While some people write as a hobby, others do it as a professional occupation. But whether you are a professional author or just doing it for fun, you’ll need the inspiration to start writing and keep you going. This article offers you 54 of the best quotes about writing to arouse your creativity.
54 Quotes About Writing
If you need some inspiration to stimulate your writing creativity, here are the top 54 most inspirational quotes about writing.
Quotes About Writing to Inspire You to Write
1. “A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.” – Richard Bach
2. “Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.” – Steven King
3. “It’s none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.” – Ernest Hemingway
4. “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.” – Stephen King
5. ‘If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor.’ – Edgar Rice Burroughs
6. “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” – Maya Angelou
7. “A writer is working when he’s staring out of the window.” – Burton Rascoe
8. “The mind has plenty of ways of preventing you from writing, and paralyzing self-consciousness is a good one. The only thing to do is ignore it, and remember what Vincent van Gogh said in one of his letters about the painter’s fear of the blank canvas—the canvas, he said, is far more afraid of the painter.” – Philip Pullman
9. “Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It’s the one and the only thing you have to offer.” – Barbara Kingsolver
10. “Every writer I know has trouble writing.” – Joseph Heller
11. “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
12. “By the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” – Sylvia Plath
13. “There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.” – W. Somerset Maugham
14. “There is no greater threat to the critics and cynics and fearmongers than those of us who are willing to fall because we have learned how to rise.” – Brené Brown
15. “Never, never, never, never give up.” -Winston Churchill
16. “If you wait for inspiration to write you’re not a writer, you’re a waiter.” – Dan Poynter.
17. “The miraculous connection between writing and the immune system results from cracking through inhibition. It seems that when we don’t speak the truth of our experience, we inhibit our emotions, and that inhibits our immune function. Keeping secrets and maintaining denial requires physical energy, energy our bodies could use in healthier ways were it available.” – Peggy Tabor Millin
18. “Being a good writer is 3% talent, 97% not being distracted by the Internet.” – Anon
19. “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
20. “You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.” – Jodi Picoult
21. “Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.” – Louis L’Amour
22. “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
Quotes About Writing by Famous Writers
23. “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.” – Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
24. “I only write when I’m inspired, so I see to it that I’m inspired every morning at nine o’clock.” – Peter De Vries
25. “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
26. “If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.” – Isaac Asimov
27. “There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly: sometimes it’s like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.” – Ernest Hemingway
28. “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
29. “The scariest moment is always just before you start. After that, things can only get better.” – Stephen King
30. “The best time to plan a book is while you’re doing the dishes.” – Agatha Christie
31. “You have to follow your own voice. You have to be yourself when you write. In effect, you have to announce, ‘This is me, this is what I stand for, this is what you get when you read me. I’m doing the best I can—buy me or not—but this is who I am as a writer.” – David Morrell
32. “As a writer, you have to have the three D’s: drive, discipline, and desire. If you’re missing any one of those three, you can have all the talent in the world, but it’s going to be really hard to get anything done.” – Nora Roberts
33. “There’s no better teacher for writing than reading… Get a library card. That’s the best investment.” – Alisa Valdes
34. “I try to write a certain amount each day, five days a week. A rule sometimes broken is better than no rule.” – Herman Wouk
35. “Beginning a novel is always hard. It feels like going nowhere. I always have to write at least 100 pages that go into the trashcan before it finally begins to work. It’s discouraging, but necessary to write those pages. I try to consider them pages -100 to zero of the novel.” – Barbara Kingsolver
36. “My first feeling was that there was no way to continue. Writing isn’t like math; in math, two plus two always equals four no matter what your mood is like. With writing, the way you feel changes everything.” – Stephenie Meyer
37. “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
38. “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
39. “I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear; my courage is reborn.” – Anne Frank
40. “I believe myself that a good writer doesn’t really need to be told anything except to keep at it.” – Chinua Achebe
41. “We turn to stories and pictures and music because they show us who and what and why we are, and what our relationship is to life and death, what is essential, and what, despite the arbitrariness of falling beams, will not burn.” – Madeleine L’Engle
42. “First, you write for yourself… always, to make sense of experience and the world around you. It’s one of the ways I stay sane. Our stories, our books, our films are how we cope with the random trauma-inducing chaos of life as it plays.” – Bruce Springsteen
Other Quotes About Writing
43. “Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly – they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.” – Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
44. “We will open the book. Its pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year’s Day.” – Edith Lovejoy Pierce
45. “A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” – Thomas Mann
46. “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
47. “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
48. “Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river.” – Lisa See
49. “When your story is ready for 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
50. “Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written largely in his works.” – Virginia Woolf
51. “Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” – Anton Chekhov
52. “If the book is true, it will find an audience that is meant to read it.” – Wally Lamb
53. “I think all writing is a disease. You can’t stop it.” – William Carlos Williams
54. “If you are not afraid of the voices inside you, you will not fear the critics outside you.” – Natalie Goldberg
