Writing is a great way to express yourself, tell your story, teach people what you know, or improve your ideas. So many people put off writing even if they’ve always wanted to write because they just don’t have the confidence or the time to do it. If you’re currently planning to write a book or have your very first blog, these inspirational writing quotes will surely help you get started.
Inspirational Writing Quotes
1. If you wait for inspiration to write you’re not a writer, you’re a waiter. – Dan Poynter.
2. Step into a scene and let it drip from your fingertips. – M J Bush.
3. Be courageous and try to write in a way that scares you a little. – Holley Gerth.
4. Words are our most inexhaustible source of magic. – J. K. Rowling.
5. A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist. – Vladimir Nabokov
6. You fail only if you stop writing. – Ray Bradbury
7. A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit. – Richard Bach
8. A book is a dream you hold in your hand. – Neil Gaiman
9. Don’t tell me the moon is shining, show me the glint of light on broken glass. – Anton Chekhov.
10. Don’t forget no one else sees the word the way you do, so no one else can tell the stories you have to tell. – Charles de Lint
11. This is how you do it, you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until it’s done. It’s that easy, and that hard. – Neil Gaiman
12. Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way. – Ray Bradbury
13. The writer is by nature a dreamer a conscious dreamer. – Carson McCullers
14. Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go. – E. L. Doctorow
15. A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity. – Franz Kafka
16. Write hard and clear about what hurts. – Ernest Hemingway
17. If a story is in you, it has got to come out. – William Faulkner
18. It’s not the fear of writing that blocks people, it’s the fear of not writing well, something quite different. – Scott Berkun
19. The only writer to whom you should compare yourself is the writer you were yesterday. – David Schlosser
20. Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river. – Lisa See
21. The first draft is just you telling yourself the story. – Terry Pratchett
22. 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.
23. That’s why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence. – Octavia E. Butler
24. You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page. – Jodi Picoult
25. Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on. – Louis L’Amour
26. 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
27. 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
28. If the book is true, it will find an audience that is meant to read it. – Wally Lamb
29. I think all writing is a disease. You can’t stop it. – William Carlos Williams
30. I can shake off everything as I write, my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn. – Anne Frank
31. A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit. – Richard Bach
32. 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
33. I believe myself that a good writer doesn’t really need to be told anything except to keep at it. – Chinua Achebe
34. You have to write a 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
35. If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time to write. Simple as that. – Stephen King
36. We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect. – Anaïs Nin
37. 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
38. If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it. – Toni Morrison
39. One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple. – Jack Kerouac
40. Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing. – Benjamin Franklin
41. You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write. – Saul Bellow
42. No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader. – Robert Frost
43. You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. – Ray Bradbury
44. Words can be like x-rays if you use them properly they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced. – Aldous Huxley
45. How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live. – Henry David Thoreau
46. I can shake off everything as I write, my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn. – Anne Frank
47. A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. – Thomas Mann
48. Let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences. – Sylvia Plath
48. 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.
50. 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
51. I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in. – Robert Louis Stevenson
52. You can make anything by writing. – C.S. Lewis
53. A word after a word after a word is power. – Margaret Atwood
54. Tears are words that need to be written. – Paulo Coelho
55. 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
56. 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
57. To survive, you must tell stories. – Umberto Eco
58. Always be a poet, even in prose. – Charles Baudelaire
59. If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster. – Isaac Asimov
60. The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself. – Albert Camus
61. I write to discover what I know. – Flannery O’Connor
62. Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen. – John Steinbeck
63. A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts 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
64. 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
65. Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing. – Norman Mailer
66. Find out the reason that commands you to write, see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart, confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. – Rainer Maria Rilke
67. As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand. – Ernest Hemingway
68. A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends. – Friedrich Nietzsche
69. The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do. – Thomas Jefferson
70. 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
71. Writers live twice. – Natalie Goldberg
72. To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. – Herman Melville
73. Words are a lens to focus one’s mind. – Ayn Rand
74. 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
75. Writing is its own reward. – Henry Miller
76. A blank piece of paper is God’s way of telling us how hard it is to be God. – Sidney Sheldon
77. I went for years not finishing anything. Because, of course, when you finish something you can be judged. – Erica Jong
78. I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by. – Douglas Adams
79. Half my life is an act of revision. – John Irving
80. Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it’s the only way you can do anything really good. – William Faulkner
81. Almost anyone can be an author, the business is to collect money and fame from this state of being. – A. A. Milne
82. When you make music or write or create, it’s really your job to have mind-blowing, irresponsible, condomless sex with whatever idea it is you’re writing about at the time. – Lady Gaga
83. Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. – Anne Lamott
84. Words are a lens to focus one’s mind. – Ayn Rand
85. Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about. – W.H. Auden
86. 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
87. All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath. – F. Scott Fitzgerald
88. The true alchemists do not change lead into gold, they change the world into words. – William H. Gass
89. Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them. There’s many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher. – Flannery O’Connor
90. Always be a poet, even in prose. – Charles Baudelaire
91. There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story. – Frank Herbert
92. 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
93. First, find out what your hero wants, then just follow him. – Ray Bradbury
94. There is only one plot things are not what they seem. – Jim Thompson
95. Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s. – Stephen King
96. You don’t write about the horrors of war. No. You write about a kid’s burnt socks lying in the road. – Richard Price
97. No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader. – Robert Frost
98. You always get more respect when you don’t have a happy ending. – Julia Quinn
99. The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do. – Thomas Jefferson
100. The secret of good writing is telling the truth. – Gordon Lish
101. 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
102. So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads. – Dr. Seuss
103. 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
104. Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way. – Ray Bradbury
105. I start with a question. Then try to answer it. – Mary Lee Settle
106. If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it. – Toni Morrison
107. 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
108. Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart. – William Wadsworth
109. 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
110. It’s none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think you were born that way. – Ernest Hemingway
111. 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
112. Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught. – Oscar Wilde
113. 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
114. Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen. – Willa Cather
115. Let children read whatever they want and then talk about it with them. If parents and kids can talk together, we won’t have as much censorship because we won’t have as much fear. – Judy Blume
116. I don’t believe that there’s a demarcation. Oh, you mustn’t tell them that. You mustn’t tell them that. You tell them anything you want. Just tell them if it’s true. If it’s true, you tell them. – Maurice Sendak
117. You have to write a 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
118. It is the writer who might catch the imagination of young people, and plant a seed that will flower and come to fruition. – Isaac Asimov
119. Many adults feel that every children’s book has to teach them something. My theory is a children’s book, can be just for fun. – R.L. Stine
120. In this modern world where activity is stressed almost to the point of mania, quietness as a childhood need is too often overlooked. Yet a child’s need for quietness is the same today as it has always been it may even be greater for quietness is an essential part of all awareness. In quiet times and sleepy times a child can dwell in thoughts of his own, and in songs and stories of his own. – Margaret Wise Brown
121. You flourish one hushed breath at a time. Imagine all you can build word by single word. – Laurie Seidler
122. Writing is my only way of drawing emotions. I know no other enthralling way to do it. – Mystqx
123. I’ve always been into fast-paced, don’t bore ’em, keep it moving along, stick with the story.’ You know, tell a story the way I want to hear a story. I find it more rewarding to write for kids, but I also find it a little easier, because you can just let loose a little bit more in terms of fantasy and stuff. – James Patterson
124. If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time to write. Simple as that. – Stephen King
125. 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
126. 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
127. I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in. – Robert Louis Stevenson
128. One sure window into a person’s soul is his reading list. – Mary B. W. Tabor
130. As writers we hold a pen or open a blank page on a screen or punch the keys of a typewriter. Either way we create, we illustrate and our inner cowardice evolves to courage through words. Before we know it the page is no longer blank, because we opened up a bit of our insides, it is stained. – Dana Hewitt
130. The most important thing in life is to stop saying, I wish and start saying I will. Consider nothing impossible, then treat possibilities as probabilities. – Charles Dickens
131. The power of a writer is that he is a god of sorts. He can create his own worlds and populate them with his own people, all by the powers of his imagination. It’s the closest a man can come close to the gods. No wonder the most successful writers are considered immortals. – Bangambiki Habyarimana
132. 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
133. You can make anything by writing. – C.S. Lewis
134. You can fix anything but a blank page. – Nora Roberts
135. I used to be afraid about what people might say or think after reading what I had written. I am not afraid anymore, because when I write, I am not trying to prove anything to anyone, I am just expressing myself and my opinions. It’s ok if my opinions are different from those of the reader, each of us can have his own opinions. So writing is like talking, if you are afraid of writing, you may end up being afraid of talking. – Bangambiki Habyarimana
136. If you write one story, it may be bad, if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor. – Edgar Rice Burroughs
137. The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. 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
138. Try to create sympathy for my characters, then turn the monsters loose. – Stephen King
139. Prose is architecture, not interior decoration. – Ernest Hemingway
140. It’s none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think you were born that way. – Ernest Hemingway
141. Most writers regard the truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are most economical in its use. – Mark Twain
142. And as imagination bodies forth, the forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen. Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name. – William Shakespeare
143. If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn’t matter a damn how you write. – Somerset Maugham
144. To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. – Herman Melville
145. It is perfectly okay to write garbage as long as you edit brilliantly. – C. J. Cherryh
146. It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous. – Robert Benchley
147. 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
148. A blank piece of paper is God’s way of telling us how hard it to be God. – Sidney Sheldon
149. Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short. – Henry David Thoreau
150. If you have other things in your life, family, friends, good productive day work these can interact with your writing and the sum will be all the richer. – David Brin
151. 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
152. I have been successful probably because I have always realized that I knew nothing about writing and have merely tried to tell an interesting story entertainingly. – Edgar Rice Burroughs
