50 Inspirational Quotes for Writers
When the words flow freely, writing can be a life-affirming, energising experience. On the flip side, writing can sometimes be a lonely, arduous endeavour that’s full of frustration. We hope the following quotes from writers about writing will offer a glimmer of hope or inspiration when you are having one of those days when you can’t quite muster the energy or imagination to turn the blank page into something beautiful, amazing or entertaining.
Once you’ve regained your inspiration to write, you might put it to good use and start your first (or next) novel or write a new story or poem. And why not enter one of our writing competitions?
So, in no particular order, here are our 50 favourite quotes for writers.
When the words flow freely, writing can be a life-affirming, energising experience. On the flip side, writing can sometimes be a lonely, arduous endeavour that’s full of frustration. We hope the following quotes from writers about writing will offer a glimmer of hope or inspiration when you are having one of those days when you can’t quite muster the energy or imagination to turn the blank page into something beautiful, amazing or entertaining.
Once you’ve regained your inspiration to write, you might put it to good use and start your first (or next) novel or write a new story or poem. And why not enter one of our writing competitions?
So, in no particular order, here are our 50 favourite quotes for writers from some of the greatest authors, poets and thinkers the world has ever known.
“Writing is a calling, not a choice.” — Isabel Allende
“If a story is in you, it has to come out.” — William Faulkner
“A word after a word after a word is power.” ― Margaret Atwood
“Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.” — Ray Bradbury
“The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.” — Maya Angelou
“The scariest moment is always just before you start.” — Stephen King
“Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.” — William Wordsworth
“There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know where they’ll take you.” ― Beatrix Potter
“If something inside of you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things.” — Anne Lamott
“The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.” — Terry Pratchett
“You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.” — Jodi Picoult
“First, find out what your hero wants, then just follow him!” — Ray Bradbury
“To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.” — Herman Melville
“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
“If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.” — Isaac Asimov
“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
“If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word.” — Margaret Atwood
“You can make anything by writing.” — C.S. Lewis
“Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.” — Albert Einstein
“I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.” — Anne Frank
“The writer is an explorer. Every step is an advance into a new land.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
“The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.” — Toni Morrison
“I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and look at it, until it shines.” — Emily Dickinson
“I have fallen in love with the imagination. And if you fall in love with the imagination, you understand that it is a free spirit. It will go anywhere and it can do anything.” — Alice Walker
“When all else fails, write what your heart tells you. You can’t depend on your eyes, when your imagination is out of focus.” — Mark Twain
“Perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupery
“The secret to editing your work is simple: You need to become its reader instead of its writer.” — Zadie Smith
“By the time I am nearing the end of a story, the first part will have been reread and altered and corrected at least one hundred and fifty times. I am suspicious of both facility and speed. Good writing is essentially rewriting. I am positive of this.” — Roald Dahl
“A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.” ― G.K. Chesterton
“Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of.” ― Kurt Vonnegut
“Modernist manuals of writing often conflate story with conflict. This reductionism reflects a culture that inflates aggression and competition while cultivating ignorance of other behavioral options. No narrative of any complexity can be built on or reduced to a single element. Conflict is one kind of behavior. There are others, equally important in any human life, such as relating, finding, losing, bearing, discovering, parting, changing. Change is the universal aspect of all these sources of story. Story is something moving, something happening, something or somebody changing.” ― Ursula K. Le Guin
“[T]he success of every novel — if it’s a novel of action — depends on the high spots. The thing to do is to say to yourself, “What are my big scenes?” and then get every drop of juice out of them.” ― P.G. Wodehouse
“Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.” ― John Steinbeck
“Work like hell! I had 122 rejection slips before I sold a story.” ― F. Scott Fitzgerald
“A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.” ― Susan Sontag
“On paper, things can live forever. On paper, a butterfly never dies.” — Jacqueline Woodson
“Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.” — Anne Carson
“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
“Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.” — Norman Mailer
“I have no taste for either poverty or honest labor, so writing is the only recourse left for me.” — Hunter S. Thompson
“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 believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found. By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This to me is a miracle.” — Kurt Vonnegut
“Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.” – Graham Greene
“I’m not religious, but writing became the closest thing to it, I suppose.” — Ai Jiang
“If you are not afraid of the voices inside you, you will not fear the critics outside you.” — Natalie Goldberg
“Writing is a job, a talent, but it’s also the place to go in your head. It is the imaginary friend you drink your tea with in the afternoon.” — Ann Patchett
“A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity.” — Franz Kafka
“I went for years not finishing anything. Because, of course, when you finish something you can be judged.” — Erica Jong
“To survive, you must tell stories.” — Umberto Eco
“The purpose of a writer is to keep civilisation from destroying itself.” — Albert Camus