91 Writers On Writing: Quotes

Diving into the minds of literary giants can be an exhilarating experience, offering glimpses into the intimate dance between the writer and the written word. For those who seek inspiration, guidance, or simply a peek behind the curtain, a curated collection of quotes from renowned authors provides a treasure trove of insight. From musings on the craft to reflections on the writer's role in society, these 91 quotes encapsulate the myriad emotions, struggles, and triumphs that accompany the creative journey. Whether you're an aspiring writer, a seasoned author, or an avid reader, these nuggets of wisdom are sure to resonate and inspire.

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. “I am a writer who came from a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.” - Eudora Welty

3. “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

4. “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

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

6. “...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

7. “Ink, a Drug.” - Vladimir Nabokov

8. “Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves - that's the truth. We have two or three great and moving experiences in our lives - experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time anyone else has been so caught up and so pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before.Then we learn our trade, well or less well, and we tell our two or three stories - each time in a new disguise - maybe ten times, maybe a hundred, as long as people will listen.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

9. “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

10. “The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle. Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.” - Joan Didion

11. “Five common traits of good writers: (1) They have something to say. (2) They read widely and have done so since childhood. (3) They possess what Isaac Asimov calls a "capacity for clear thought," able to go from point to point in an orderly sequence, an A to Z approach. (4) They're geniuses at putting their emotions into words. (5) They possess an insatiable curiosity, constantly asking Why and How.” - James J. Kilpatrick

12. “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

13. “Just me, my music, and the voices in my head.” - Christie Silvers

14. “Yang bisa kita lakukan sebagai penulis hanyalah mencoba, mengerahkan usaha, menabur benih, dan menuai panen apa pun yang diberikan dengan penuh sukacita dan syukur.” - Dan Millman

15. “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.

16. “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

17. “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

18. “There's a difference between writing for a living and writing forlife. If you write for a living, you make enormous compromises....If you write for life, you'll work hard; you'll do what's honest,not what pays” - Toni Morrison

19. “Mice: What is the best early training for a writer?Y.C.: An unhappy childhood.” - Ernest Hemingway

20. “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.

21. “There is no greater feeling of accomplishment than to create a world that solely exists in your imagination and be able to pull someone into this hidden place inside of my thoughts. To make someone care for a person that has manifested from my dreams, to make them hate me for putting them in danger, and for them to ask to be taken on another journey with me when it is all said and done is why I write.” - Teresa Mummert

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

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

24. “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

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

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

27. “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.

28. “Before cruelly vilifying them from a great height, the mudslingers at newspapers and journals should bear in mind that all artistic endeavors were by and large a mixture of effort and imagination, the embodiment of a solitary endeavor, of a sometimes long-nurtured dream, when they were not a desperate bid to give life meaning.” - Félix J. Palma

29. “It is my personal belief that writing cannot be taught.” - Parnell Hall

30. “Why do I love writing YA? Because I get a chance to re-live my youth knowing all I know now...” - Belle Whittington

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

32. “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

33. “Capture your reader, let him not depart, from dull beginnings that refuse to start” - Horace

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

35. “Writers have come to master nearly every trade. They are inventors and entrepreneurs of character, plot, and dialogue. They are the eager scientists that can’t wait to try out their new experiment. They are the maestros of the symphony that plays in their head, conducting what happens, where, and at what precise moment. They are engineers and architects that design the structure of their piece so it stands the test of time and continues to fire on all cylinders. They play mechanics and doctors in their revisions, hoping they prescribe the correct diagnosis to fix the piece’s 'boo boos'. They are salesmen who pitch not an idea or a product, but themselves, to editors, publishers, and more importantly, their readers. They are teachers who through their craft, preach to pupils about what works and what doesn’t work and why. Writers can make you feel, can make you think, can make you wonder, but they can also grab your hand and guide you through their maze. Similar to what Emerson stated in 'The Poet,' writers possess a unique view on life, and with their revolving eye, they attempt to encompass all. I am a writer.” - Garrett Dennert

36. “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

37. “Writing is the dragon that lives underneath my floorboards. The one I incessantly feed for fear it may turn and devour my ass. Writing is the friend who doesn't return my phone calls; the itch I'm unable to scratch; a dinner invitation from a cannibal; elevator music for a narcoleptic. Writing is the hope of lifting all boats by pissing in the ocean. Writing isn't something that makes me happy like a good cup of coffee. It's just something I do because not writing, as I've found, is so much worse.” - Quentin R. Bufogle

38. “Fictional characters are made of words, not flesh; they do not have free will, they do not exercise volition. They are easily born, and as easily killed off.” - John Banville

39. “Discipline allows magic. To be a writer is to be the very best of assassins. You do not sit down and write every day to force the Muse to show up. You get into the habit of writing every day so that when she shows up, you have the maximum chance of catching her, bashing her on the head, and squeezing every last drop out of that bitch.” - Lili St. Crow

40. “I should be writing ...” - Mur Lafferty

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

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

43. “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

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

45. “Needless to say, the business of living interferes with the solitude so needed for any work of the imagination. Here's what Virginia Woolf said in her diary about the sticky issue: "I've shirked two parties, and another Frenchman, and buying a hat, and tea with Hilda Trevelyan, for I really can't combine all this with keeping all my imaginary people going.” - Virginia Woolf

46. “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

47. “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.

48. “You may be a serious writer if ….10. your hard drive is littered with random notes and story ideas … but not nearly as littered as your head.9. you keep pen and paper next to your bed. And in the glove compartment. And in your gym bag. Also on the rim of the bathtub.8. a day without Roget’s Thesaurus is a day without sunshine.7. your emotional landscape includes creativity, confidence, elation, frustration, and the occasional neurosis.6. you’ve ever had to clean peanut butter and bread crumbs off your keyboard, because the work was going well, and you didn’t want to stop for lunch.5. grammar and punctuation turn you on.4. your interest in a new acquaintance is directly proportionate to his/her potential as a secondary character.3. you’ve worn the white e, r, s, and t clean off your keyboard.2. the search history on your web browser would raise red flags with the FBI, CIA, DEA, and mental health professionals everywhere.1. you have stories to tell, and you just. Keep. Telling. Them.” - Kathy Disanto

49. “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

50. “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

51. “Women’s fiction” doesn’t sound like anything but a slur to my ears.” - Sheila Heti

52. “My language is the common prostitute that I turn into a virgin.” - Karl Kraus

53. “The task of the artist at any time is uncompromisingly simple — to discover what has not yet been done, and to do it.” - Craig Raine

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

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

57. “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

58. “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

59. “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

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

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

62. “It seemed to me then that to have published a book - any kind of book - would be the greatest possible happiness I could ask from life.” - Christopher Isherwood

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

64. “True writers know that writing is not something they feel required to do,or to make a living they must do, it is quite frankly like breathing. Somecan breathe often and fluently, some short breaths, some a long exhaleand for many of us it is the patient steady breathing surrounding life.” - Milissa R. Bailey

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

66. “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

67. “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

68. “Literature might be called the art of story, and story might in turn be called a universal language, for every culture we know of has a tradition of storytelling. No doubt stories have touched your life, too, from bedtime stories you may have heard as a child to news stories you see on TV or read in a newspaper. We might even say that a major goal of living is to created the story of our own lives, a story we hope to take pleasure and pride in telling.” - Andrea A. Lunsford

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

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

71. “There is a curious idea among unscientific men that in scientific writing there is a common plateau of perfectionism. Nothing could be more untrue. The reports of biologists are the measure, not of the science, but of the men themselves. There are as few scientific giants as any other kind. In some reports it is impossible, because of inept expression, to relate the descriptions to the living animals. In some papers collecting places are so mixed or ignored that the animals mentioned cannot be found at all. The same conditioning forces itself into specification as it does into any other kind of observation, and the same faults of carelessness will be found in scientific reports as in the witness chair of a criminal court. It has seemed sometimes that the little men in scientific work assumed the awe-fullness of a priesthood to hide their deficiencies, as the witch-doctor does with his stilts and high masks, as the priesthoods of all cults have, with secret or unfamiliar languages and symbols. It is usually found that only the little stuffy men object to what is called "popularization", by which they mean writing with a clarity understandable to one not familiar with the tricks and codes of the cult. We have not known a single great scientist who could not discourse freely and interestingly with a child. Can it be that the haters of clarity have nothing to say, have observed nothing, have no clear picture of even their own fields? A dull man seems to be a dull man no matter what his field, and of course it is the right of a dull scientist to protect himself with feathers and robes, emblems and degrees, as do other dull men who are potentates and grand imperial rulers of lodges of dull men.” - John Steinbeck

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

73. “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

74. “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

75. “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

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

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

78. “I consider whoever my words land on to be my target, that’s why I like flash fiction, it’s a lot like using a shotgun.” - Neil Leckman

79. “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

80. “...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

81. “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

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

83. “Writing is easy. Writing is hard. It's a breeze and a struggle, just like life.” - Dennis R. Miller

84. “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

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

86. “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

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

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

89. “The thing I want to write most is the next thing I write.” - Carroll Bryant

90. “You can be a writer who doesn't read everyday. But you're not fooling anyone. It shows, rather embarrassingly, in your work.” - Don Roff

91. “A writer’s brain is like a magician’s hat. If you’re going to get anything out of it, you have to put something in it first” - Louis L'Amour