Read top quotes about writing from famous writers, artists and philosophers. Take inspirations from their powerful words!
Writing is a work towards perfection that has no saturation point. Any piece of writing can be polished and improved and it will still remain unfinished.
This is the inconvenient charm writing offers.
I never found a single person who does not have the requisite quality to be a writer. Everybody has a wealth of experiences to share, memories that refuse to die, and emotions that need to burst out, but they struggle.
They struggle to gather the right words and relevant thoughts to transfer their row emotions into a readable piece of art. Even those who pursue writing as a career, often find them in a strange situation they call writer’s block. It is an unexpected creative slowdown, an overwhelming feeling of unable to produce anything new persistently.
But then this is the beauty of writing. Good writing is unavailable in abundance. It is useless without hard work and dedication. And it needs constant backing of pure inspiration. Thanks to technology, we have publicly available information that we can turn to whenever we need to bring out the writer in us.
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This article aims to accomplish the goal. It covers 100 famous writing quotes. I seriously believe that there is at least one quote that will strike your mind, will inspire you to finalize the unfinished draft. Or probably, it will linger in your mind for many upcoming days, constantly supporting you in your effort to become a better writer every day.
Happy reading!
Top 100 Motivational writing quotes to Tickle Your Creative Side
| Quote | Author |
| “The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.” | Terry Pratchett |
| “Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river.” | Lisa See |
| “The road to hell is paved with adverbs.” | Stephen King |
| “Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly – they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.” | Aldous Huxley |
| “The scariest moment is always just before you start.” | Stephen King |
| “You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.” | Ray Bradbury |
| “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.” | Robert Frost |
| “You don’t start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it’s good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That’s why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.” | Octavia E. Butler |
| “Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.” | Louis L’Amour |
| “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.” | Douglas Adams |
| “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” | Toni Morrison |
| You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page | Jodi Picoult |
| “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” | Maya Angelou |
| “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” | Ernest Hemingway |
| “If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.” | Stephen King |
| “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” | Anais Nin |
| “Fiction is the truth inside the lie.” | Stephen King |
| “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. ’tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.” | Mark Twain |
| “You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.” | Madeleine L’Engle |
| “One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.” | Jack Kerouac |
| “Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.” | E.L. Doctorow |
| “There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story.” | Frank Herbert |
| “When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.” | George Orwell |
| “Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.” | William Wadsworth |
| “You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.” | Annie Proulx |
| “I kept always two books in my pocket: one to read, one to write in.” | Robert Louis Stevenson |
| “The Six Golden Rules of Writing: Read, read, read, and write, write, write.” | Ernest Gaines |
| “A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.” | Richard Bach |
| “It’s none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.” | Ernest Hemingway |
| “A writer is working when he’s staring out of the window.” | Burton Rascoe |
| “The English language is an arsenal of weapons. If you are going to brandish them without checking to see whether or not they are loaded, you must expect to have them explode in your face from time to time.” | Stephen Fry |
| “Every writer I know has trouble writing.” | Joseph Heller |
| “The best time to plan a book is while you’re doing the dishes.” | Agatha Christie |
| “I try to write a certain amount each day, five days a week. A rule sometimes broken is better than no rule.” | Herman Wouk |
| “A blank piece of paper is God’s way of telling us how hard it is to be God.” | Sidney Sheldon |
| “I went for years not finishing anything. Because, of course, when you finish something you can be judged.” | Erica Jong |
| “Half my life is an act of revision.” | John Irving |
| “Almost anyone can be an author; the business is to collect money and fame from this state of being.” | A. A. Milne |
| “A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” | Thomas Mann |
| “If a story is not about the hearer, he will not listen. And here I make a rule – a great and interesting story is about everyone or it will not last.” | John Steinbeck |
| “There is probably no hell for authors in the next world – they suffer so much from critics and publishers in this one.” | C.N. Bovee |
| “Sometimes the ideas just come to me. Other times I have to sweat and almost bleed to make ideas come. It’s a mysterious process, but I hope I never find out exactly how it works. I like a mystery, as you may have noticed.” | J.K. Rowling |
| “Good writing is remembering detail. Most people want to forget. Don’t forget things that were painful or embarrassing or silly. Turn them into a story that tells the truth.” | Paula Danziger |
| “To write well, express yourself like the common people, but think like a wise man.” | Aristotle |
| I think all writing is a disease. You can’t stop it.” | William Carlos Williams |
| “I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.” | Anne Frank |
| “I believe myself that a good writer doesn’t really need to be told anything except to keep at it.” | Chinua Achebe |
| “Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.” | Mark Twain |
| “Read, read, read. Read everything – trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it’s good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out of the window.” | William Faulkner |
| “Let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences.” | Sylvia Plath |
| “Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.” | Kurt Vonnegut Jr. |
| “Write what should not be forgotten.” | Isabel Allende |
| “First, find out what your hero wants, then just follow him.” | Ray Bradbury |
| “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” | Ernest Hemingway |
| “It doesn’t matter how many book ideas you have if you can’t finish writing your book.” | Joe Bunting |
| “I am not at all in a humor for writing; I must write on until I am.” | Jane Austen |
| “You can fix anything but a blank page.” | Nora Roberts |
| “If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word.” | Margaret Atwood |
| “A writer never has a vacation. For a writer life consists of either writing or thinking about writing.” | Eugene Ionesco |
| “The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.” | Zadie Smith |
| “No matter what people tell you, words and ideas can change the world.” | Robin Williams |
| “A word after a word after a word is power.” | Margaret Atwood |
| “Writers live twice.” | Natalie Goldberg |
| “Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.” | Benjamin Franklin |
| “History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.” | Winston Churchill |
| “Find your best time of the day for writing and write. Don’t let anything else interfere. Afterwards it won’t matter to you that the kitchen is a mess.” | Esther Freud |
| “Write drunk, edit sober.” | Ernest Hemingway |
| “Style means the right word. The rest matters little.” | Jules Renard |
| “I love my rejection slips. They show me I try.” | Sylvia Plath |
| “If you want to change the world, pick up your pen and write.” | Martin Luther |
| “Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” | David Foster Wallace |
| “All stories have to at least try to explain some small portion of the meaning of life.” | Gene Weingarten |
| “Don’t take anyone’s writing advice too seriously.” | Lev Grossman |
| “To survive, you must tell stories.” | Umberto Eco |
| “Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.” | Norman Mailer |
| “As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand.” | Ernest Hemingway |
| “To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.” | Herman Melville |
| “Let my thoughts come to you, when I am gone, like the afterglow of sunset at the margin of starry silence.” | Rabindranath Tagore |
| “Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it’s the only way you can do anything really good.” | William Faulkner |
| “Words are a lens to focus one’s mind.” | Ayn Rand |
| “Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” | David Foster Wallace |
| “Writing is its own reward.” | Henry Miller |
| “You go where the story leads you.” | Stephen King |
| “It is perfectly okay to write garbage — as long as you edit brilliantly.” | C. J. Cherryh |
| “Be willing to write really badly.” | Jennifer Egan |
| “Anyone who says writing is easy isn’t doing it right.” | Amy Joy |
| “I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.” | Gustave Flaubert |
| “You fail only if you stop writing.” | Ray Bradbury |
| “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.” | Henry David Thoreau |
| “What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.” | Samuel Johnson |
| “You can’t fail if you don’t quit. You can’t succeed if you don’t start.” | Michael Hyatt |
| “Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.” | Natalie Goldberg |
| “I try to leave out the parts that people skip.” | Elmore Leonard |
| “I write to discover what I know.” | Flannery O’Connor |
| “It ain’t whatcha write, it’s the way atcha write it.” | Jack Kerouac |
| “If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn’t matter a damn how you write.” | Somerset Maugham |
| “If you have no critics, you’ll likely have no success.” | Malcolm X |
| Despite words being a writer’s best friends, they still fall short of his expectations. | Unknown |
Learning from these inspirational writing quotes
- To write, you have to start
- Then, keep writing
- Then, have a penchant for editing
- While without sacrificing emotions, and your inner calling
- You can write, and be good at it
- Being a writer is satisfying
- You will also have critics, failures and merciless editors
- Love them, but don’t make them a priority
- Write your heart out. Because
- You can write!
The gist is – Don’t quit! You can’t control the outcome or response but if you have something interesting to say and feel an inner drive to share it with the world, why not write it?
What is your favourite writing quote? I’m waiting to see your comment!