lee

4. “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” - Ernest Hemingway

5. “Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious. When you're conscious and writing from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth, you have the ability to throw the lights on for your reader. He or she will recognize his or her life and truth in what you say, in the pictures you have painted, and this decreases the terrible sense of isolation that we have all had too much of.” - Anne Lamott

6. “I don't think anybody can teach anybody anything. I think that you learn it, but the young writer that is as I say demon-driven and wants to learn and has got to write, he don't know why, he will learn from almost any source that he finds. He will learn from older people who are not writers, he will learn from writers, but he learns it -- you can't teach it.” - William Faulkner

7. “A man's grammar, like Caesar's wife, should not only be pure, but above suspicion of impurity.” - Edgar Allan Poe

8. “But let the wise be warned against too great readiness at explanation: it multiplies the sources of mistake, lengthening the sum for reckoners sure to go wrong.” - George Eliot

9. “If something inside of you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act—truth is always subversive.” - Anne Lamott

10. “Prose is architecture, not interior decoration.” - Ernest Hemingway

11. “When I met a truly beautiful girl, I would tell her that if she spent the night with me, I would write a novel or a story about her. This usually worked; and if her name was to be in the title of the story, it almost always worked. Then, later, when we'd passed a night of delicious love-making together, after she’d gone and I’d felt that feeling of happiness mixed with sorrow, I sometimes would write a book or story about her. Sometimes her character, her way about herself, her love-making, it sometimes marked me so heavily that I couldn't go on in life and be happy unless I wrote a book or a story about that woman, the happy and sad memory of that woman. That was the only way to keep her, and to say goodbye to her without her ever leaving.” - Roman Payne

12. “Giving a reader a sex scene that is only half right is like giving her half a kitten. It is not half as cute as a whole kitten; it is a bloody, godawful mess. A half-good sex scene is not half as hot; it actually moves into the negative numbers, draining any heat from the surrounding material.” - Sandra Newman

13. “I have a great many opinions about writing, but I'm afraid that all of them are unprintable” - Alfred Lansing

14. “On the whole, I think you should write biographies of those you admire and respect, and novels about human beings who you think are sadly mistaken.” - Penelope Fitzgerald

15. “It's okay to write crap. Just don't try publishing it while it's still crap.” - S.M. Blooding

16. “Next morning I went over to Paul’s for coffee and told him I had finished. “Good for you,” he said without looking up. “Start the next one today.” - Steven Pressfield

17. “Start telling the stories that only you can tell, because there’ll always be better writers than you and there’ll always be smarter writers than you. There will always be people who are much better at doing this or doing that - but you are the only you.Tarantino - you can criticize everything that Quentin does - but nobody writes Tarantino stuff like Tarantino. He is the best Tarantino writer there is, and that was actually the thing that people responded to - they’re going ‘this is an individual writing with his own point of view’.There are better writers than me out there, there are smarter writers, there are people who can plot better - there are all those kinds of things, but there’s nobody who can write a Neil Gaiman story like I can.” - Neil Gaiman

18. “No writing is wasted. Did you know that sourdough from San Francisco is leavened partly by a bacteria called lactobacillus sanfrancisensis? It is native to the soil there, and does not do well elsewhere. But any kitchen can become an ecosystem. If you bake a lot, your kitchen will become a happy home to wild yeasts, and all your bread will taste better. Even a failed loaf is not wasted. Likewise, cheese makers wash the dairy floor with whey. Tomato gardeners compost with rotten tomatoes. No writing is wasted: the words you can't put in your book can wash the floor, live in the soil, lurk around in the air. They will make the next words better.” - Erin Bow

19. “When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.” - Raymond Chandler

20. “It's all mine, it's all sacred.” - Jamie Weise

21. “You can only write by putting words on a paper one at a time.” - Sandra Brown

22. “The first thing you have to learn when you go into the arts is to learn to cope with rejection. If you can’t, you’re dead” - Warren Adler

23. “Be prepared to work hard to be a writer.” - Sandra Brown

24. “Life is not a submarine.” - Anne Lamott

25. “10 Steps to Becoming a Better WriterWrite.Write more.Write even more.Write even more than that.Write when you don’t want to.Write when you do.Write when you have something to say.Write when you don’t.Write every day.Keep writing.” - Brian Clark

26. “Nouns and verbs are the guts of the language. Beware of covering up with adjectives and adverbs.” - A.B. Guthrie Jr.

27. “People say to write about what you know. I'm here to tell you, no one wants to read that, cos you don't know anything. So write about something you don't know. And don't be scared, ever.” - Toni Morrison

28. “Writing starts with living.—Rumors of Water: Thoughts on Creativity & Writing” - L.L. Barkat

29. “Writing starts with living.” - L. L. Barkat

30. “We will need to find people who will provide a safe writing space for us, where criticism comes late and love and delight come early.—from Rumors of Water: Thoughts on Creativity & Writing” - L.L. Barkat

31. “Fiction---good fiction, anyway---is dream made flesh, given purpose and drive, and set on a quest to show us the best in us and to give us the power and the tools to dream beyond reality's 'merely good enough' to a vision of what is truly great......and then to give us the stories of men and women of character who in turn inspire those of us who dare to reach for the truly great within ourselves.THAT is why you write fiction.” - Holly Lisle

32. “Writers are born, not created.” - Tim Campbell

33. “Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.” - Neil Gaiman

34. “The true writer, the born writer, will scribble words on scraps of litter, the back of a bus tickets, on the wall of a cell.” - David Nicholls

35. “She thought a writer should work harder writing a book than she did reading it.” - Jeffrey Eugenides

36. “When I am grown up I shall carry a notebook—a fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases.” - Virginia Woolf

37. “From my writer's workshop, "Know when it's time to put everything you've got on the page. Then, rip open a vein and do it!” - Heather Burch

38. “It's a great lesson about not being too precious about your writing. You have to try your hardest to be at the top of your game and improve every joke you can until the last possible second, and then you have to let it go. You can't be that kid standing at the top of the waterslide, overthinking it...You have to let people see what you wrote.” - Tina Fey

39. “Try any goddam thing you like, no matter how boringly normal or outrageous. If it works, fine. If it doesn't, toss it. Toss it even if you love it.” - Stephen King

40. “People say that writers write for money. From my own experience that's not true. I write for me. I publish for money.” - Greg Curtis

41. “To be a successful fiction writer you have to write well, write a lot … and let ‘em know you’ve written it! Then rinse and repeat.” - Gerard de Marigny

42. “I ran across an excerpt today (in English translation) of some dialogue/narration from the modern popular writer, Paulo Coelho in his book: Aleph.(Note: bracketed text is mine.)... 'I spoke to three scholars,' [the character says 'at last.'] ...two of them said that, after death, the [sic (misprint, fault of the publisher)] just go to Paradise. The third one, though, told me to consult some verses from the Koran. [end quote]' ...I can see that he's excited. [narrator]' ...Now I have many positive things to say about Coelho: He is respectable, inspiring as a man, a truth-seeker, and an appealing writer; but one should hesitate to call him a 'literary' writer based on this quote. A 'literary' author knows that a character's excitement should be 'shown' in his or her dialogue and not in the narrator's commentary on it. Advice for Coelho: Remove the 'I can see that he's excited' sentence and show his excitement in the phrasing of his quote.(Now, in defense of Coelho, I am firmly of the opinion, having myself written plenty of prose that is flawed, that a novelist should be forgiven for slipping here and there.)Lastly, it appears that a belief in reincarnation is of great interest to Mr. Coelho ... Just think! He is a man who has achieved, (as Leonard Cohen would call it), 'a remote human possibility.' He has won lots of fame and tons of money. And yet, how his preoccupation with reincarnation—none other than an interest in being born again as somebody else—suggests that he is not happy!” - Roman Payne

43. “If a writer starts worring about what he or she has left out or forgotten, they might not be able to write even a single line.” - Baby Halder

44. “Language does not always have to wear a tie and lace-up shoes. The object of fiction isn't grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story … to make him/her forget, whenever possible, that he/she is reading a story at all.” - Stephen King - On Writing

45. “Writing a book is a blood sport. If it doesn't hurt when you're done, you're probably doing something wrong.” - Kevis Hendrickson

46. “Keep working. Keep trying. Keep believing. You still might not make it, but at least you gave it your best shot. If you don’t have calluses on your soul, this isn’t for you. Take up knitting instead.” - David Eddings

47. “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

48. “You can always edit a bad page. You can't edit a blank page.” - Jodi Picoult

49. “...language always occurs in a context - you can speak Elizabethan words, but to speak the language you have to put on the mindset...” - John Geddes

50. “...you do violence with your words if you force them - art is given - the words received, moment by moment from unseen hands - call it a Muse ...” - John Geddes

51. “...some writers closet themselves - I write wherever I am because that's where life is happening ...” - John Geddes

52. “You cherry-pick events that are relevant to the story question and construct a gauntlet of challenge (read: the plot) that will force the protagonist to put his money where his mouth is. Think baptism by ever-escalating fire.” - Lisa Cron

53. “...consider yourself a functional character in someone else's novel - a background character - a person on the street - that's the perspective ...” - John Geddes

54. “Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn’t work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they’re done they’re done.” - Kurt Vonnegut

55. “... 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

56. “Perhaps the hardest thing in all literature— at least I have found it so: by no voluntary effort can I accomplish it: I have to take it as it comes— is to write anything original. And perhaps the easiest is, when once an original line has been struck out, to follow it up, and to write any amount more to the same tune.” - Lewis Carroll

57. “...a writer should not so much write as embroider on paper; the work should be painstaking, laborious.” - Anton Chekhov

58. “Writing is the act of discovery.” - Natalie Goldberg

59. “Tell your story. Don't try and tell the stories that other people can tell. Any starting writer starts out with other people's voices. But as quickly as you can start telling the stories that only you can tell, because there will always be better writers than you and there will always be smarter writers than you, but you are the only you.” - Neil Gaiman

60. “Avoid stock expressions (like the plague, as William Safire used to say) and repetitions. Don't say that as a boy your grandmother used to read to you, unless at that stage of her life she really was a boy, in which case you have probably thrown away a better intro. If something is worth hearing or listening to, it's very probably worth reading. So, this above all: Find your own voice.” - Christopher Hitchens

61. “Poetic license is not a license to scribe recklessly.” - C. Kennedy

62. “Bastam poucas palavras para escrever uma história e apenas uma pessoa para a ler.” - Fernando Guerreiro

63. “I tell everyone who asks me about writing...almost everyone has an idea for a book, and some even have a great ending, but it's that 290 or so pages in between that are tough!” - Brooklyn Hudson

64. “The beautiful unruliness of literature is what makes it so much fun to wander through: you read Jane Austen and you say, oh, that is IT. And then you turn around and read Sterne, and you say, Man, that is IT. And then you wander across a century or so, and you run into Kafka, or Calvino, or Cortazar, and you say, well that is IT. And then you stroll through what Updike called the grottos of Ulysses, and after that you consort with Baldwin or Welty or Spencer, or Morrison, or Bellow or Fitzgerald and then back to W. Shakespeare, Esq; the champ, and all the time you feel the excitement of being in the presence of IT. And when you yourself spend the good time writing, you are not different in kind than any of these people, you are part of that miracle of human invention. So get to work. Get on with IT, no matter how difficult IT is. Every single gesture, every single stumble, every single uninspired-feeling hour, is worth IT." Richard Bausch” - Kathy Fish

65. “Writing is a muscle. Smaller than a hamstring and slightly bigger than a bicep, and it needs to be exercised to get stronger. Think of your words as reps, your paragraphs as sets, your pages as daily workouts. Think of your laptop as a machine like the one at the gym where you open and close your inner thighs in front of everyone, exposing both your insecurities and your genitals. Because that is what writing is all about.” - Colin Nissan

66. “...my writing is a wild mustang - more thunderous than a lightning storm -and all my skill which I call art, is devoted to simply staying on...” - John Geddes

67. “...it's merely writing, but you have to adjust your ear – I speak quietly – I sob – I whisper...” - John Geddes

68. “Don't let yourself slip and get any perfect characters... keep them people, people, people, and don't let them get to be symbols.” - Ernest Hemingway

69. “Don’t start right off writing the ‘Great American Novel’, that's too much pressure and you'll get disappointed; start with porn, it’s fun and a good way to get your feet wet.” - scavola

70. “I honestly think in order to be a writer, you have to learn to be reverent. If not, why are you writing? Why are you here? Let's think of reverence as awe, as presence in and openness to the world. The alternative is that we stultify, we shut down. Think of those times when you've read prose or poetry that is presented in such a way that you have a fleeting sense of being startled by beauty or insight, by a glimpse into someone's soul. All of a sudden everything seems to fit together or at least to have some meaning for a moment. This is our goal as writers, I think; to help others have this sense of -- please forgive me -- wonder, of seeing things anew, things that can catch us off guard, that break in on our small, bordered worlds.” - Anne Lamott

71. “I have a hardcore attitude: a “self-published, ghost-written book” is wrong because the concept behind self publishing is that you have knowledge or emotions that you want to express. Whenpeople read a book—particularly a self-published one—they have the right to expect that it’s the person’s writing, not cleaned-up dictation or slapping a name on a book that someone else wrote.” - Guy Kawasaki

72. “If you can't stand your own company alone in a room for long hours, or, when it gets tough, the feeling of being in a locked cell, or, when it gets tougher still, the vague feeling of being buried alive--then don't be a writer.” - Graham Swift

73. “There are two moments worthwhile in writing, the one when you start and the other when you throw it in the waste-paper basket.” - Samuel Beckett

74. “Raise the bar. Don't duck under it.” - Peter James West

75. “If you want to write, you can. Fear stops most people from writing, not lack of talent, whatever that is. Who am I? What right have I to speak? Who will listen to me if I do? You’re a human being, with a unique story to tell, and you have every right. If you speak with passion, many of us will listen. We need stories to live, all of us. We live by story. Yours enlarges the circle.” - Richard Rhodes

76. “Often when he was teaching me to write in Greek, the Fox would say, "Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that is the whole art and joy of words." A glib saying.” - C.S. Lewis

77. “You can’t just come out and say what you have to say. That’s what people do on airplanes, when a man plops down next to you in the aisle seat of your flight to New York, spills peanuts all over the place (back when the cheapskate airlines at least gave you peanuts), and tells you about what his boss did to him the day before. You know how your eyes glaze over when you hear a story like that? That’s because of the way he’s telling his story. You need a good way to tell your story.” - Adair Lara

78. “Write as though your life depended on it.” - Jill Telford

79. “But if you don't understand that story is character and not just idea, you will not be able to breathe life into even the most intriguing flash of inspiration.” - Elizabeth George

80. “An author needs a lot more than one person to succumb to his literary seductive charms, but, like Saul, he must realize that he doesn't have to--and indeed cannot--capture the hearts of every possible reader out there. No matter who the writer, his ideal intended audience is only a small faction of all the living readers. Name the most widely read authors you can think of--from Shakespeare, Austen, and Dickens to Robert Waller, Stephen King, and J.K. Rowling--and the immense majority of book-buyers out there actively decline to read them.” - Thomas McCormack

81. “Let us not neglect the forbidden. Let us not sophisticate ourselves out of the cheap thrill and chill of it: the story told for perversity's sake, and all the better for that; the image created because an artist gets tired of reasons sometimes, and wants to dredge up some picture he's been haunted by, and parade it like a new tattoo. I go with it, readily.” - Clive Barker

82. “Maybe those sailors will write bad poems, but the same men would have kept dull diaries, too. The problem has to do not with the evidence but with the witness. The point is not the adventure but the adventurer. Reality cannot be directly rendered. Reality is a pile of bricks that can assume many forms.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

83. “The beauty of Goodreads is that you know you’re sowing in a field where everyone, by definition and self-selection, loves to read.” - Guy Kawasaki

84. “Do you know what the difference is between PR and advertising? Advertising is when you say how great you are. PR is when other people say how great you are. PR is better.” - Guy Kawasaki

85. “Good writing just isn't that common.” - Eric Flint

86. “It is only when you open your veins and bleed onto the page a little that you establish contact with your reader. If you do not believe in the characters or the story you are doing at that moment with all your mind, strength, and will, if you don't feel joy and excitement while writing it, then you're wasting good white paper, even if it sells, because there are other ways in which a writer can bring in the rent money besides writing bad or phony stories.” - Paul Gallico