75 of the Best Quotes About Writing

75 of the Best Quotes About Writing

by Jaylynn Korrell

Looking for writing inspiration?

“Treat it like a job,” they say.

“Write every day,” they say.

“You can’t edit a blank page.”

And yet…you’re not writing!

And that is okay. Totally fine. Because this list of the best quotes about writing is going to help. Authors & experts have been floundering behind their quills, typewriters, and laptops for hundreds of years, and they can speak from experience right to your heart to get you back to doing the thing you love.

Writing is a solitary venture, sure, but if anyone knows that the magic of writing can read the minds of incredible people, it’s writers. Read quotes & tape them to the walls of your workplace to remind yourself that if Hemingway and Gaiman ran through writer’s block, you can too.

Writers, English teachers, and librarians, rejoice! Whether you’re looking for inspiration or some new content for your Instagram or classroom walls, this list is sure to have a quote that you’ll find insightful.

Here are some of our favorite writing quotes!

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1. “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”― Ernest Hemingway

2. “You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.” ― Maya Angelou

3. “The freelance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.” — Robert Benchley

4. “Let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences.” — Sylvia Plath

5. “If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered.”― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

6. “In order to write about life first you must live it.” ― Ernest Hemingway

7. “Write. Rewrite. When not writing or rewriting, read. I know of no shortcuts.” — Larry L. King, WD

8. “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see, and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” – Joan Didion

9. “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, The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain

10. “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

11. “Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”― Anton Chekhov

12. “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

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

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14. “One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.” ― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

15. “I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.”― Anne Frank

16. “There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know where they’ll take you.”― Beatrix Potter

17. “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

18. “What your novel tells you it wants to be is ultimately more important than what you wanted it to be when you began.” – Matt Bell, Refuse to Be Done

19.“If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.”― Isaac Asimov

20. “Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.” ― Kurt Vonnegut

21. “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

22. “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.” — Robert Frost

23.“Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.” — Cyril Connolly

24. “Talent is helpful in writing, but guts are absolutely essential.” — Jessamyn West

25. “If a story is in you, it has to come out.” — William Faulkner

26. “A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.” — Richard Bach

27. “Some writers enjoy writing, I am told. Not me. I enjoy having written.” — George R.R. Martin

28. “It is only by writing, not dreaming about it, that we develop our own style.” — P.D. James

29.“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

30. “For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.”— Catherine Drinker Bowen

31. “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

32. “Imagination is like a muscle. I found out that the more I wrote, the bigger it got.” — Philip José Farmer

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Motivational Quotes About Writing

33. “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, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

34. “You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”
― Jack London

35. “You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

36.“Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.”― Louis L’Amour

37.“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”
― Ernest Hemingway

38.“A word after a word after a word is power.”― Margaret Atwood

40.“Write the kind of story you would like to read. People will give you all sorts of advice about writing, but if you are not writing something you like, no one else will like it either.” ― Meg Cabot

41. “If you wait for inspiration to write you’re not a writer, you’re a waiter.” — Dan Poynter

42. “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

43. “If you want to change the world, pick up your pen and write.” — Martin Luther

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

45.“If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!” — Jackie Collins

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

47.“Don’t get it right, get it written.”― Ally Carter

Quotes About The Writing Process

48. “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

49. “The first draft of anything is shit.”— Ernest Hemingway

50. “The secret of it all is to write… without waiting for a fit time or place.” — Walt Whitman

51. “Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations.” — Ray Bradbury

52.  “Be willing and unafraid to write badly, because often the bad stuff clears the way for good, or forms a base on which to build something better.” — Jennifer Egan

53. “I’m writing a first draft and reminding myself that I’m simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.” — Shannon Hale

54. “Write a page a day. Only 300 words and in a year you have written a novel.” — Stephen King

55.“Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.” — Stephen King

56.“The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.” — Thomas Jefferson

57. “There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.” — Somerset Maugham

58. “Don’t say it was delightful; make us say delightful when we’ve read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers, ‘Please will you do the job for me.’”― C.S. Lewis

59. “Writing is like driving at night. You can see only as far as the headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” ― E.L. Doctorow

Quotes About Writing: Editing

60. “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

61. “You may not write well every day, but you can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.” ― Jodi Picoult

62. “The secret to editing your work is simple: You need to become its reader instead of its writer.” ― Zadie Smith

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

64.“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

65.“I have rewritten — often several times — every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.”― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

66. “Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”― Stephen King

67. “Editing fiction is like using your fingers to untangle the hair of someone you love.”― Stephanie Roberts

68.“Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.” — T.S. Eliot

69.“Write drunk, edit sober.” — Ernest Hemingway

Quotes About Writing: Rejection

70. I discovered that rejections are not altogether a bad thing. They teach a writer to rely on his own judgment and to say in his heart of hearts, “To hell with you.” ― Saul Bellow

71. “I love my rejection slips. They show me I try.” — Sylvia Plath

72. “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

73.“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

74. “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

75. “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

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What are your favorite quotes about writing?

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About the Author

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