Writing Quotes:200 Best Inspirational Quotes for Writers

When we doubt our abilities as writers we need to understand that other writers have gone through a similar situation in the course of their work.

Having a list of inspiring quotes from writers can go a long way.

These authors(writers) didn’t leave only their work to give inspiration but also their words in form of quotes.

These quotes offer positive advice for every stage of the writing journey.

Let’s dive in.

What should I write Quotes?

1.”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

2.”Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.” – William Wadsworth

3.”I start with a question. Then try to answer it.” – Mary Lee Settle

5.“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

6.” And 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

7.”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

8.” Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.”

― John Steinbeck

9.”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

10.”If you wait for inspiration to write you’re not a writer, you’re a waiter.” ~ Dan Poynter.

11.”We’re past the age of heroes and hero kings. … Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it’s up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting.”

—John Updike,

12.”Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.”

—Virginia Woolf

13.”Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.” – Ray Bradbury

14.”There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.” – Willa Cather

Quotes about editing

15.”You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.”

― Jodi Picoult

16.”If it can be cut out, then CUT IT OUT. Everything non-essential that you can eliminate strengthens what’s left.”

― Alexander Mackendrick

17.”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

18.“Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”

— Franz Kafka

19.”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

20.”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

21.”Half my life is an act of revision.”

–John Irving

22.“Not a wasted word. This has been a main point to my literary thinking all my life.”

—Hunter S. Thompson

23.”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,

24.”For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.”

—Catherine Drinker Bowen

25.”Style means the right word. The rest matters little.”

—Jules Renard

26.”The difference between the almost right word and the right word is … the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”

—Mark Twain

27.”So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads.” – Dr. Seuss

28.”Editing should be, especially in the case of old writers, a counselling rather than a collaborating task. The tendency of the writer-editor to collaborate is natural, but he should say to himself, ‘How can I help this writer to say it better in his own style?’ and avoid ‘How can I show him how I would write it if it were my piece?”

― James Thurber

29.”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

30.”Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald

31.”Most editors are failed writers – but so are most writers.” – T.S. Eliot

32.”It is perfectly okay to write garbage—as long as you edit brilliantly.” – C. J. Cherryh

33.”Good writing is rewriting.” – Truman Capote

34.”Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.” – Stephen King

35.”No author dislikes to be edited as much as he dislikes not to be published.”

― J. Russell Lynes

Inspirational Writing Quotes

36.“I believe myself that a good writer doesn’t really need to be told anything except to keep at it.”

— Chinua Achebe

37.”Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.”

— Louis L’Amour

38.”Serious writers write, inspired or not. Over time they discover that routine is a better friend than inspiration.” – Ralph Keyes

39.”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

40.”The hard part about writing a novel is finishing it.” – Ernest Hemingway

41.”What seems to us as bitter trials are often blessings in disguise.” – Oscar Wilde

42.”Focus more on your desire than on your doubt, and the dream will take care of itself.” – Mark Twain

43.”There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”

― Maya Angelou

44.”Writing is something you do alone. Its a profession for introverts who want to tell you a story but don’t want to make eye contact while doing it.” – John Green

45.”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

46.”To survive, you must tell stories.”

–Umberto Eco, The Island of the Day Before

47.”That’s what fiction is for. It’s for getting at the truth when the truth isn’t sufficient for the truth.” – Tim O’Brien

48.”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

49.”The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.”

–Albert Camus

50.”This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It’s that easy, and that hard.” – Neil Gaiman

Courage and Belief to write

66.”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

67.”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

68.”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.

69.”That’s why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.”

― Octavia E. Butler

70.”I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.”

— Anne Frank

71.”A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.”

— Richard Bach

72.”You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”

–Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

73.”A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”

–Thomas Mann, Essays of Three Decades

74.”I went for years not finishing anything. Because, of course, when you finish something you can be judged.”

–Erica Jong

75.”A blank piece of paper is God’s way of telling us how hard it is to be God.”

–Sidney Sheldon

76.”Writing is its own reward.”

–Henry Miller

77.”Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it’s the only way you can do anything really good.”

–William Faulkner

78.”Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.” ~ Steven King

79.”It’s none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.” ~ Ernest Hemingway

80.”Every writer I know has trouble writing.” ~ Joseph Heller

81.”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 only thing you have to offer.” ~ Barbara Kingsolver

82.”The scariest moment is always just before you start. After that, things can only get better.” ~ Stephen King

83.”Never, never, never, never give up.” ~Winston Churchill

84.”If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor.’ ~ Edgar Rice Burroughs

85.”Being a good writer is 3% talent, 97% not being distracted by the Internet.” ~ Anon

86.”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

87.”We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”

—Ernest Hemingway

88.”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

89.”One thing that helps is to give myself permission to write badly. I tell myself that I’m going to do my five or 10 pages no matter what and that I can always tear them up the following morning if I want. I’ll have lost nothing—writing and tearing up five pages would leave me no further behind than if I took the day off.”

—Lawrence Block,

90.“To defend what you’ve written is a sign that you are alive.”

—William Zinsser,

91.”Keep a small can of WD-40 on your desk—away from any open flames—to remind yourself that if you don’t write daily, you will get rusty.”

—George Singleton

92.”Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.” – Anne Lamott

Tips for Writers

93.”I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”

–Douglas Adams

94.”If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads.” – Ray Bradbury

95.”Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”

― Anton Chekhov

96.”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

97.”Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.”

–Benjamin Franklin

98.”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

99.”I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.”

–Robert Louis Stevenson

100.”Always be a poet, even in prose.”

–Charles Baudelaire

101.”As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand.”

― Ernest Hemingway

102.”A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.”

― Friedrich Nietzsche

103.”To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.”

–Herman Melville

104.”The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.”

Reading

123.”Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river.”

― Lisa See

124.”If the book is true, it will find an audience that is meant to read it.”

— Wally Lamb

125.”If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”

–Stephen King

126.”If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”

–Toni Morrison

127.”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

128.”A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called “leaves”) imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time–proof that humans can work magic.”

― Carl Sagan

129.”If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.” – Stephen King

130.”There’s no better teacher for writing than reading… Get a library card. That’s the best investment.” ~ Alisa Valdes

131.”All readers come to fiction as willing accomplices to your lies. Such is the basic goodwill contract made the moment we pick up a work of fiction.”

—Steve Almond, WD

132.”What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though.” – J.D. Salinger

133.”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

134.”I’m out there to clean the plate. Once they’ve read what I’ve written on a subject, I want them to think, ‘That’s it!’ I think the highest aspiration people in our trade can have is that once they’ve written a story, nobody will ever try it again.”

—Richard Ben Cramer

135.”A book is simply the container of an idea—like a bottle; what is inside the book is what matters.”

—Angela Carter

136.”There are reasons people seek escape in books, and one of those reasons is that the boundary of what can happen is beyond what we do – or would want to see in real life.” – James Patterson

137.”One sure window into a person’s soul is his reading list.” – Mary B. W. Tabor

138.“I believe that writing is derivative. I think good writing comes from good reading.”

― Charles Kuralt

Writing

139.”It’s not wise to violate the rules until you know how to observe them.”

― T.S. Eliot

140.”The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.”

― Terry Pratchett

141.”I think all writing is a disease. You can’t stop it.”

— William Carlos Williams

142.”We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”

–Anaïs Nin

143.”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

145.”No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”

–Robert Frost

146.”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., A Man Without a Country

147.”You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.”

–Saul Bellow

148.”One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.”

–Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

149.”How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”

–Henry David Thoreau

150.”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

151.”Let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences.”

–Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

152.”Tears are words that need to be written.”

–Paulo Coelho

153.”Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader – not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.”

― E. L. Doctorow

154.”A word after a word after a word is power.”

–Margaret Atwood

155.”I write to discover what I know.”

–Flannery O’Connor

156.”You can make anything by writing.”

–C.S. Lewis

157.”Writing is like sex. First, you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.”

–Virginia Woolf

158.”Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.”

― Norman Mailer

159.”I always start writing with a clean piece of paper and a dirty mind.”

—Patrick Dennis

160.”Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish.”

― Hermann Hesse

161.”Know your literary tradition, savor it, steal from it, but when you sit down to write, forget about worshiping greatness and fetishizing masterpieces.”

—Allegra Goodman

162.”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

163.”In good writing, words become one with things.”

― Ralph Waldo Emerson

164.”There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.” ~ W. Somerset Maugham

165.“The best time to plan a book is while you’re doing the dishes.” ~ Agatha Christie

166.”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

167.”I almost always urge people to write in the first person. … Writing is an act of ego and you might as well admit it.”

—William Zinsser

168.”Stop aspiring and start writing. If you’re writing, you’re a writer. Write like you’re a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there’s no chance for a pardon. Write like you’re clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last breath, and you’ve got just one last thing to say like you’re a bird flying over us and you can see everything, and please, for God’s sake, tell us something that will save us from ourselves.” – Alan W. Watts

169.”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

170.”There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.”

—Doris Lessing

171.”Some things are hard to write about. After something happens to you, you go to write it down, and either you over dramatize it, or underplay it, exaggerate the wrong parts or ignore the important ones. At any rate, you never write it quite the way you want to.” – Sylvia Plath

172.”Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at 15 to write several novels.”

—May Sarton

173.”Write while the heat is in you. … The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with.”

—Henry David Thoreau

174.”The writing of a novel is taking life as it already exists, not to report it but to make an object, toward the end that the finished work might contain this life inside it and offer it to the reader. The essence will not be, of course, the same thing as the raw material; it is not even of the same family of things. The novel is something that never was before and will not be again.”

—Eudora Welty,

175.”There is no such thing as fantasy unrelated to reality.” – Maurice Sendak

176.”I don’t care if a reader hates one of my stories, just as long as he finishes the book.” – Roald Dahl

177.”Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it’s about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It’s about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy.” – Stephen King

178.“I do not over-intellectualise the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.”

—Tom Clancy,

179.”The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.” – Eleanor Roosevelt

180.”Remember: Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations.”

—Ray Bradbury, WD

181.”The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes.”

—Andre Gide

182.”Description begins in the writer’s imagination but should finish in the reader’s.” – Stephen King

183.”Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.”

—Robert A. Heinlein

184.”First, find out what your hero wants, then just follow him!” – Ray Bradbury

185.”When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people, not characters. A character is a caricature.”

—Ernest Hemingway

186.”There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story.” – Frank Herbert

187.”The secret of good writing is telling the truth.” – Gordon Lish

188.”All that I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say, is that I love the world.” – E.B. White

189.”We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” – Anaïs Nin

190.”I write for the same reason I breathe – because if I didn’t, I would die.” – Isaac Asimov

191.”A writer can do nothing for men more necessary, satisfying, than just simply to reveal to them the infinite possibilities of their own souls.” – Walt Whitman

192.”A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.” – Lorrie Moore

193.”Easy reading is damn hard writing.”

― Nathaniel Hawthorne

194.”You do an awful lot of bad writing in order to do any good writing. Incredibly bad. I think it would be very interesting to make a collection of some of the worst writing by good writers.”

―William S. Burroughs

195.”I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.” – Blaise Pascal

196.”Love is the only energy I’ve ever used as a writer. I’ve never written out of anger, although anger has informed love.” – Athol Fugard

197.”First, forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won’t. Habit is persistence in practice.”

― Octavia Butler

198.”You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”

― Jack London

199.”One should use common words to say uncommon things”

― Arthur Schopenhauer

200.”No iron can pierce the human heart as chillingly as a full stop placed at the right time.”

― Isaac Babel

Conclusion

We have looked at two hundred motivational quotes from writers.

From reading to editing.

Now it’s your turn. which of the quotes is your favorite?

Let me know in the comments section 🤔.