195 Quotes from Famous Authors to Inspire the Writer Within You
/This is the ultimate collection of motivational writing quotes and tips from the world’s most famous authors. No matter your level of experience, every writer has bad days. These expert writing tips from the pros will provide the inspiration you need to start and complete your writing projects.
By Michelle Segrest, Navigate Content
Writing opens doors to worlds we sometimes can only dream about. The written word can paint pictures that the reader can see, smell, taste, and feel. The best way to learn the finer points of writing is to learn from the masters of the craft. Even the most famous authors struggle at times when staring at a blank page, but these words of wisdom will inspire experienced writers as well as novices.
Writing Tips from the Pros
1. “The best advice on writing was given to me by my first editor, Michael Korda, of Simon and Schuster, while writing my first book. 'Finish your first draft and then we'll talk,' he said. It took me a long time to realize how good the advice was. Even if you write it wrong, write and finish your first draft. Only then, when you have a flawed whole, do you know what you have to fix.” — Dominick Dunne
2. “The main thing I try to do is write as clearly as I can. I rewrite a good deal to make it clear.” — E.B. White
3. “Powerful writing is inspired by real-life experiences. If you hear yourself say, ‘You can’t make up this stuff,” then you have a story to tell. Write it down. Make it the foundation of your narrative. Then make up stuff to make it even better.” – Michelle Segrest
4. “You have to surrender to your mediocrity, and just write. Because it's hard, really hard, to write even a crappy book. But it's better to write a book that kind of sucks rather than no book at all, as you wait around to magically become Faulkner. No one is going to write your book for you and you can't write anybody's book but your own.” – Cheryl Strayed
5. “Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.” — Stephen King
6. “Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.” — Natalie Goldberg
7. “People do support themselves as artists and writers, so there's no need to be all doom and gloom about it. You just have to push forward. You have to follow your vision and hope for the best. You have to write for love.” – Cheryl Strayed
8. “I would write a book, or a short story, at least three times — once to understand it, the second time to improve the prose, and a third to compel it to say what it still must say. Somewhere I put it this way: first drafts are for learning what one's fiction wants him to say. Revision works with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to reform it. Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.” — Bernard Malamud
9. “Write drunk. Edit sober.” – Ernest Hemingway
10. "Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it's the only way you can do anything really good." — William Faulkner
11. “The most important thing for aspiring writers is for them to give themselves permission to be brave on the page, to write in the presence of fear, to go to those places that you think you can’t write - really that’s exactly what you need to write.” – Cheryl Strayed
12. “Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.” — John Steinbeck
13. “When your story is ready for a rewrite, cut it to the bone. Get rid of every ounce of excess fat. This is going to hurt; revising a story down to the bare essentials is always a little like murdering children, but it must be done.” — Stephen King
14. “As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand.” ― Ernest Hemingway
15. “The secret to being a writer is that you have to write. It’s not enough to think about writing or to study literature or plan a future life as an author. You really have to lock yourself away, alone, and get to work.” — Augusten Burroughs
16. “Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.” — Stephen King
17. “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
18. “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
19. Rather | Very | Little | Pretty | Really | Quite
”These are the leeches that infest the pond of prose, sucking the blood of words. The constant use of the adjective little (except to indicate size) is particularly debilitating; we should all try to do a little better, we should all be very watchful of this rule, for it is a rather important one, and we are pretty sure to violate it now and then.” — William Strunk & E.B. White
20. “Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. [...] All they do is show you've been to college.” — Kurt Vonnegut
21. “To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.” — Herman Melville
22. “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.” — Mark Twain
23. “The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.” — Neil Gaiman
24. “Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up.” — Jane Yolen
25. “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it. Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can't allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative.” — Elmore Leonard
26. “Your writing voice is the deepest possible reflection of who you are. The job of your voice is not to seduce or flatter or make well-shaped sentences. In your voice, your readers should be able to hear the contents of your mind, your heart, your soul.” — Meg Rosoff
27. “I would advise any beginning writer to write the first drafts as if no one else will ever read them — without a thought about publication — and only in the last draft to consider how the work will look from the outside.” — Anne Tyler
28. “I just give myself permission to suck. I delete about 90 percent of my first drafts, so it doesn’t really matter much if on a particular day I write beautiful and brilliant prose that will stick in the minds of my readers forever, because there’s a 90 percent chance I’m just going to delete whatever I write anyway. I find this hugely liberating.” — John Green
29. “Be willing to write really badly.” — Jennifer Egan
30. “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
Motivational Quotes from Famous Authors
31. “Get a job at a newspaper. Start a blog. Write letters to your grandmother. Write in a journal. If you truly want to be a writer, find a way to write every day. You just need experience—and this is how you get it.” — Michelle Segrest
32. “There are some books that refuse to be written. They stand their ground year after year and will not be persuaded. It isn’t because the book is not there and worth being written — it is only because the right form of the story does not present itself. There is only one right form for a story and, if you fail to find that form, the story will not tell itself.” — Mark Twain
33. “Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.” ― William Strunk Jr., The Elements of Style
34. “So, the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads.” ― Dr. Seuss
35. “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at the typewriter and bleed.” — Ernest Hemingway
36. “Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.” — Louis L’Amour
37. “First, find out what your hero wants, then just follow him.” — Ray Bradbury
38. “You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.” ― Jodi Picoult
39. “Editing might be a bloody trade, but knives aren’t the exclusive property of butchers. Surgeons use them too.” — Blake Morrison
40. “You write to communicate to the hearts and minds of others what's burning inside you, and we edit to let the fire show through the smoke.” — Arthur Plotnik
Inspiring Quotes About Writing
41. “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” — Ernest Hemingway
42. “Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works.” — Virginia Woolf
43. “I write to find what I have to say. I edit to figure out how to say it right.” – Cheryl Strayed
44. “If the book is true, it will find an audience that is meant to read it.” — Wally Lamb
45. “Writing is storytelling. If you want to know if you have a truly interesting story, tell it to your children at bedtime. If they stay awake, then write it down.” – Michelle Segrest
46. “A word after a word after a word is power.” — Margaret Atwood
47. “If you want to change the world, pick up your pen and write.” — Martin Luther
48. “The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.” — Albert Camus
49. “Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” — David Foster Wallace
50. “After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.” — Philip Pullman
Motivational Quotes to Inspire the Writer Within You
51. “All stories have to at least try to explain some small portion of the meaning of life.” — Gene Weingarten
52. “If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.” — Peter Handke
53. “The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.” — Tom Clancy
54. “Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of job: It’s always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.” — Neil Gaiman
55. “It’s none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think you were born that way.” — Ernest Hemingway
56. “If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.” — Stephen King
57. "If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it." — Toni Morrison
58. “Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don’t see any.” — Orson Scott
59. “Most writers regard the truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are most economical in its use.” — Mark Twain
60. “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
Inspirational Writing Quotes from the World’s Greatest Authors
61. “To gain your own voice, you have to forget about having it heard.” — Allen Ginsberg
62. “It is perfectly okay to write garbage — as long as you edit brilliantly.” — C. J. Cherryh
63. “I've found the best way to revise your own work is to pretend that somebody else wrote it and then to rip the living shit out of it.” ― Don Roff
64. “Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial 'we'.” — Mark Twain
65. “Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.” — Henry David Thoreau
66. “No author dislikes to be edited as much as he dislikes not to be published.” — Russell Lynes
67. “Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now.” — Annie Dillard
68. “No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft.” — H.G. Wells
69. “One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.” — Jack Kerouac
70. “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.” —Robert Frost
Famous authors share their best writing tips
Famous Authors Provide Expert Writing Tips and Advice
71. “The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.” — Terry Pratchett
72. “Get through a draft as quickly as possible.” — Joshua Wolf Shenk
73. “I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.” — Douglas Adams
74. “Writing is hard for every last one of us—straight white men included. Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.” – Cheryl Strayed
75. “The first draft of everything is shit.” — Ernest Hemingway
76. “There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story.” — Frank Herbert
77. “It is only by writing, not dreaming about it, that we develop our own style.” — P.D. James
78. “It doesn’t matter how many book ideas you have if you can’t finish writing your book.” — Joe Bunting
79. “If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word.” — Margaret Atwood
80. “A blank piece of paper is God's way of telling us how hard it is to be God.” — Sidney Sheldon
Motivational Writing Quotes to Inspire You
81. “I am not at all in a humor for writing; I must write on until I am.” — Jane Austen
82. “You can fix anything but a blank page.” — Nora Roberts
83. “I don’t wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that. Your mind must know it has got to get down to work.” — Pearl S. Buck
84. “Voice is not just the result of a single sentence or paragraph or page. It’s not even the sum total of a whole story. It’s all your work laid out across the table like the bones and fossils of an unidentified carcass.” — Chuck Wendig
85. “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
86. “A writer is a world trapped in a person.” — Victor Hugo
87. “A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” — Thomas Mann
88. “People say, ‘What advice do you have for people who want to be writers?’ I say, they don’t really need advice, they know they want to be writers, and they’re gonna do it. Those people who know that they really want to do this and are cut out for it, they know it.” — R.L. Stine
89. “And if you're gonna be a writer, you just truly have to be a writer. You have to throw yourself into it and deal with the negative consequences of that. And there are negative consequences. I mean, there are. But, it's also true that you wouldn't be interviewing me right now if I had worked at the post office. You wouldn't. I would be still writing, but I wouldn't have gotten as far as I've gotten, because I wouldn't have had the time.” – Cheryl Strayed
90. “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
World’s Best Quotes About Writing
91. “Let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences.” — Sylvia Plath
92. “I go out to my little office, where I’ve got a manuscript, and the last page I was happy with is on top. I read that, and it’s like getting on a taxiway. I’m able to go through and revise it and put myself — click — back into that world.” — Stephen King
93. “I think all writing is a disease. You can’t stop it.” — William Carlos Williams
94. “Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players. I have 10 or so, and that’s a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.” — Gore Vidal
95. “For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.” — Catherine Drinker Bowen
96. “The task of a writer consists of being able to make something out of an idea.” — Thomas Mann
97. “Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.” — T.S. Eliot
98. “Many people hear voices when no one is there. Some of them are called mad and are shut up in rooms where they stare at the walls all day. Others are called writers and they do pretty much the same thing.” — Margaret Chittenden
99. “A writer never has a vacation. For a writer life consists of either writing or thinking about writing.” — Eugene Ionesco
100. “Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.” — Benjamin Franklin
Inspirational Quotes About Writing Your Own Story
101. “A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it.” — Roald Dahl
102. “Don't lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don't have a career. You have a life. Do the work. Keep the faith. Be true blue. You are a writer because you write. Keep writing and quit your bitching. Your book has a birthday. You don't know what it is yet.” – Cheryl Strayed
103. “Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.” — Gloria Steinem
104. “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.” — Henry David Thoreau
105. “Cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can’t fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.” — William S. Burroughs
106. “You fail only if you stop writing.” — Ray Bradbury
107. “If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster.” — Isaac Asimov
108. “Just write every day of your life. Read intensely. Then see what happens. Most of my friends who are put on that diet have very pleasant careers.” — Ray Bradbury
109. “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
110. “The best cure for writer’s block is to write.” – Michelle Segrest
The Best Writing Quotes
111. “I believe myself that a good writer doesn’t really need to be told anything except to keep at it.” — Chinua Achebe
112. “Writing is such a strangely and radically private act, and yet its purpose is this great sense of connection and community. I mean, I wanted people to love the book. And the only way to get them to love it is to try to make it good for them. So, of course, the audience has to be considered.” — Cheryl Strayed
113. “Write what should not be forgotten.” — Isabel Allende
114. “The story must strike a nerve in me. My heart should start pounding when I hear the first line in my head. I start trembling at the risk.” — Susan Sontag
115. “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
116. “I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.” — Anne Frank
117. “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” — Anais Nin
118. “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” ― Maya Angelou
119. “The writing life doesn't move in a straight line. I've had successes and rejections all along the way, at every stage of my career, and I will continue to do so. Acceptances and rejections don't define me. They're both part of what it means to be a writer. My job is to simply keep doing the work.” – Cheryl Strayed
120. “Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” ― Anton Chekhov
Motivational Quotes to Encourage Writers
121. “My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.” — Anton Chekhov
122. “There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.” — Somerset Maugham
123. “Writing is part intuition and part trial and error, but mostly it's very hard work.” – Cheryl Strayed
124. “Style means the right word. The rest matters little.” — Jules Renard
125. “The only way I've been able to stay informed without letting fury rule my life is to channel my rage into something that ultimately feels like love to me. The place I do that the best is in my writing. That's where I feel like I can tap into the power of story and maybe bring something good into the world.” – Cheryl Strayed
126. “My aim in constructing sentences is to make the sentence utterly easy to understand, writing what I call transparent prose. I’ve failed dreadfully if you have to read a sentence twice to figure out what I meant.” — Ken Follett
127. “And one of [the things you learn as you get older] is, you really need less… My model for this is late Beethoven. He moves so strangely and quite suddenly sometimes from place to place in his music, in the late quartets. He knows where he’s going and he just doesn’t want to waste all that time getting there… One is aware of this as one gets older. You can’t waste time.” — Ursula K. Le Guin
128. “The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.” — Zadie Smith
129. “The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone’s neurosis.” — William Styron
130. “No matter what people tell you, words and ideas can change the world.” — Robin Williams
Motivational Writing Quotes to Inspire You to Write
131. “Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly — they'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced.” — Aldous Huxley
132. “You can make anything by writing.” — C.S. Lewis
133. “Writers live twice.” — Natalie Goldberg
134. “History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.” — Winston Churchill
135. “Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.” — Oscar Wilde
136. “You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.” — Ray Bradbury
137. “A lot of people go off and have fun adventures, or hard adventures, and their impulse is to write about them right away. What really makes a difference is having some perspective on what happened.” – Cheryl Strayed
138. “On first drafts: It is completely raw, the sort of thing I feel free to do with the door shut — it’s the story undressed, standing up in nothing but its socks and undershorts.” — Stephen King
139. “With fiction, it could be about anything. It just has to be good writing. I want to forget I have a book in my hand.” – Cheryl Strayed
140. “I do not over-intellectualise the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.” — Tom Clancy
Compelling Quotes about Writing
141. “Anyone who says writing is easy isn’t doing it right.” — Amy Joy
142. “I don’t want just words. If that’s all you have for me, you’d better go.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald
143. “You can’t let praise or criticism get to you. It’s a weakness to get caught up in either one.” — John Wooden
144. “Rejection slips, or form letters, however tactfully phrased, are lacerations of the soul, if not quite inventions of the devil — but there is no way around them.” — Isaac Asimov
145. “Was I bitter? Absolutely. Hurt? You bet your sweet ass I was hurt. Who doesn’t feel a part of their heart break at rejection. You ask yourself every question you can think of, what, why, how come, and then your sadness turns to anger. That’s my favorite part. It drives me, feeds me, and makes one hell of a story.” — Jennifer Salaiz
146. “I love my rejection slips. They show me I try.” — Sylvia Plath
147. “I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing his talent, he would be wise to develop a thick hide.” — Harper Lee
148. “I think the first thing - if you want to be a writer - the first thing you need to do is write. Which sounds like an obvious piece of advice. But so many people have this feeling they want to be a writer and they love to read but they don't actually write very much. The main part of being a writer, though, is being profoundly alone for hours on end, uninterrupted by email or friends or children or romantic partners and really sinking into the work and writing. That's how I write. That's how writing gets done.” – Cheryl Strayed
149. “I used to save all my rejection slips because I told myself, one day I’m going to autograph these and auction them. And then I lost the box.” — James Lee Burke
150. “This manuscript of yours that has just come back from another editor is a precious package. Don’t consider it rejected. Consider that you’ve addressed it ‘to the editor who can appreciate my work’ and it has simply come back stamped ‘Not at this address’. Just keep looking for the right address.” — Barbara Kingsolver
Passionate Writing Quotes
151. “To ward off a feeling of failure, she joked that she could wallpaper her bathroom with rejection slips, which she chose not to see as messages to stop, but rather as tickets to the game.” — Anita Shreve
152. “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
153. “The artist doesn’t have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don’t have the time to read reviews.” — William Faulkner
154. “I think that you have to believe in your destiny; that you will succeed, you will meet a lot of rejection and it is not always a straight path, there will be detours — so enjoy the view.” — Michael York
155. “I went for years not finishing anything. Because, of course, when you finish something you can be judged.” — Erica Jong
156. “I tell writers to keep reading, reading, reading. Read widely and deeply. And I tell them not to give up even after getting rejection letters. And only write what you love.” — Anita Diamant
157. “Writing can be such a lonely endeavor that I do think community is also important. Meeting at cafes and exchanging work and reading to each other and giving each other little bits of encouragement and feedback and thoughts, I think that's an incredibly rich experience because what it does is it gives you a sense of community but also purpose. If I know I'm going to meet you in a cafe next Tuesday, I'm going to write something that I can hand to you. Discipline is such a challenge for so many writers and so I think that that's a key benefit of being in a group.” – Cheryl Strayed
158. “I could write an entertaining novel about rejection slips, but I fear it would be overly long.” — Louise Brown
159. “I had immediate success in the sense that I sold something right off the bat. I thought it was going to be a piece of cake and it really wasn’t. I have drawers full of — or I did have — drawers full of rejection slips.” — Fred Saberhagen
160. “An absolutely necessary part of a writer’s equipment, almost as necessary as talent, is the ability to stand up under punishment, both the punishment the world hands out and the punishment he inflicts upon himself.” — Irwin Shaw
Creative Writing Quotes from the World’s Best Authors
161. “Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.” — C. S. Lewis
162. “Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.” — Virginia Woolf
163. “Everywhere I go, I’m asked if the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them.” — Flannery O’Connor
164. “Of course some people manage to write books really young and publish really young. But for most writers, it takes several years because you have to apprentice yourself to the craft, and you also have to grow up. I think maturity is connected to one's ability to write well.” – Cheryl Strayed
165. “As for ‘Write what you know,’ I was regularly told this as a beginner. I think it’s a very good rule and have always obeyed it. I write about imaginary countries, alien societies on other planets, dragons, wizards, the Napa Valley in 22002. I know these things. I know them better than anybody else possibly could, so it’s my duty to testify about them.” — Ursula K. Le Guin
166. “I’m very lucky in that I don’t understand the world yet. If I understood the world, it would be harder for me to write these books.” — Mo Willems
167. “Ideas are cheap. It’s the execution that is all important.” — George R.R. Martin
168. “If you wait for inspiration to write you’re not a writer, you’re a waiter.” — Dan Poynter
169. “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
Where to Find Writing Inspiration
170. “Indeed, learning to write may be part of learning to read. For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.” — Eudora Welty
171. “Let yourself be gutted. Let it open you. Start here.” — Cheryl Strayed
172. “The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector. This is the writer’s radar, and all great writers have had it.” — Ernest Hemingway
173. “I kept always two books in my pocket: one to read, one to write in.” — Robert Louis Stevenson
174. “The Six Golden Rules of Writing: Read, read, read, and write, write, write.” — Ernest Gaines
175. “To entrust to an editor a story over which you have labored and to which your name and reputation are attached can be like sending your daughter off for an evening with Ted Bundy.” – Edna Buchanan
176. “The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book.” — Samuel Johnson
177. “Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river.” ― Lisa See
178. “One sure window into a person’s soul is his reading list.” — Mary B. W. Tabor
179. “It is by sitting down to write every morning that one becomes a writer.” — Gerald Brenan
180. “Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.” — James Baldwin
181. “You just have to go on when it is worst and most helpless — there is only one thing to do with a novel and that is go straight on through to the end of the damn thing.” — Ernest Hemingway
Quotes on Writing
182. “We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.” — Kurt Vonnegut
183. “The nearest I have to a rule is a Post-it on the wall in front of my desk saying ‘Faire et se taire’ from Flaubert. Which I translate for myself as ‘Shut up and get on with it.’” — Helen Simpson
184. “I’ve been writing since I was six. It is a compulsion, so I can’t really say where the desire came from; I’ve always had it. My breakthrough with the first book came through persistence, because a lot of publishers turned it down.” — J.K. Rowling
185. “Every once in a while, there comes a story. A story that blows your mind. One where you know you've made a difference. That's what makes it all worthwhile. That and the anticipation. It's addictive, because you never know when it will happen, but when it does, nothing in the world is as important.” – Edna Buchanan
186. “Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old-fashioned virtues of hard, constant labor, he’ll eventually make some kind of career for himself as a writer.” — Ray Bradbury
187. “It is worth mentioning, for future reference, that the creative power which bubbles so pleasantly in beginning a new book quiets down after a time, and one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in. Then one becomes resigned. Determination not to give in, and the sense of an impending shape keep one at it more than anything.” — Virginia Woolf
188. “A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.” — Richard Bach
189. “An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice.” — Mark Twain
190. “We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.” – Ernest Hemingway
191. “Whatever happens to you belongs to you. Make it yours. Feed it to yourself even if it feels impossible to swallow. Let it nurture you, because it will.” — Cheryl Strayed
192. “If you really want to do something, you’ll find a way. If you don’t, you’ll find an excuse.” – Jim Rohn
193. “A story carves deep grooves into our brains each time we tell it. But we aren’t one story. We can change our stories. We can write our own.” – Amy Poehler
194. “ You can. You should. And if you’re brave enough to start, you will.” – Stephen King
195. “Everyone has a great story to tell.” – Michelle Segrest
