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Blog • Perfecting your Craft

Posted on Mar 29, 2019

170 Writing Quotes by Famous Authors for Every Occasion

About the author.

Reedsy's editorial team is a diverse group of industry experts devoted to helping authors write and publish beautiful books.

About Savannah Cordova

Savannah is a senior editor with Reedsy and a published writer whose work has appeared on Slate, Kirkus, and BookTrib. Her short fiction has appeared in the Owl Canyon Press anthology, "No Bars and a Dead Battery".

When you're feeling stuck on your novel, an important thing to remember is that we've all been there in the past. That's right — even the J.K Rowling's and Ernest Hemingway's of this world. Which is why it's always a great idea to turn to your most famous peers (and their writing quotes) for inspiration.

Without further ado, here are 170 writing quotes to guide you through every stage of writing. ( Yes! We've added more since we first published this post! )

The number one piece of advice that most authors have for other authors is to read, read, read. Here’s why.

1. “If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time ( or the tools ) to write. Simple as that.” — Stephen King

2. “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

3. “Indeed, learning to write may be part of learning to read. For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.” — Eudora Welty

4. “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

5. “I kept always two books in my pocket: one to read, one to write in.” — Robert Louis Stevenson

6. “The Six Golden Rules of Writing: Read, read, read, and write, write, write.” — Ernest Gaines

7. “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

8. “Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river.” ― Lisa See

9. “One sure window into a person’s soul is his reading list.” — Mary B. W. Tabor

The well of inspiration, we’re afraid, often does run dry. Here are the writing quotes to replenish it and, hopefully, remind you that there might be a story idea waiting for you just around the corner of life.

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10. "If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it." — Toni Morrison

11. “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

12. “Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.” — Stephen King

13. “Most writers regard the truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are most economical in its use.” — Mark Twain

14. “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

15. “Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.” — Natalie Goldberg

16. “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

17. “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.” — Henry David Thoreau

18. “Cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can’t fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.” — William S. Burroughs

19. “Write what should not be forgotten.” — Isabel Allende

20. “The story must strike a nerve in me. My heart should start pounding when I hear the first line in my head. I start trembling at the risk.” — Susan Sontag

21. “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

22. “As for ‘Write what you know,’ I was regularly told this as a beginner. I think it’s a very good rule and have always obeyed it. I write about imaginary countries, alien societies on other planets, dragons, wizards, the Napa Valley in 22002. I know these things. I know them better than anybody else possibly could, so it’s my duty to testify about them.” — Ursula K. Le Guin

23. “I’m very lucky in that I don’t understand the world yet. If I understood the world, it would be harder for me to write these books.” — Mo Willems

24. “Ideas are cheap. It’s the execution that is all important.” — George R.R. Martin

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

Now, finding your "voice" is not as simple as entering a nationally-televised competition on NBC ( nyuk nyuk! ). Yet your voice will define you as a writer, and these famous writers have plenty of tips and writing quotes for you when it comes to finding it.

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26. “To gain your own voice, you have to forget about having it heard.” — Allen Ginsberg

27. “One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.” — Jack Kerouac

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

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

30. “Voice is not just the result of a single sentence or paragraph or page. It’s not even the sum total of a whole story. It’s all your work laid out across the table like the bones and fossils of an unidentified carcass.” — Chuck Wendig

31. “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

32. “Your writing voice is the deepest possible reflection of who you are. The job of your voice is not to seduce or flatter or make well-shaped sentences. In your voice, your readers should be able to hear the contents of your mind, your heart, your soul.” — Meg Rosoff

33. “I don’t want just words. If that’s all you have for me, you’d better go.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald

34. “Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.” — Virginia Woolf

35. “Everywhere I go, I’m asked if the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them.” — Flannery O’Connor

36. “There are some books that refuse to be written. They stand their ground year after year and will not be persuaded. It isn’t because the book is not there and worth being written — it is only because the right form of the story does not present itself. There is only one right form for a story and, if you fail to find that form, the story will not tell itself.” — Mark Twain

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

38. “First, find out what your hero wants, then just follow him.” — Ray Bradbury

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

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

41. “Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of job: It’s always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.” — Neil Gaiman

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

43. “It doesn’t matter how many book ideas you have if you can’t finish writing your book.” — Joe Bunting

44. “If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word.” — Margaret Atwood

45. “A blank piece of paper is God's way of telling us how hard it is to be God.” — Sidney Sheldon

46. “I am not at all in a humor for writing; I must write on until I am.” — Jane Austen

47. "Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it's the only way you can do anything really good." — William Faulkner

48. “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

49. “Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.” — John Steinbeck

50. “You can fix anything but a blank page.” — Nora Roberts

51. “I don’t wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that. Your mind must know it has got to get down to work.” — Pearl S. Buck

52. “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at the typewriter and bleed.” — Ernest Hemingway

Don’t get discouraged if you get this far and you’re thinking that your first draft is rather poor. These writing quotes are reminders that it’s just part of the process.

53. “The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.” — Terry Pratchett

54. “Get through a draft as quickly as possible.” — Joshua Wolf Shenk

55. “I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.” — Douglas Adams

56. “The first draft of everything is shit.” — Ernest Hemingway

57. “There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story.” — Frank Herbert

58. “I would advise any beginning writer to write the first drafts as if no one else will ever read them — without a thought about publication — and only in the last draft to consider how the work will look from the outside.” — Anne Tyler

59. “I just give myself permission to suck. I delete about 90 percent of my first drafts, so it doesn’t really matter much if on a particular day I write beautiful and brilliant prose that will stick in the minds of my readers forever, because there’s a 90 percent chance I’m just going to delete whatever I write anyway. I find this hugely liberating.” — John Green

60. “Be willing to write really badly.” — Jennifer Egan

61. “On first drafts: It is completely raw, the sort of thing I feel free to do with the door shut — it’s the story undressed, standing up in nothing but its socks and undershorts.” — Stephen King

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

63. “Anyone who says writing is easy isn’t doing it right.” — Amy Joy

64. “You fail only if you stop writing.” — Ray Bradbury

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

66. “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

67. “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

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

69. “The secret to being a writer is that you have to write. It’s not enough to think about writing or to study literature or plan a future life as an author. You really have to lock yourself away, alone, and get to work.” — Augusten Burroughs

70. “It is by sitting down to write every morning that one becomes a writer.” — Gerald Brenan

71. “Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.” — James Baldwin

72. “You just have to go on when it is worst and most helpless — there is only one thing to do with a novel and that is go straight on through to the end of the damn thing.” — Ernest Hemingway

73. “We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.” — Kurt Vonnegut

74. “The nearest I have to a rule is a Post-it on the wall in front of my desk saying ‘Faire et se taire’ from Flaubert. Which I translate for myself as ‘Shut up and get on with it.’” — Helen Simpson

75. “I’ve been writing since I was six. It is a compulsion, so I can’t really say where the desire came from; I’ve always had it. My breakthrough with the first book came through persistence, because a lot of publishers turned it down.” — J.K. Rowling

76. “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

77. “It is worth mentioning, for future reference, that the creative power which bubbles so pleasantly in beginning a new book quiets down after a time, and one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in. Then one becomes resigned. Determination not to give in, and the sense of an impending shape keep one at it more than anything.” — Virginia Woolf

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

“Write drunk, edit sober” might be one of the most famous writing quotes about editing, but we can’t all outdrink Ernest Hemingway. Which is why these other words of wisdom and writing quotes exist!

79. “You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.” ― Jodi Picoult

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80. “When your story is ready for a 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

81. “The best advice on writing was given to me by my first editor, Michael Korda, of Simon and Schuster, while writing my first book. 'Finish your first draft and then we'll talk,' he said. It took me a long time to realize how good the advice was. Even if you write it wrong, write and finish your first draft. Only then, when you have a flawed whole, do you know what you have to fix.” — Dominick Dunne

82. “Editing might be a bloody trade, but knives aren’t the exclusive property of butchers. Surgeons use them too.” — Blake Morrison

83. “The main thing I try to do is write as clearly as I can. I rewrite a good deal to make it clear.” — E.B. White

84. “You write to communicate to the hearts and minds of others what's burning inside you, and we edit to let the fire show through the smoke.” — Arthur Plotnik

85. “Half my life is an act of revision.” — John Irving

86. “I'm all for the scissors. I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.” — Truman Capote

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

88. “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

89. “Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial 'we'.” — Mark Twain

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

91. “Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.” — Henry David Thoreau

92. “I would write a book, or a short story, at least three times — once to understand it, the second time to improve the prose, and a third to compel it to say what it still must say. Somewhere I put it this way: first drafts are for learning what one's fiction wants him to say. Revision works with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to reform it. Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.” — Bernard Malamud

93. “No author dislikes to be edited as much as he dislikes not to be published.” — Russell Lynes

94. “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

95. “No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft.” — H.G. Wells

96. “A writer is a world trapped in a person.” — Victor Hugo

97. “A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” — Thomas Mann

98. “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

99. “As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand.” ― Ernest Hemingway

100. “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

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

102. “I go out to my little office, where I’ve got a manuscript, and the last page I was happy with is on top. I read that, and it’s like getting on a taxiway. I’m able to go through and revise it and put myself — click — back into that world.” — Stephen King

103. “I think all writing is a disease. You can’t stop it.” — William Carlos Williams

104. “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

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

106. “The task of a writer consists of being able to make something out of an idea.” — Thomas Mann

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

108. “Many people hear voices when no one is there. Some of them are called mad and are shut up in rooms where they stare at the walls all day. Others are called writers and they do pretty much the same thing.” — Margaret Chittenden

109. “A writer never has a vacation. For a writer life consists of either writing or thinking about writing.” — Eugene Ionesco

110. “Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.” — Benjamin Franklin

111. “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

112. “Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.” — Gloria Steinem

From cavemen to our modern day in the 21st-century, we have written our joys and sorrows throughout history. What compels us to write? Here’s what some of the most beloved writers we know have to say.

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

114. “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” — Anais Nin

115. “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” ― Maya Angelou

116. “The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.” — Zadie Smith

117. “The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone’s neurosis.” — William Styron

118. “No matter what people tell you, words and ideas can change the world.” — Robin Williams

119. “Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly — they'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced.” — Aldous Huxley

120. “You can make anything by writing.” — C.S. Lewis

121. “Writers live twice.” — Natalie Goldberg

122. “History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.” — Winston Churchill

123. “Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.” — Oscar Wilde

124. “You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.” — Ray Bradbury

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

126. “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

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

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

129. “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

130. “Find your best time of the day for writing and write. Don’t let anything else interfere. Afterwards it won’t matter to you that the kitchen is a mess.” — Esther Freud

131. “Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. [...] All they do is show you've been to college.” — Kurt Vonnegut

132. “To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.” — Herman Melville

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

134. “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.” — Mark Twain

135. “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

136. “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

137. “Style means the right word. The rest matters little.” — Jules Renard

138. “My aim in constructing sentences is to make the sentence utterly easy to understand, writing what I call transparent prose. I’ve failed dreadfully if you have to read a sentence twice to figure out what I meant.” — Ken Follett

139. “And one of [the things you learn as you get older] is, you really need less… My model for this is late Beethoven. He moves so strangely and quite suddenly sometimes from place to place in his music, in the late quartets. He knows where he’s going and he just doesn’t want to waste all that time getting there… One is aware of this as one gets older. You can’t waste time.” — Ursula K. Le Guin

140. “ Part 1. I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English — it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don’t let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in . Part 2. When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don’t mean utterly, but kill most of them – then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart. Part 3. An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice.” — Mark Twain

“You miss 100% of the shots that you never take — Wayne Gretsky,” as Michael Scott once said. In tribute to this sentiment, these writing quotes help show why it’s important not to let failure or rejection get you down.

141. “You can’t let praise or criticism get to you. It’s a weakness to get caught up in either one.” — John Wooden

142. “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

143. “Was I bitter? Absolutely. Hurt? You bet your sweet ass I was hurt. Who doesn’t feel a part of their heart break at rejection. You ask yourself every question you can think of, what, why, how come, and then your sadness turns to anger. That’s my favorite part. It drives me, feeds me, and makes one hell of a story.” — Jennifer Salaiz

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

145. “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

147. “I used to save all my rejection slips because I told myself, one day I’m going to autograph these and auction them. And then I lost the box.” — James Lee Burke

148. “This manuscript of yours that has just come back from another editor is a precious package. Don’t consider it rejected. Consider that you’ve addressed it ‘to the editor who can appreciate my work’ and it has simply come back stamped ‘Not at this address’. Just keep looking for the right address.” — Barbara Kingsolver

149. “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

150. “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

151. “The artist doesn’t have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don’t have the time to read reviews.” — William Faulkner

152. “I think that you have to believe in your destiny; that you will succeed, you will meet a lot of rejection and it is not always a straight path, there will be detours — so enjoy the view.” — Michael York

153. “I went for years not finishing anything. Because, of course, when you finish something you can be judged.” — Erica Jong

154. “I tell writers to keep reading, reading, reading. Read widely and deeply. And I tell them not to give up even after getting rejection letters. And only write what you love.” — Anita Diamant

155. “I could write an entertaining novel about rejection slips, but I fear it would be overly long.” — Louise Brown

156. “I had immediate success in the sense that I sold something right off the bat. I thought it was going to be a piece of cake and it really wasn’t. I have drawers full of — or I did have — drawers full of rejection slips.” — Fred Saberhagen

157. “An absolutely necessary part of a writer’s equipment, almost as necessary as talent, is the ability to stand up under punishment, both the punishment the world hands out and the punishment he inflicts upon himself.” — Irwin Shaw

158. “Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.” — C. S. Lewis

Why does writing matter? If there’s anyone who might know the answer, it’s the people who write — and continue to write, despite adverse circumstances. Here are a few pennies for their thoughts.

159. “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

160. “If the book is true, it will find an audience that is meant to read it.” — Wally Lamb

161. “A word after a word after a word is power.” — Margaret Atwood

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

163. “The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.” — Albert Camus

164. “Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” — David Foster Wallace

165. “After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.” — Philip Pullman

166. “All stories have to at least try to explain some small portion of the meaning of life.” — Gene Weingarten

167. “If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.” — Peter Handke

168. “The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.” — Tom Clancy

169. “If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don’t listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.” — Lillian Hellman

170. “Don’t take anyone’s writing advice too seriously.” — Lev Grossman

Of course, writing quotes by themselves won't write the book for you — you alone have that power. However, we hope that this post has helped inspire you in some way! If you're looking for more in-depth resources, you can check out these guides:

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2 responses

Brian Welte says:

08/05/2019 – 12:28

Here's a quote I absolutely adore: "The author, in his work, must be like God in the Universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere" [Quote from Gustave Flaubert]

Comments are currently closed.

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It’s never been a better time to be a writer –or aspire to become one.

Platforms like LinkedIn , Medium, and WordPress have placed millions of dollars of technology, and the power that once only belonged to major publishing and media firms, into the hands of millions of writers – entirely for free.

But technology can take a writer only so far. Writing is an art and a craft that needs to be developed through deliberate practice and study over a long period of time. Fortunately, some of the world’s greatest writers, the ones who mastered the craft and whose names have been passed down to us through time, gifted us not only with their stories. Many of them took time between the creation of their novels and short stories and poems to codify their writing philosophies, their writing strategies, and their writing habits.

Some of these authors recorded their thoughts on writing in books, some as essays, and some as letters to their friends, lovers, and editors.

The 100+ Most Famous Writing Quotes of All Time

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Renowned authors and imaginative minds have long been a fountain of encouragement and wisdom for those of us undertaking creative pursuits. When we’re craving a spark of motivation or a nugget of wisdom, a compelling quote can often light the way.

The masters of the written word have a unique way of distilling their vast experiences and profound insights into succinct, impactful statements. So, we've curated a collection of quotes that encapsulate the essence of inspiration, creativity, and the art of writing itself.

Whether you're in search of the perfect quote to share with a fellow writer or seeking inspirational words to boost your own creative journey, this collection is designed to ignite your passion for storytelling and spark your imagination.

Quotes about writing

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers — Isaac Asimov
Home is the cats, my books, and my work never done — Patti Smith
There is nothing at all to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed — Ernest Hemingway
The only way to write is to write — John Steinbeck
I write to give myself strength. I write to be the characters that I am not. I write to explore all the things I'm afraid of — Joss Whedon
It’s terribly dangerous for an artist to fulfil other people’s expectations — David Bowie
The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance — Aristotle
Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand — George Orwell

Quotes on being a writer

If you're writing, you're a writer — Neil Gaiman
The terrible thing about being a writer is that you don’t decide to become one, you discover that you are one — James Baldwin
The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself — Albert Camus
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
The role of a writer is not to say all we can say, but what we are unable to say — Anaïs Nin
The writer's job is to tell the truth — Ernest Hemingway
One role of the writer today is to sound the alarm. The environment is disintegrating, the hour is late, and not much is being done — E.B White
To name something truly is to lay bare what may be brutal or corrupt (or important or possible) and key to the work of changing the world is changing the story — Rebecca Solnit
You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say — F. Scott Fitzgerald
A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people — Thomas Mann
Writers have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live really. The second one is romantic, it is separate from themselves, it is not real but it is really there — Gertrude Stein
Writers do not merely reflect and interpret life, they inform and shape life — E.B. White
A writer is someone who has taught his mind to misbehave — Oscar Wilde

Famous quotes about creativity

Creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes and having fun — Mary Lou Cook
Creativity is intelligence having fun — Albert Einstein
Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work — Gustave Flaubert
The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenalin but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity — Glenn Gould
Creativity is the combination of discipline and a childlike spirit — Robert Greene
An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail — Dr Edwin Land
Creativity takes courage — Henri Matisse
I tell you: one must have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star — From Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt — Sylvia Plath

Famous quotes on writing a book

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you — Maya Angelou
There is something compelling about the blank page that beckons you in to write something on it. It must be filled — Margaret Atwood
You’ve got to be able to look at your thoughts on paper and discover what a fool you were — Ray Bradbury
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
The best time for planning a book is while you're doing the dishes — Agatha Christie
Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go — E.L. Doctorow
What you cannot fix is the perfection of a blank page. What you cannot fix is that pristine, unsullied whiteness of a screen or a page with nothing on it, because there's nothing there to fix — Neil Gaiman
You are ready. Start making stuff — Austin Kleon
The scariest moment is always just before you start — Stephen King
A blank page is also a door — it contains infinity, like a night sky with a supermoon really close to the Earth, with all the stars and the galaxies, where you can see very, very clearly… — David Mitchell
Start with a phrase, a line, a quote. Questions are very helpful. Begin with a few you’re carrying right now — Naomi Shihab Nye
I always in writing start with a name. Give me a name and it produces a story, not the other way about normally — JRR Tolkien

Inspirational writing quotes

I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by — Douglas Adams
Be not afraid of going slowly, be afraid of standing still — Chinese Proverb
Don't be a writer; be writing — William Faulkner
Writing is easy: All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead — Gene Fowler
People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are — Steve Jobs
It always seems impossible, until it's done — Nelson Mandela
The depths are obscured in us when we try to force feelings; we clarify them by giving them adequate time and space and letting them come — Stephen Nachmanovich
The first draft is just you telling yourself the story — Terry Pratchett
Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar — E.B. White
We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection — Anaïs Nin
Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but that's the only way you can do anything really good — William Faulkner

Quotes about editing and revising a novel

The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon — Robert Cormier
Perfection is not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away — Antoine de Saint-Exupery
In writing, you must kill all your darlings — William Faulkner
Write drunk; edit sober — Ernest Hemmingway
The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do — Thomas Jefferson
The road to hell is paved with adverbs — Stephen King
I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter — James Michener
The most important thing in writing is to have written. I can always fix a bad page. I can't fix a blank one — Nora Roberts
The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightening and a lightening bug — Mark Twain
There's no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written — Oscar Wilde
Usually I compose only with great difficulty and endless rewriting — JRR Tolkien
There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are - W Somerset Maugham

Quotes about using emotion in your writing

Learning the craft, understanding what language can do, gaining control of the language, enables one to make people weep, make them laugh… — Maya Angelou
No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader — Robert Frost
All romance books are about one theme: love conquers all... That journey from hole-hearted to whole-hearted is the romance arc for each character — Gwen Hayes
Any fool with steady hands and a working set of lungs can build up a house of cards and then blow it down, but it takes a genius to make people laugh — Stephen King
Novels ought to have hope; at least, American novels ought to have hope. French novels don't need to — Anne Lamott
Our sense of enchantment is not triggered only by grand things... The awe-inspiring, the numinous, is all around us, all the time. It becomes valuable when we value it — Katherine May
A work responds to the reader’s, not the author’s, questions. Once written, the work has a life of its own distinct from that of its author, a life granted by its successive readers — Octavio Paz
The best stories don't come from ‘good vs bad’, but from ‘good vs good’ — Leo Tolstoy
Maybe we can’t draw flesh from reverie nor retrieve a dusty spur, but we can gather the dream itself and bring it back uniquely whole — Patti Smith
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

Quotes about mastering the writing craft

A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit — Richard Bach
My responsibility as a writer is to be as good as I can be at my craft — Maya Angelou
Don't tell me the moon is shining: show me the glint of light on broken glass — Anton Chekhov
A good writer is always a people watcher — Patricia Highsmith
The only way to do great work is to love what you do — Steve Jobs
If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write — Stephen King
If you want to be a writer, you have to write. Everyday. No excuses — Walter Mosley
In the exposition we put a pot of water on the stove; getting the action to rise is making the water boil — George Saunders
A scene without conflict is a scene without tension... which is to say, a scene that gives us no reason to read it — Chuck Wendig
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
It is a writer's greatest pleasure to hear that someone was kept up until the unholy hours of the morning reading one of his books. It goes back to authors being terrible people who delight in the suffering of others — Brandon Sanderson

Writing motivation quotes

Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it — Maya Angelou
I can't give you a sure fire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure: try to please everybody all the time — Herbert Bayard Swope
The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do — Steve Jobs
If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete — Jack Kornfield
The best way to predict your future is to create it — Abraham Lincoln
Care about what other people think and you will always be their prisoner — Lao Tzu
Do one thing everyday that scares you — Eleanor Roosevelt
And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is’ — Kurt Vonnegut

Quotes about getting ideas

Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats — Howard Aiken
I don't need an alarm clock. My ideas wake me — Ray Bradbury
Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to split open — Natalie Goldberg
Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like — Paul Graham
If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it — Toni Morrison
A writer should concern himself with whatever absorbs his fancy, stirs his heart, and unlimbers his typewriter — E.B. White
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

Learning from the greats

For us, quotes from famous writers are like beacons guiding us through the writing process. Ernest Hemingway tells us to pour our feelings out. Antoine de Saint-Exupery teaches us to keep our stories simple, taking away anything that's not needed. Stephen King warns us to use our words carefully to make our writing strong. These tips show us how to become better writers. They tell us to trust our own way of writing and to keep learning and getting better. If these writers did it, so can you!

Writing philosophy in practice

When you read a lot of advice from different writers, you'll notice they don't all agree. Hemingway's idea of writing being tough doesn't quite match Stephen King's idea of it being an adventure. Flaubert liked things orderly, but Kerouac loved just letting ideas flow freely. That's okay, though. Writing is about finding what works for you.

You should be writing, but since you're here why not read more articles on this topic?

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55 Motivational Writing Quotes from Famous Authors

Sometimes, the hardest part of writing is simply getting started. Whether you’re taking your first dip in the storytelling pool, or you’re opening a fresh, blank document after finishing your last project, that empty page can be a little daunting.

So, to help combat those moments of doubt, here are some quotes from professional authors and artists who have been right where you are now, and who know exactly how you feel.

First, you just have to start.

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

- Louis L’Amour

2. "Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it's the only way you can do anything really good."

- William Faulkner

3. "The first draft is just you telling yourself the story."

- Terry Pratchett

4. "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."

- Octavia E. Butler

5. "Start before you’re ready."

- Steven Pressfield

6. "You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page"

- Jodi Picoult

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

- Jack London

8. "I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering."

- Robert Frost

9. "If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it."

- Toni Morrison

10. "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

11. "I get a lot of letters from people. They say, 'I want to be a writer. What should I do?' I tell them to stop writing to me and get on with it."

- Ruth Rendell

Then, keep going!

12. "First, find out what your hero wants, then just follow him!"

- Ray Bradbury

13. "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 a book."

- Samuel Johnson

14. "Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way."

- E. L. Doctorow

15. "To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme."

- Herman Melville

16. "Tell the readers a story! Because without a story, you are merely using words to prove you can string them together in logical sentences."

- Anne McCaffrey

17. "Description begins in the writer’s imagination but should finish in the reader’s."

- Stephen King

18. "No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader."

19. "If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot."

- Stephen King

20. "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

21. "Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure. Emotion is easily transferred from the writer to the reader."

- Joseph Joubert

Editing is vital.

22. "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

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

- Thomas Jefferson

24. "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."

25. "It is perfectly okay to write garbage as long as you edit brilliantly."

- C. J. Cherryh

26. "Half my life is an act of revision."

- John Irving

27. "Writing without revising is the literary equivalent of waltzing gaily out of the house in your underwear."

- Patricia Fuller

28. "Write your first draft with your heart. Rewrite with your head."

- Mike Rich

29. "So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads."

- Dr. Seuss

30. "You write to communicate to the hearts and minds of others what's burning inside you, and we edit to let the fire show through the smoke."

- Arthur Plotnik

31. "Anyone and everyone taking a writing class knows that the secret of good writing is to cut it back, pare it down, winnow, chop, hack, prune, and trim, remove every superfluous word, compress, compress, compress..."

- Nick Hornby

32. "When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you’re done, you have to step back and look at the forest."

Don’t lose your sense of humor.

33. "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

34. "There’s no such thing as writer’s block. That was invented by people in California who couldn’t write."

- Terry Pratchett

35. "Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read."

- Groucho Marx

36. "I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."

- Douglas Adams

37. "If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster."

- Isaac Asimov

Believe in yourself.

38. "If you have no critics, you’ll likely have no success."

- Malcolm X

39. "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

40. "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

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

- Wally Lamb

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

- Erica Jong

43. "Believe in yourself! Have faith in your abilities! Without a humble but reasonable confidence in your own powers, you cannot be successful or happy."

- Norman Vincent Peale

44. "If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word."

- Margaret Atwood

45. "Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them. "

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

46. "Difficulties mastered are opportunities won."

- Winston Churchill

47. "Ignore all hatred and criticism. Live for what you create, and die protecting it."

- Lady Gaga

Remember, being a writer is awesome.

48. "You can make anything by writing."

- C.S. Lewis

49. "The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words."

- William H. Gass

50. "Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions."

- Albert Einstein

51. "Words are our most inexhaustible source of magic."

- J. K. Rowling

52. "A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer; it sings because it has a song."

- Maya Angelou

53. "I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being conscious of living."

- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

54. "I write to give myself strength. I write to be the characters that I am not. I write to explore all the things I’m afraid of."

- Joss Whedon

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

- Anne Frank

Now that you've been inspired, the next step is writing consistently! Writers who use our Freewrite distraction-free writing tools have seen their word counts double. Could be a Freewrite be right for you!?

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Claire Wilkins is a freelance copywriter and editor from New Zealand. After a career in financial services spanning almost three decades, Claire left the corporate world behind to start Unmistakable - her writing and editing business. She creates website copy, blogs, and newsletters for creative agencies and small businesses, and specializes in polishing existing content until it shines. In her spare time, Claire enjoys cloud-spotting, singing in the car and editing video.

115 Inspirational Writing Quotes by Famous Authors

Writing can change lives. Many authors have found peace in writing and have been quoted conveying the magic they have found in writing. We wanted to share some of the most famous writing quotes with you. Thank you to Goodreads for the quotes.

“I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.” ― James Michener

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

“let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences” ― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.” ― Kurt Vonnegut, If This Isn’t Nice, What Is?: Advice for the Young

“I haven’t any right to criticize books, and I don’t do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.” ― Mark Twain

“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

“The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words.” ― William H. Gass, A Temple of Texts

“History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.” ― Winston S. Churchill

“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, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Make up a story… For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don’t tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief’s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear’s caul.” ― Toni Morrison, The Nobel Lecture In Literature, 1993

“A well-composed book is a magic carpet on which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter in any other way.” ― Caroline Gordon

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.” ― Stephen King

“Tears are words that need to be written.” ― Paulo Coelho

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

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

“Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.” ― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

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

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

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

“Fiction is the truth inside the lie.” ― Stephen King

“”Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day , and on the good writing days nothing else matters.”” ― Neil Gaiman

“A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.” ― G.K. Chesterton, Heretics

“You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.” ― Saul Bellow

“I write to give myself strength. I write to be the characters that I am not. I write to explore all the things I’m afraid of. ” ― Joss Whedon

“The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.” ― Albert Camus

“So what? All writers are lunatics!” ― Cornelia Funke, Inkspell

“Stories may well be lies, but they are good lies that say true things, and which can sometimes pay the rent.” ― Neil Gaiman

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.” ― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“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

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

“I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.” ― Franz Kafka

“The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.” ― Anais Nin

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” ― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

“A short story is a different thing altogether – a short story is like a quick kiss in the dark from a stranger.” ― Stephen King, Skeleton Crew

“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.” ― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt

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

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

“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

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

“If you can’t annoy somebody, there is little point in writing.” ― Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim

“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

“Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It’s a way of understanding it.” ― Lloyd Alexander

“If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I’m not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.” ― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

“Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.” ― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” ― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” ― Anais Nin

“you can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will.” ― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“One always has a better book in one’s mind than one can manage to get onto paper.” ― Michael Cunningham

“Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that’s where it should stay.” ― Christopher Hitchens

“I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which ‘Escape’ is now so often used. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?” ― J.R.R. Tolkien

“Which of us has not felt that the character we are reading in the printed page is more real than the person standing beside us?” ― Cornelia Funke

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.” ― Henry David Thoreau

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

“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

“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

“You know, it’s hard work to write a book. I can’t tell you how many times I really get going on an idea, then my quill breaks. Or I spill ink all over my writing tunic.” ― Ellen DeGeneres, The Funny Thing Is…

“Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.” ― Pablo Picasso

“”You must write every single day of your life… 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… may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.” ― Ray Bradbury

“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

“We live and breathe words. …. It was books that made me feel that perhaps I was not completely alone. They could be honest with me, and I with them. Reading your words, what you wrote, how you were lonely sometimes and afraid, but always brave; the way you saw the world, its colors and textures and sounds, I felt–I felt the way you thought, hoped, felt, dreamt. I felt I was dreaming and thinking and feeling with you. I dreamed what you dreamed, wanted what you wanted–and then I realized that truly I just wanted you.” ― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Prince

“Always be a poet, even in prose.” ― Charles Baudelaire

“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

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

“A little talent is a good thing to have if you want to be a writer. But the only real requirement is the ability to remember every scar.” ― Stephen King

“There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.” ― Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist

“Write what should not be forgotten.” ― Isabel Allende

“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, The Catcher in the Rye

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

“Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time.” ― Howard Nemerov

“After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.” ― Philip Pullman

“Ordinary life is pretty complex stuff.” ― Harvey Pekar

“This is what love does: It makes you want to rewrite the world. It makes you want to choose the characters, build the scenery, guide the plot. The person you love sits across from you, and you want to do everything in your power to make it possible, endlessly possible. And when it’s just the two of you, alone in a room, you can pretend that this is how it is, this is how it will be.” ― David Levithan, Every Day

“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

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

“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. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories — science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.” ― Ray Bradbury

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

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

“The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them — words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they’re brought out. But it’s more than that, isn’t it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you’ve said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That’s the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.” ― Stephen King

“Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos… to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream.” ― John Cheever

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

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

“You can make anything by writing.” ― C.S. Lewis

“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

“A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea, this by no means signifies that he respects her opinions, admires her understanding, or will refuse, though the rapier is denied him, to run through the body with his pen.” ― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“”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

“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

“By now, it is probably very late at night, and you have stayed up to read this book when you should have gone to sleep. If this is the case, then I commend you for falling into my trap. It is a writer’s greatest pleasure to hear that someone was kept up until the unholy hours of the morning reading one of his books. It goes back to authors being terrible people who delight in the suffering of others. Plus, we get a kickback from the caffeine industry…” ― Brandon Sanderson, Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians

“If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write, because our culture has no use for it.” ― Anais Nin

“People love a happy ending. So every episode, I will explain once again that I don’t like people. And then Mal will shoot someone. Someone we like. And their puppy.” ― Joss Whedon

“The scariest moment is always just before you start.” ― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.” ― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.” ― William Wordsworth

“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” ― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.” ― George Orwell

“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, A Man Without a Country

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

“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

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

“Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.” ― E.L. Doctorow

“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

“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” ― Thomas Mann, Essays of Three Decades

“Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it’s always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.” ― Neil Gaiman

“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

“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

“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

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

“You don’t write about the horrors of war. No. You write about a kid’s burnt socks lying in the road.” ― Richard Price

“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

“Easy reading is damn hard writing.” ― Nathaniel Hawthorne

“You always get more respect when you don’t have a happy ending.” ― Julia Quinn

“A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche

“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

“I was a late bloomer. But anyone who blooms at all, ever, is very lucky. ” ― Sharon Olds

“Women want love to be a novel. Men, a short story.” ― Daphne du Maurier

“I hate writing, I love having written.” ― Dorothy Parker

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Writing Quotes: 120+ Inspirational Writing Quotes For You

Writing quotes are good bits of inspiration to keep around when you’re feeling defeated in your writing endeavors.

Every author has a bad day; it doesn’t matter how experienced you are.

There will be days when you sit at your desk to write, and the only action that ends up happening is a flashing cursor on a blank page. It could be writer’s block or, you could just be drained.

There will be good days, too. Days when you love writing, and you stare at your work-in-progress with pride.

For both the good and bad times, we can energize our creative writing flow and motivation by perusing our favorite inspirational writing quotes by famous writers .

The daily habit of sitting for hours and typing out a manuscript is challenging for the best of authors most days. This is why we all need to have writing tools and writing prompts for motivation when your writing isn’t flowing.

To help you with your writing speed and keep your fingers moving through the flow of your manuscript, here are 120 inspirational writing quotes by famous authors.

This list of inspirational writing quotes contains:

How to use these inspirational writing quotes

Keep a journal of writing quotes
Share these quotes with authors
Post the quotes around your writing space

List of inspirational writing quotes

There is a plethora of great quotes here by authors who need inspiration just like we do. Whether you’re learning how to become an author or whether you’ve self-published 30 books already, having your favorite writing quotes around will only help your practice.

These are 3 tips for how to best use these quotes so you feel inspired and creative during your writing sessions.

1 – Keep a journal of writing quotes

Buy a journal or a simple notebook for writing quotes. Each day, write down several quotes from this list. Start your writing sessions by repeating several of your favorite quotes. You can choose several a day. Make this a daily practice. Get into the habit of carrying the journal with you. In addition to the best writing quotes, you can use the journal for making notes on your book.

2 – Share these quotes with authors

If you find a great quote, share it with other authors. Post it in your author mastermind community. Share it on your Facebook page.

You can create a community of inspired authors by sharing the wisdom and advice of a good writing quote.

3 – Post the quotes around your writing space

Do you have a personal writing space? If yes, write down your favorite quotes on post-it-notes and tack them around your space.

Choose a quote per day from this list and recite it several times while you are writing.

If you care about aesthetics and want to get fancy, have your favorite quote printed in a nice font, and frame it for your writing space.

We have included the best from authors such as Stephen King, JK Rowling, Ray Bradbury, George Orwell, William Zinsser, Roald Dahl, Margaret Atwood, Carl Sagan, Carrie Fisher, Mark Twain, and Ernest Hemingway…and a lot more!

Print this of writing quotes list or bookmark the page, read through it daily, and keep on writing that bestseller!

1. “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

2. “Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”

— George Orwell

3. “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

4. “I was set free because my greatest fear had been realized, and I still had a daughter who I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became a solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.”

— J.K. Rowling

5. “If you’re holding out for universal popularity, I’m afraid you will be in this cabin for a very long time.”

— J.K. Rowling

6. “Why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me.”

7. “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

8. “I’ve always believed in writing without a collaborator, because where two people are writing the same book, each believes he gets all the worry and only half the royalties.”

— Agatha Christie

9. “Some days I’m lucky to squeeze out a page of copy that pleases me, but I get as many as six or seven pages on a very good day; the average is probably three pages.”

— Dean Koontz

10. “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

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

— Stephen King

12. “I try to create sympathy for my characters, then turn the monsters loose.”

13. “Making people believe the unbelievable is no trick; it’s work . … Belief and reader absorption come in the details: An overturned tricycle in the gutter of an abandoned neighborhood can stand for everything.”

—Stephen King , WD [this quote is from an interview with King in Writer’s Digest ]

14. “Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.”

— Isaac Asimov

15. “In my later years, I have looked in the mirror each day and found a happy person staring back. Occasionally I wonder why I can be so happy. The answer is that every day of my life I’ve worked only for myself and for the joy that comes from writing and creating. The image in my mirror is not optimistic, but the result of optimal behavior.”

— Ray Bradbury

16. “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.”

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

18. “You fail only if you stop writing.”

19. “I always wrote. I wrote from when I was 12. That was therapeutic for me in those days. I wrote things to get them out of feeling them, and onto paper. So writing in a way saved me, kept me company. I did the traditional thing with falling in love with words, reading books and underlining lines I liked and words I didn’t know.”

— Carrie Fisher

20. “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

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

22. “It’s none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think you were born that way.”

— Ernest Hemingway

23. “As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand.”

― Ernest Hemingway

24. “Write something that’s worth fighting over. Because that’s how you change things. That’s how you create art.”

— Jeff Goins, author of Real Artists Don’t Starve

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

— Toni Morrison

26. “This is how you do it: You sit down at the keyboard and and you put one word after another until it’s done. It’s that easy, and that hard.”

— Neil Gaiman

27. “I can shake off everything as I write. My sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.”

— Anne Frank

28. “I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing his talent, he would be wise to develop a thick hyde.”

— Harper Lee

29. “There are some people who live in a dream world, and there are some who face reality; and then there are those who turn one into the other.”

— Desiderius Eramus

30. “Writing is like a ‘lust,’ or like ‘scratching when you itch.’ Writing comes as a result of a very strong impulse, and when it does come, I, for one, must get it out.”

— C.S. Lewis

31. “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.”

— Robert Frost

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

— Saul Bellow

33. “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

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

35. “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

36. “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

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

38. “A word after a word after a word is power.”

— Margaret Atwood

39. “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

40. “You reach deep down and bring up what feels absolutely authentic to you as you move along with the book, but you don’t know everything about it. You can’t.”

— Anne Rice , Interview With the Vampire

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

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

— Albert Camus

43. “I write to discover what I know.”

— Flannery O’Connor

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

— John Steinbeck

45. “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

46. “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

47. “I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don’t know what I did before that. Just loafed, I suppose.”

— P.G. Wodehouse

48. “If you want to be a writer, you have to write everyday. You don’t go to a well just once in awhile but daily.”

— Walter Mosley

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

— Herman Melville

50. “Words are a lens to focus one’s mind.”

51. “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

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

— Sidney Sheldon

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

— Erica Jong

54. “Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it’s the answer to everything. … It’s the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it’s a cactus.”

— Enid Bagnold

55. “To gain your own voice, you have to forget about having it heard.”

— Allen Ginsberg, WD

56. “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

57. “Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”

58. “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

59. “I’m not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn’t make us better, then what on earth is it for.”

— Alice Walker

60. “I don’t care if a reader hates one of my stories, just as long as he finishes the book.”

—Roald Dahl

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61. Writing is sweat and drudgery most of the time. And you have to love it in order to endure the solitude and the discipline.

— Peter Benchley, author of Jaws

62. “I read very widely, both non-fiction and fiction, so I don’t think there’s a single writer who influences me.”

— Peter Benchley

63. “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

64. “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

65. “There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

66. “The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order to write; a writer will turn over half a library to make one book.”

— Samuel Johnson

67. “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

68. “Write. Rewrite. When not writing or rewriting, read. I know of no shortcuts.”

— Larry L. King

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

— Tom Clancy

70. “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

71. “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.”

72. “Don’t expect the puppets of your mind to become the people of your story. If they are not realities in your own mind, there is no mysterious alchemy in ink and paper that will turn wooden figures into flesh and blood.”

— Leslie Gordon Barnard

73. “Plot is people. Human emotions and desires founded on the realities of life, working at cross purposes, getting hotter and fiercer as they strike against each other until finally there’s an explosion—that’s Plot.”

— Leigh Brackett

74. “Genius gives birth, talent delivers. What Rembrandt or Van Gogh saw in the night can never be seen again. Born writers of the future are amazed already at what they’re seeing now, what we’ll all see in time for the first time, and then see imitated many times by made writers.”

— Jack Kerouac

75. “Long patience and application saturated with your heart’s blood—you will either write or you will not—and the only way to find out whether you will or not is to try.”

— Jim Tully

76. “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

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

— May Sarton

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

—Andre Gide

79. “You do not have to explain every single drop of water contained in a rain barrel. You have to explain one drop—H 2 O. The reader will get it.”

—George Singleton

80. “When I say work I only mean writing. Everything else is just odd jobs.”

— Margaret Laurence

81. “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

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

—Angela Carter

83. “You don’t actually have to write anything until you’ve thought it out. This is an enormous relief, and you can sit there searching for the point at which the story becomes a toboggan and starts to slide.”

—Marie de Nervaud

84. “Whether a character in your novel is full of choler, bile, phlegm, blood or plain old buffalo chips, the fire of life is in there, too, as long as that character lives.”

—James Alexander Thom

85. “It is perfectly okay to write garbage—as long as you edit brilliantly.”

— C. J. Cherryh

86. “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 writer.”

87. “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

88. “Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.”

— Willa Cather

89. “The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn’t require any.”

— Russell Baker

90. “People on the outside think there’s something magical about writing, that you go up in the attic at midnight and cast the bones and come down in the morning with a story, but it isn’t like that. You sit in back of the typewriter and you work, and that’s all there is to it.”

— Harlan Ellison

91. “People do not deserve to have good writing, they are so pleased with bad.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

92. “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

93. “Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

— E. L. Doctorow

94. “The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

95. “Only in a person’s imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.”

— Joseph Conrad

96. “You learn by writing short stories. Keep writing short stories. The money’s in novels, but writing short stories keeps your writing lean and pointed.”

— Larry Niven

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

— Robert A. Heinlein

98. “The more closely the author thinks of why he wrote, the more he comes to regard his imagination as a kind of self-generating cement which glued his facts together, and his emotions as a kind of dark and obscure designer of those facts. Reluctantly, he comes to the conclusion that to account for his book is to account for his life.”

— Richard Wright

99. “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.”

100. “In general…there’s no point in writing hopeless novels. We all know we’re going to die; what’s important is the kind of men and women we are in the face of this.”

— Anne Lamott

101. “All the words I use in my stories can be found in the dictionary—it’s just a matter of arranging them into the right sentences.”

— Somerset Maugham

102. “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

103. “If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor.”

104. “…And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”

— Anaïs Nin

105. “Know that the Creator lives and moves and breathes within you. So those dreams? Risk them. Those words? Write them. Those hopes? Believe them.”

— Elora Nicole Ramirez

106. “Art is not about thinking something up. It is the opposite — getting something down.

— Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way

107. The writer is an explorer. Every step is an advance into a new land.

108. “The great work must inevitably be obscure, except to the very few, to those who like the author himself are initiated into the mysteries. Communication then is secondary: it is perpetuation which is important. For this only one good reader is necessary.”

— Henry Miller

109. “I am like a little pencil in God’s hand. He does the writing. The pencil has nothing to do with it.”

— Mother Teresa

110. “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

111. “Writing a book is like telling a joke and having to wait 2 years to know whether or not it was funny.”

— Alain de Botton

112. “No person who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.”

113. “Too many of us are not living our dreams because we are living our fears.”

— Les Brown

114. “If something isn’t working, if you have a story that you’ve built and it’s blocked and you can’t figure it out, take your favorite scene, or your very best idea or set-piece, and cut it. It’s brutal, but sometimes inevitable.”

— Joss Whedon

115. “You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

116. “There’s no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside of you.”

— Maya Angelou

117. “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

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

— Thomas Mann , Essays of Three Decades

119. “Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do…Try to be better than yourself.”

120. “You may not always write well, but you can edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page .”

— Jodi Picoult

Now you have a comprehensive list of inspirational writing quotes to keep you pushing forward.

And by reading through those quotes, hopefully you don’t feel so alone knowing that famous authors experience the same love/hate relationship with writing.

The most important thing is that you take action each day to move closer towards publishing your book . Then, you’ll be creating your own writing quotes for other aspiring authors to get inspired by!

What are your favorite inspirational writing quotes?

Join the community.

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ThinkWritten

Writing Quotes: 101 Quotes for Writers to Inspire You

Need a little motivation to write? These 101 Quotes for Writers from best selling authors are sure to inspire you!

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Sharing is caring!

Today I wanted to share a great round-up of my favorite writing quotes for writers, because sometimes it can be just that little bit of motivational inspiration you need to keep going.

An encouraging word from a published author is always reassurance that the madness of sitting at your laptop typing words for hours is worth the sacrifice!

We can also learn a lot about how to write from these famous author quotes included in this list of quotes about writing! Many of these quotes come from well known authors who share their best tips, advice, and secrets to learn all about writing.

While these quotes are no substitute for taking an online writing class, you’ll definitely find some inspiration here!

From tips for staying motivated to inspiring ideas for how to develop great characters in your writing, you are sure to find a lot of great writing advice to be found in these words of wisdom from successful authors!

Here are 101 Writing Quotes for Writers

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

“Words are a lens to focus one’s mind.” – Ayn Rand

“Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.” – W.H. Auden

“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

“All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald

“The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words.” – William H. Gass

“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

Writing Advice Quotes: Tips to Write Better from Writers

“Always be a poet, even in prose.” – Charles Baudelaire

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

“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

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

“There is only one plot — things are not what they seem.” – Jim Thompson

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

“You don’t write about the horrors of war. No. You write about a kid’s burnt socks lying in the road.” – Richard Price

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

“You always get more respect when you don’t have a happy ending.” – Julia Quinn

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

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

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” – Maya Angelou

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

“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

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

Quotes About Creativity and Finding Inspiration as a Writer

“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

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

“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

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

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

“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

Hobbes: Do you have an idea for your story yet? Calvin: No, I’m waiting for inspiration. You can’t just turn on creativity like a faucet. You have to be in the right mood. Hobbes: What mood is that? Calvin: Last-minute panic. – Bill Watterson

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

“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

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

“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

“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

“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 Card

“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

“Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.” – Willa Cather

Quotes On Writing for Children

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“I know what I liked as a child, and I don’t do any book that I, as a child, wouldn’t have liked.” – H. A. Rey

“I’m very lucky to write for children, because I don’t have to deal with popular culture. I can just deal with core fundamental issues: jealousy, love, hatred, sadness, joy, wanting to drive a bus.” – Mo Willems

“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

Quotes from Writers About Reading and Books

You’ll probably notice a common theme about all of these next quotes from writers – if you wish to write a book, you better get reading! Here are some of our favorite quotes about reading and books from a variety of authors.

“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

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

“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

“I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.” – Robert Louis Stevenson

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

“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

Motivational Quotes for Writers

“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

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

“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

“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

“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

“You can make anything by writing.” – C.S. Lewis

“You can fix anything but a blank page.” – Nora Roberts

“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

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

“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

Writing Quotes About Not Giving Up

These writing quotes about not giving up are a good thing to remember when you start submitting your manuscript to publishers ! It’s easy to want to give up, but it is worth the trials and tribulations to keep working at becoming a successful published author.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Writing Quotes About Editing and Revising

“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

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

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

“Half my life is an act of revision.” – John Irving

“Not a wasted word. This has been a main point to my literary thinking all my life.” – Hunter S. Thompson

“Good writing is rewriting.” – Truman Capote

“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

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

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

“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

More Great Quotes for Writers

“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

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

“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

“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

“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

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

“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

“A person who can write a long letter with ease, cannot write ill.” – Jane Austen

“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

“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

“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

“I don’t think of literature as an end in itself. It’s just a way of communicating something.” – Isabel Allende

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

“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

“Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.” – Benjamin Franklin

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

“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

“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.” – Ernest Hemingway

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

“A blank piece of paper is God’s way of telling us how hard it to be God.” – Sidney Sheldon

“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly — they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.” – Aldous Huxley

“I’m very lucky in that I don’t understand the world yet. If I understood the world, it would be harder for me to write these books.” — Mo Willems

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

What are your favorite writing quotes?

After reading these writing quotes, do you have a favorite? Which ones inspire you to start writing? Are there any quotes that offer writing tips you find useful? Are there any writing quotes you like that we may not have included on this list?

Your thoughts, comments, suggestions and ideas are always welcome in the comments section below!

Chelle Stein wrote her first embarrassingly bad novel at the age of 14 and hasn't stopped writing since. As the founder of ThinkWritten, she enjoys encouraging writers and creatives of all types.

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Famous Quotes on Writing

Need some writing inspiration and courage to keep going? Here are wise words from famous writers.

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

“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, “talent is cheaper than table salt. what separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.” ~ steven king.

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

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.” ~ Stephen King

“there is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” ~ maya angelou, “i love deadlines. i love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.” ~ douglas adams, the salmon of doubt.

“A writer is working when he’s staring out of the window.” ~ Burton Rascoe

“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, “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, “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, “if my doctor told me i had only six minutes to live, i wouldn’t brood. i’d type a little faster.” ~ isaac asimov.

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

“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

“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.

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

“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 best time to plan a book is while you’re doing the dishes.” ~ agatha christie, “there are three rules for writing the novel. unfortunately, no one knows what they are.” ~ w. somerset maugham, “[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, “i try to write a certain amount each day, five days a week. a rule sometimes broken is better than no rule.” ~ herman wouk.

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

“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

“there’s no better teacher for writing than reading… get a library card. that’s the best investment.” ~ alisa valdes.

“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

“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.

“A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” ~Thomas Mann

“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 require physical energy, energy our bodies could use in healthier ways were it available.” ~ Peggy Tabor Millin

‘if you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor.’ ~ edgar rice burroughs, “being a good writer is 3% talent, 97% not being distracted by the internet.” ~ anon.

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

“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

“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, “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, “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, “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, “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.

50+ Inspiring Quotes About Writing and Writers

by Joe Bunting | 6 comments

Start Your Story TODAY! We’re teaching a new LIVE workshop this week to help you start your next book. Learn more and sign up here.

The best way to become a better writer is to write and then to publish your writing, whether you publish it on a blog, in a book, or with a close friend. It's only by practicing writing, and getting feedback on it, that you can improve.

That being said, it never hurts to learn from those who have gone before you, and over the years, we've compiled a lot of excellent advice from the best writers on how to become a better writer.

My Top 5 Writing Quotes:

“Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of job: It's always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.” —Neil Gaiman

“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.” —Somerset Maugham
“Writing is the only thing that when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.” —Gloria Steinem
“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” —Anais Nin
“Get through a draft as quickly as possible.” —Joshua Wolf Shenk

Favorite Quotes from Writers in Our Community

I asked authors in our community for their favorite quotes on writing or being a writer, and here's what they sent me.

1. How You Write a Book, According to Neil Gaiman

From Carole Wolfe, author of My Best Mistake , and M MacKinnon, author of The Comyn's Curse :

2. Why We Write, According to Walt Whitman

From Melanie Lambert, author of Wonder Woman in Disguise :

Walt Whitman Writing Quote The Write Practice

“We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. So medicine, law, business, engineering… these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love… these are what we stay alive for.”

― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

3. What You Must Write, According to Toni Morrison

From Michelle Dalton, author of Epona , and Joslyn Chase, author of Steadman's Blind :

Toni Morrison Writing Quote The Write Practice

4. How to Write the Right Word, According to Mark Twain

From Ichabod Ebenezer, author of A Shadow Stained in Blood :

Mark Twain Writing Quote The Write Practice

5. What Writing Is, According to Isaac Asimov

From Jeff Elkins, author of Grab :

Isaac Asimov Writing Quote The Write Practice

6. On the Path to Writing Success, According to Octavia E. Butler

From S.J. Henderson, author of Daniel the Drawer :

Octavia E Butler Writing Quote The Write Practice

“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

7. Why We Doubt Our Own Writing, According to Ira Glass

From Ross Boone, author of The Absent Landlord :

Ira Glass Writing Quote The Write Practice

“All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. . . . For the first couple years you make stuff, it's just not that good. . . . But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you.” —Ira Glass

8. Why Writing Requires Empathy, According to John Barth (and Sarah Gribble)

From Sarah Gribble, author of The Hike :

Sarah Gribble Writing Quote The Write Practice

“Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.” John Barth

In other words:

More Favorite Writing Quotes

Need more writing quotes? Read on for more of our favorites:

9. Why You Became a Writer, According to Gloria Steinem

Writing is the only thing that when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else. Gloria Steinem

10. Why You Became a Writer, According to George Orwell

“[You write out of the] desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, etc., etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive and a strong one.” —George Orwell

11. Why You Became a Writer, According to Anaïs Nin

We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect. Anais Nin

12. That Doesn't Mean Writing Is Easy

Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of job: It's always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins. Neil Gaiman

13. Start Writing Now

Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on. Louis L'Amour

Need more grammar help? My favorite tool that helps find grammar problems and even generates reports to help improve my writing is ProWritingAid . Works with Word, Scrivener, Google Docs, and web browsers. Also, be sure to use my coupon code to get 25 percent off: WritePractice25

14. And Write Quickly

15. what to write about.

“Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.” —Natalie Goldberg

16. Be Willing to Write Badly

Be willing to write really badly. Jennifer Egan

17. Don't Doubt Yourself

The worst enemy to creativity is self doubt. Sylvia Plath

18. All Great Writers Are a Little Crazy

“The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis.” —William Styron

19. The Only Way to Fail As a Writer…

You fail only if you stop writing. Ray Bradbury

20. Just Write One True Sentence

All you have to do is write one true sentence. Writer the truest sentence that you know. Ernest Hemingway

21. Just Write Something Simple

One day I will find the write words, and they will be simple. Jack Kerouac

22. Your Big Ideas are Worthless

Ideas are cheap. It's the Execution that is all important. George R.R. Martin

23. Really Worthless

It doesn't matter how many book ideas you have if you can't finish writing your book. Joe Bunting

(I don't consider myself the equal of George R.R. Martin, Ernest Hemingway, or Sylvia Plath… yet… but this quote seemed important to include.)

24. Don't Let Anything Interfere With Your Writing

“Find your best time of the day for writing and write. Don't let anything else interfere. Afterwards it won't matter to you that the kitchen is a mess.” —Esther Freud

25. Keep At It

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

26. Write Even When the World is Chaotic

Write even when the world is chaotic. Cory Doctorow

27. The Mark of a Master Writer

“The mark of a master is to select only a few moments but to give us a lifetime.” —Robert McKee

28. No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.

29. stay drunk on writing.

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. Ray Bradbury

30. Writing is like kissing

I can't write without a reader. It's precisely like a kiss—you can't do it alone. John Cheever

31. Don't Make a Chore for Your Readers

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

32. Show, Don't Tell

Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass. Anton Chekhov

33. How to Develop Your Own Style

It is only be writing, not dreaming about it, that we develop our own style. PD James

34. Writing is More Difficult for Us

A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. Thomas Mann

35. No One Knows the Rules

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

36. The best way to become a writer

The best way to be a writer is to be a writer. Augusten Burroghs

37. Always Listen to Ben Franklin

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing. Benjamin Franklin

38. Your Words Have Power

39. Chase Your Dream

40. Writing in the Dark

41. Turn the Monsters Loose

42. Stories Are All Around You

43. Write Now

44. The Secret Professional Writers Know

45. Follow Your Hero

46. Exercise Your Writing Muscle

47. But Actually, Exercise Your Writing Muscle

48. Your Writing Is Your Strength

49. The Real Challenge: Avoiding Distraction

50. Just Tell a Story

“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

51. Perseverance Is Key

52. Your Villains Think They've Got it Right

53. Write First, Edit Later

54. Your Hero's Job

55. Plan, Then Adjust

56. Read, Read, Then Read Some More

57. How to Keep Your Readers Hooked

Which quote is your favorite? Let us know in the comments .

Write something worth reading! Spend fifteen minutes free writing or working on a work in progress. As you write, channel the advice from the great writers above.

When your time is up, post your practice in the Pro Practice Workshop and encourage each other with your own writing wisdom!

Happy writing!

Joe Bunting

Joe Bunting is an author and the leader of The Write Practice community. He is also the author of the new book Crowdsourcing Paris , a real life adventure story set in France. It was a #1 New Release on Amazon. Follow him on Instagram (@jhbunting).

Want best-seller coaching? Book Joe here.

This happened while I was working on the day I wrote this. Since the prompt was so open ended, I decided to write about the tough day. I don’t really know why I chose not to give him a name; it’s just something I felt like trying.

Good job, mama. Magical times. Do you create bedtime stories for your son? My son (who is 13 now) used to tell me, “Mama, make up a story for me.” I was terrible at it. If that’s something you can do, even if you aren’t able to write them down, that will be your writing practice for the day AND an amazing connection with and gift for your son. Also, be sure to relish in his language development; this is the perfect time to notice his amazing leaps forward. If you haven’t explored using sign language with little kids, it’s a lot of fun and a great way to support their language development. If you have a moment (yeah, right, didn’t you hear I have a two-year-old?), check out http://www.signingtime.com/company/about-us/story/

Thanks for the wonderful tips. I think making up stories for your child is a great idea. I did try a little signing with my son, unfortunately, I didn’t get past the first ten essentials. I was actually hoping to learn this new language with him, but I didn’t fight hard enough for it. Of course, it’s never too late to start again. Thanks!

I really liked this, David! It flows very easily “Writing free or freely writingIs writing ever really free?” I love that! Writing has a cost, a cost that’s worth it.

-Spring Storm-

Raindrops hit my window and glide down the glass. A flash of lighting. A roar of thunder. The evergreen tree sways in the wind. The weather alarm sounds its obnoxious alert; there’s a hail advisory. The trees in the distance are gray and blurred against the rain-hazed sky. A lone leaf spirals to the ground. pitter patter… A thousand tiny hailstones land on the fresh spring grass and clink against my window. The window is smeared as if I’m wearing someone else’s glasses. A car drives up the street, water spraying from under its tires. The rain falls gently now. The grass brightens and puddles of water dot the yard. There’s a pastel blue sky. Soft. Hopeful. The storm has left me.

Yes, Chekhov the best advice.

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Grades 6-12
School Leaders

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100 Quotes About Writing To Inspire Your Students

Wise words from authors, poets, historical figures and more.

Many students say the hardest part of school is writing. That’s one of the reasons inspiring students to write can be a challenge. As you look through this list of quotes about writing, you’ll discover many of the great authors actually feel the same way. If you’re looking for a way to encourage your class to put pen to paper, check out this list of 100 relatable quotes about writing from authors, poets, and other influential figures.

Quotes About Writing by Historical Figures

“either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.” – benjamin franklin.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing- Quotes About Writing

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

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.” – Henry David Thoreau

“History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.” – Winston S. Churchill

History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.- Quotes About Writing

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

“The best way to become acquainted with a subject is to write about it.” – Benjamin Disraeli

Quotes About Writing by Authors

“i kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.” – robert louis stevenson.

I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.- Quotes About Writing

“You can make anything by writing.” – C.S. Lewis

“To survive, you must tell stories.” – Umberto Eco, The Island of the Day Before

“As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand.” – Ernest Hemingway

As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand.- Quotes About Writing

“Writers live twice.” – Natalie Goldberg

“Words are a lens to focus one’s mind.” – Ayn Rand

“If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.” – Peter Handke

If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.- Quotes About Writing

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

“The first sentence can’t be written until the final sentence is written.” – Joyce Carol Oates

“A book is simply the container of an idea—like a bottle; what is inside the book is what matters.” – Angela Carter

A book is simply the container of an idea—like a bottle; what is inside the book is what matters.- Quotes About Writing

“There is no greater power on this earth than story.” – Libba Bray, The Diviners

“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

“In good writing, words become one with things.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

In good writing, words become one with things.- Quotes About Writing

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

“The real story is not the plot but how the characters unfold by it.” – Vanna Bonta

“What I’ve learned about writing is that sometimes less is more, while often more is grander. And both are true.” – Richelle E. Goodrich

What I’ve learned about writing is that sometimes less is more, while often more is grander. And both are true.- Quotes About Writing

“Character is plot, plot is character.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald

“You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.” – Jodi Picoult

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

“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

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.- Quotes About Writing

“I get a lot of letters from people. They say, ‘I want to be a writer. What should I do?’ I tell them to stop writing to me and get on with it.” – Ruth Rendell

“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 a book.” – Samuel Johnson

“Tell the readers a story! Because without a story, you are merely using words to prove you can string them together in logical sentences.” – Anne McCaffrey

Tell the readers a story! Because without a story, you are merely using words to prove you can string them together in logical sentences.- Quotes About Writing

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.” – Stephen King

“If the book is true, it will find an audience that is meant to read it.” – Wally Lamb

“Words are our most inexhaustible source of magic.” – J.K. Rowling

Words are our most inexhaustible source of magic.- Quotes About Writing

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

“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

“You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.” – Saul Bellow

You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.- Quotes About Writing

“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

“Fiction is the truth inside the lie.” – Stephen King

“The scariest moment is always just before you start.” – Stephen King

The scariest moment is always just before you start.- Quotes About Writing

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

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

“After nourishment, shelter, and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.” – Philip Pullman

After nourishment, shelter, and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.- Quotes About Writing

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

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

“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

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.- Quotes About Writing

“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

“A well-composed book is a magic carpet on which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter in any other way.” – Caroline Gordon

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

“The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.” – Anais Nin

“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

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

Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.- Quotes About Writing

“Closed in a room, my imagination becomes the universe, and the rest of the world is missing out.” – Criss Jami

Closed in a room, my imagination becomes the universe, and the rest of the world is missing out.- Quotes About Writing

“A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.” – G.K. Chesterton

“There comes a time in your life when you have to choose to turn the page, write another book or simply close it.” – Shannon L. Alder

“My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.” – Ernest Hemingway

My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.- Quotes About Writing

“Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted.” – Jules Renard

“So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.” – Virginia Woolf

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

All that I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say, is that I love the world.- Quotes About Writing

“You can fix anything but a blank page.” – Nora Roberts

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

The hard part about writing a novel is finishing it.- Quotes About Writing

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

“Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.” – Natalie Goldberg

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

“There is creative reading as well as creative writing.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.- Quotes About Writing

“Ideas aren’t magical; the only tricky part is holding on to one long enough to get it written down.” – Lynn Abbey

Ideas aren't magical; the only tricky part is holding on to one long enough to get it written down.- Quotes About Writing

“Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river.” – Lisa See

“Write about the emotions you fear the most.” – Laurie Halse Anderson

“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

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.- Quotes About Writing

“If you want to be a writer, stop talking about it and sit down and write!” – Jackie Collins

“A story has no beginning or end: Arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.” – Graham Greene

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

A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.- Quotes About Writing

“With writing, we have second chances.” – Jonathan Safran Foer

“Written words can also sing.” – Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

“You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.” – Stephen King

You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.- Quotes About Writing

“A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth.” – Diane Setterfield

“A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it.” – Mark Twain

“We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.” – Franz Kafka

“the first draft is just you telling yourself the story.” – terry pratchett.

“You can’t blame a writer for what the characters say.” – Truman Capote

“Personally I think that grammar is a way to attain beauty.” – Muriel Barbery

Personally I think that grammar is a way to attain beauty.- Quotes About Writing

“Don’t classify me, read me. I’m a writer, not a genre.” – Carlos Fuentes

“Writing is the only thing that when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.” – Gloria Steinem

Quotes About Writing by Poets

“i have never started a poem yet whose end i knew. writing a poem is discovering.” – robert frost.

“A synonym is a word you use when you can’t spell the other one.” – Baltasar Gracián

A synonym is a word you use when you can’t spell the other one.- Quotes About Writing

“If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word.” – Margaret Atwood

“Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.” – William Wordsworth

“A word after a word after a word is power.” – Margaret Atwood

A word after a word after a word is power.- Quotes About Writing

“I hate writing, I love having written.” – Dorothy Parker

“Some moments are nice, some are nicer, some are even worth writing about.” – Charles Bukowski

Quotes About Writing by Philosophers

“the purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.” – albert camus.

“A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.” – Friedrich Nietzsche

A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.- Quotes About Writing

“All I need is a sheet of paper and something to write with, and then I can turn the world upside down.” – Friedrich Nietzsche

All I need is a sheet of paper and something to write with, and then I can turn the world upside down.- Quotes About Writing

“To write well, express yourself like the common people, but think like a wise man.” – Aristotle

“It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.” – Friedrich Nietzsche

More Quotes About Writing

“write your first draft with your heart. rewrite with your head.” – mike rich.

Write your first draft with your heart. Rewrite with your head.- Quotes About Writing

“I write to give myself strength. I write to be the characters that I am not. I write to explore all the things I’m afraid of.” – Joss Whedon

“Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.” – Pablo Picasso

Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.- Quotes About Writing

“Everybody is talented because everybody who is human has something to express.” – Brenda Ueland

“You are what you write.” – Helvy Tiana Rosa

Did you like these 100 quotes about writing? Check out our 80+ Motivational Quotes for Students of All Ages to further inspire your students!

Come share your favorite quotes about writing in the weareteachers helpline group on facebook .

These quotes about writing from authors, poets, historical figures, and others will get your students' creative juicing flowing!

23 Close Reading Anchor Charts That Will Help Your Students Dig Deep

Take a closer look. Continue Reading

45+ Quotes About Writing from Famous Writers

Whether seasoned and published or just starting out, any writer will appreciate these quotes about writing from celebrated authors who know their craft and its challenges.

No matter how passionate you are about it, writing can be difficult. Whenever you’re struggling with writer’s block, rejection, competition, insecurity, or any of the countless obstacles that wordsmiths encounter daily, it can help to get encouragement from those who have successfully overcome the very same challenges.

So, whether you’re up against a creative wall or just looking for some inspiration to start your next project, these quotes about writing from writers themselves are sure to be welcome reading!

Inspirational Quotes from Writers

Trying to get psyched up to sit down and write? It can be reassuring to hear the words of literary greats celebrating a few of the very best parts of being a writer.

1. “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

2. “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

3. “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, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

4. “What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you.” — Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing

5. “Stories aren't made of language: they're made of something else... perhaps they're made of life.” — Philip Pullman, Daemon Voices: On Stories and Storytelling

6. “There is no greater power on this earth than story.” — Libba Bray, The Diviners

7. “You may tell a tale that takes up residence in someone's soul, becomes their blood and self and purpose. That tale will move them and drive them and who knows that they might do because of it, because of your words. That is your role, your gift.” — Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus

8. “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, A Circle of Quiet

9. “Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can't remember who we are or why we're here.” — Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees

10. “Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.” — Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

11. “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, Born to Run

Encouraging Quotes for Writers

Some of the most famous quotes from writers are about how ridiculously hard writing can be—and why you should rise to the challenge and do it anyway.

12. “The scariest moment is always just before you start.” — Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

13. “And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right.” — Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

14. “If you are not afraid of the voices inside you, you will not fear the critics outside you.” — Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones

15. “The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death.” — Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

16. “The mind has plenty of ways of preventing you from writing, and paralysing 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, Daemon Voices: On Stories and Storytelling

17. “There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.” — Sol Stein, Stein on Writing: A Master Editor Shares His Craft, Techniques, and Strategies

18. “Because this business of becoming conscious, of being a writer, is ultimately about asking yourself, How alive am I willing to be?” — Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing

19. “Writing is supposed to be difficult, agonizing, a dreadful exercise, a terrible occupation.” — Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

Quotes About the Writing Process

From writers who know the drill, these quotes offer valuable insights and practical advice on the craft of writing, and the discipline and rigor it requires.

20. “Examine every word you put on paper. You'll find a surprising number that don't serve any purpose.” — William Zinsser, On Writing Well: The Audio Collection

21. “Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.” — William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White, The Elements of Style

22. “The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle.” — Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

23. “People who think that grammar is just a collection of rules and restrictions are wrong. If you get to like it, grammar reveals the hidden meaning of history, hides disorder and abandonment, links things and brings opposites together. Grammar is a wonderful way of organising the world how you'd like it to be.” — Delphine de Vigan, No and Me

24. “Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I'd have the facts.” — Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

25. “Whenever I'm asked what advice I have for young writers, I always say that the first thing is to read, and to read a lot. The second thing is to write. And the third thing, which I think is absolutely vital, is to tell stories and listen closely to the stories you're being told.” — John Green, An Abundance of Katherines

26. “A great novel, rather than discouraging me, simply makes me want to write.” — Madeleine L’Engle, A Circle of Quiet

27. “I read and feel that same compulsion; the desire to possess what he has written, which can only be subdued by writing something myself.” — Patti Smith, M Train

28. “Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river.” — Lisa See, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

29. “If you read good books, when you write, good books will come out of you.” — Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones

30. “The only way to learn to write is to force yourself to produce a certain number of words on a regular basis.” — William Zinsser, On Writing Well: The Audio Collection

31. “Prose is architecture, not interior decoration.” — Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon

32. “One writes out of one thing only—one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.” — James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

33. “We cannot choose where to start and stop. Our stories are the tellers of us.” — Chris Cleave, Little Bee

34. “A man who tells secrets or stories must think of who is hearing or reading, for a story has as many versions as it has readers. Everyone takes what he wants or can from it and thus changes it to his measure. Some pick out parts and reject the rest, some strain the story through their mesh of prejudice, some paint it with their own delight. A story must have some points of contact with the reader to make him feel at home in it. Only then can he accept wonders.” — John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

Funny Quotes About Writing

Sometimes, when you’re in the thick of a third, fourth, or fifth edit and ready to throw in the towel, what you need most is a good laugh, courtesy of someone who understands your plight.

35. “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.” — Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt

36. “Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons… All they do is show you've been to college.” — Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

37. “Tellers of stories with ink on paper, not that they matter anymore, have been either swoopers or bashers. Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn't work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right just before they go on to the next one. When they're done, they're done." — Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake

38. “I’m sure I could write endlessly about nothing. If only I had nothing to say.” — Patti Smith, M Train

39. “You want to tell a story? Grow a heart. Grow two. Now, with the second heart, smash the first one into bits. Gross, right? A bloody pulpy liquid mess. Look at it, try to make sense of it. Realize you can't. Because there is no sense.” — Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

40. “The road to hell is paved with adverbs.” — Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

Quotes About Writers

Many artists draw much of their inspiration from introspection, and writers are no different. These quotes feature sayings about writers from the ultimate authority: writers themselves.

41. “If you want life-long friendship and selfless camaraderie, join the army and learn to kill. If you want a lifetime of temporary alliances with peers who will glory in your every failure, write novels.” — Robert Galbraith, The Silkworm

42. “Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Love of the Last Tycoon

43. “A storyteller makes up things to help other people; a liar makes up things to help himself.” — Daniel Wallace, The Kings and Queens of Roam

44. “The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think, but to give you questions to think upon.” — Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings

45. “It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.” — E. B. White, Charlotte’s Web

46. “A writer’s life and work are not a gift to mankind; they are its necessity.” — Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations

47. “We never sit anything out. We are cups, quietly and constantly being filled. The trick is knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.” — Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

Becoming a writer is especially difficult if you don’t know where to start. To help, we’ve rounded up advice from several authors on starting out as a writer. Take a look at our infographic below to learn what these wordsmiths think you should do to kick off your writing career.

Click to view a full sized writing quotes graphic .

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138 Writing Quotes to Motivate, Inspire, & Kick Your Butt

by Kevin J. Duncan

on Aug 22, 2024

Who doesn’t love writing quotes?

A good quote can motivate you. It can encourage you when you feel like giving up. It can inspire you when you need a tiny lil’ spark to start writing .

In this simple, easy-to-read resource, I’ve compiled a list of inspiring, motivational quotes about writing and life that have been shared with the world by famous writers, public figures, and great literary minds, both past and present:

28 Inspirational Writing Quotes

37 quotes about writing, 24 writing quotes of encouragement.

49 Motivational Quotes for Writers

Let’s jump in.

1. You fail only if…

“You fail only if you stop writing.” (Click to Tweet) — Ray Bradbury

2. Type a little faster…

“If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster .” (Click to Tweet) — Isaac Asimov

3. Do it for joy…

“I’ve written because it fulfilled me. Maybe it paid off the mortgage on the house and got the kids through college, but those things were on the side — I did it for the buzz. I did it for the pure joy of the thing. And if you can do it for joy, you can do it forever.” (Click to Tweet) — Stephen King

4. You must write it…

“If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” (Click to Tweet) — Toni Morrison

5. Taste life…

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” (Click to Tweet) — Anaïs Nin

6. Don’t water it down…

“Don’t bend; don’t water it down; (and) don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.” (Click to Tweet) — Franz Kafka

7. Write every day of your life…

“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.” (Click to Tweet) — Ray Bradbury

8. Cut it to the bone…

“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.” (Click to Tweet) — Stephen King

9. Everything in life is writable…

“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.” (Click to Tweet) — Sylvia Plath

10. How vain is it…

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.” (Click to Tweet) — Henry David Thoreau

11. What is written without effort…

“What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.” (Click to Tweet) — Samuel Johnson

12. Change more lives…

“90 percent perfect and shared with the world always changes more lives than 100 percent perfect and stuck in your head.” (Click to Tweet) — Jon Acuff

13. Don’t quit…

“You can’t fail if you don’t quit. You can’t succeed if you don’t start.” (Click to Tweet) — Michael Hyatt

14. That’s how you create art…

“Write something that’s worth fighting over. Because that’s how you change things. That’s how you create art.” (Click to Tweet) — Jeff Goins

15. Determination never does…

“Inspiration may sometimes fail to show up for work in the morning, but determination never does.” (Click to Tweet) — K.M. Weiland

16. Exercise the writing muscle…

“ 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

17. Write what disturbs you…

“Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.” — Natalie Goldberg

18. Write what…

“Write what should not be forgotten.” — Isabel Allende

19. Lens to focus…

“Words are a lens to focus one’s mind.” — Ayn Rand

20. Breathings of your heart…

“Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.” — William Wadsworth

21. Blank page…

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

22. No talent for writing…

“It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.” — Robert Benchley

23. The most beautiful things…

“The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes.” — Andre Gide

24. You create them…

“Opportunities don’t happen. You create them.” — Chris Grosser

25. Write something worth reading…

“Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.” (Click to Tweet) — Benjamin Franklin

26. Better than perfect…

“Done is better than perfect.” — Sheryl Sandberg

27. No such thing as writer’s block…

“There’s no such thing as writer’s block . That was invented by people in California who couldn’t write.” (Click to Tweet) — Terry Pratchett

28. Persistence…

“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

1. No greater agony…

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” (Click to Tweet) — Maya Angelou

2. Every secret of a writer’s soul…

“Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works.” (Click to Tweet) — Virginia Woolf

3. Show me the glint of light…

“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” (Click to Tweet) — Anton Chekhov

4. Surprise…

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

5. The first draft…

“The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.” — Terry Pratchett

6. One of the exquisite pleasures of writing…

“I would write a book, or a short story, at least three times — once to understand it, the second time to improve the prose, and a third to compel it to say what it still must say. Somewhere I put it this way: first drafts are for learning what one’s fiction wants him to say. Revision works with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to reform it. Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.” — Bernard Malamud

7. The difference between…

“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.” (Click to Tweet) — Mark Twain

8. The whooshing sound…

“I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.” (Click to Tweet) — Douglas Adams

9. Write as clearly as I can…

“The main thing I try to do is write as clearly as I can. I rewrite a good deal to make it clear.” — E.B. White

10. Words can be like x-rays…

“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly — they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.” — Aldous Huxley

11. A lesson in creative writing…

“Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. (…) All they do is show you’ve been to college.” — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

12. Find the right words…

“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.” — Jack Kerouac

13. When I sit down to write…

“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

14. Only a great man can write it…

“Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.” — Oscar Wilde

15. Leave out the parts…

“I try to leave out the parts that people skip.” — Elmore Leonard

16. My courage is reborn…

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

17. A person is a fool to become a writer…

“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.” (Click to Tweet) — Roald Dahl

18. No one knows…

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

19. To discover…

“I write to discover what I know.” — Flannery O’Connor

20. Wants to be written…

“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

21. Writing is easy…

“Writing is easy: All you do is sit staring at a blank piece of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.” (Click to Tweet) — Gene Fowler

22. Never have to change…

“You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.” — Saul Bellow

23. No shortcuts…

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

24. Irritated by my own writing…

“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

25. Mighty book, mighty theme…

“To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.” — Herman Melville

26. Good writing…

“Good writing is rewriting.” — Truman Capote

27. Writing advice…

“Don’t take anyone’s writing advice too seriously.” — Lev Grossman

28. The Muse…

“Cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can’t fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.” — William S. Burroughs

29. Using two words…

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

30. Greatest part of a writer…

“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

31. Great writer…

“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 writer.” — Ray Bradbury

32. Do not hoard…

“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

33. You can make anything…

“You can make anything by writing.” — C.S. Lewis

34. Have something to say…

“You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald

35. Failed writers…

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

36. Wake up…

“I wake up in the morning and my mind starts making sentences, and I have to get rid of them fast — talk them or write them down.” — Ernest Hemingway

37. Adverbs…

“Empty your knapsack of all adjectives, adverbs and clauses that slow your stride and weaken your pace. Travel light.” — Bill Moyers

1. Waited for perfection…

“If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word.” (Click to Tweet) — Margaret Atwood

2. The good writers…

“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.” (Click to Tweet) — Orson Scott Card

3. Start writing…

“Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.” (Click to Tweet) — Louis L’Amour

4. A writer needs three things…

“A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.” — William Faulkner

5. Didn’t quit…

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

6. One true sentence…

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

7. Part of the learning process…

“You have to resign yourself to wasting lots of trees before you write anything really good. That’s just how it is. It’s like learning an instrument. You’ve got to be prepared for hitting wrong notes occasionally, or quite a lot. That’s just part of the learning process.” (Click to Tweet) — J.K. Rowling

8. Road to achievement…

“Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.” — C. S. Lewis

9. Writing is more difficult…

“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” — Thomas Mann

10. Tell it as best you can…

“(…) 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.” (Click to Tweet) — Neil Gaiman

11. What you have to say…

“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

12. Pouring yourself into your work…

“When you are pouring yourself into your work and bringing your unique perspective and skills to the table, then you are adding value that only you are capable of contributing.” (Click to Tweet) — Todd Henry

13. Like driving a car at night…

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

14. Be brave…

“We were born to be brave.” (Click to Tweet) — Bob Goff

15. Start somewhere…

“Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.” (Click to Tweet) — Anne Lamott

16. Rejection slips…

“I could write an entertaining novel about rejection slips, but I fear it would be overly long.” — Louise Brown

17. Ideas are like rabbits…

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

18. Ideas are like rabbits…

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

19. Meant to read it…

“If the book is true, it will find an audience that is meant to read it.” — Wally Lamb

20. They know it…

“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

21. Writing prompts…

“Most writers draw a blank when they first start with writing prompts . Keep pushing through, because something thrilling will start to happen.” — Mel Wicks

22. None of their business…

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

23. Keep it simple…

“I do not over-intellectualise the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the d*mned story.” — Tom Clancy

24. Surviving the rollercoaster…

“Being a writer is not just about typing. It’s also about surviving the rollercoaster of the creative journey.” (Click to Tweet) — Joanna Penn

49 Motivational Quotes for Writers (or Anyone Who Needs Motivating Thoughts, Really)

1. Success is no accident…

“Success is no accident. It is hard work, perseverance, learning, studying, sacrifice and most of all, love of what you are doing or learning to do.” — Pele

2. Count the days…

“Don’t count the days, make the days count.” — Muhammad Ali

3. If my determination…

“Failure will never overtake me if my determination to succeed is strong enough.” — Og Mandino

4. Hard work…

“Hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard.” — Tim Notke

5. Live and learn…

“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.” — Mahatma Gandhi

6. Living our fears…

“Too many of us are not living our dreams because we are living our fears.” — Les Brown

7. Perseverance…

“I do not think that there is any other quality so essential to success of any kind as the quality of perseverance. It overcomes almost everything, even nature.” — John D. Rockefeller

8. Meant to be reached…

“A goal is not always meant to be reached; it often serves simply as something to aim at.” — Bruce Lee

9. Not a product of my circumstances…

“I’m not a product of my circumstances. I am a product of my decisions.” — Stephen Covey

10. Fear of failure…

“There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve, the fear of failure.” — Paulo Coelho

11. The whole secret…

“The whole secret of a successful life is to find out what is one’s destiny to do, and then do it.” — Henry Ford

12. Have to settle…

“If you are not willing to risk the usual you will have to settle for the ordinary.” — Jim Rohn

13. Perfection…

“Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence.” — Vince Lombardi

14. Stepping stone…

“Failure is another stepping stone to greatness.” — Oprah Winfrey

15. Self-confidence…

“The best way to gain self-confidence is to do what you are afraid to do.” — Swati Sharma

16. Great work…

“The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.” — Steve Jobs

17. Successful people…

“Unsuccessful people make their decisions based on their current situations. Successful people make their decisions based on where they want to be.” — Benjamin Hardy

18. Success…

“Success is going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.” — Winston Churchill

19. Born to win…

“You were born to win, but to be a winner, you must plan to win, prepare to win, and expect to win.” — Zig Ziglar

20. Tried anything new…

“A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.” — Albert Einstein

21. Learn from the mistakes…

“Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.” — Eleanor Roosevelt

22. With all you have…

“Do what you can with all you have, wherever you are.” — Theodore Roosevelt

23. All our dreams…

“All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them.” — Walt Disney

24. Our greatest story…

“Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.” — Confucius

25. Enough time…

“Don’t say you don’t have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo Da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.” — H. Jackson Brown Jr.

26. Hustle…

“What you lack in talent can be made up with desire, hustle and giving 110% all the time.” — Don Zimmer

27. The best you can…

“Do the best you can. No one can do more than that.” — John Wooden

28. What we fear…

“What we fear of doing most is usually what we most need to do.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

29. See opportunities…

“If you believe it’ll work out, you’ll see opportunities. If you don’t believe it’ll work out, you’ll see obstacles.” — Wayne Dyer

30. Strive to be worthy…

“Don’t worry when you are not recognized, but strive to be worthy of recognition.” — Abraham Lincoln

31. Excellence…

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” — Aristotle

32. Key to success…

“One important key to success is self-confidence. An important key to self-confidence is preparation.” — Arthur Ashe

33. Can’t lose…

“Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.” — Bill Gates

34. Comfort zone…

“Move out of your comfort zone. You can only grow if you are willing to feel awkward and uncomfortable when you try something new.” — Brian Tracy

35. Positive thought…

“Just one small positive thought in the morning can change your whole day.” — Dalai Lama

36. Develop success…

“Develop success from failures. Discouragement and failure are two of the surest stepping stones to success.” — Dale Carnegie

37. Expect great things…

“You must expect great things of yourself before you can do them.” — Michael Jordan

38. Do small things…

“If you cannot do great things, do small things in a great way.” — Napoleon Hill

39. The other side of fear…

“Everything you’ve ever wanted is on the other side of fear.” — George Addair

40. Path to success…

“The path to success is to take massive, determined action.” — Tony Robbins

41. Tough times…

“Tough times never last, but tough people do.” — Robert Schuller

42. Left undone…

“Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.” — Pablo Picasso

43. Keep going…

“Don’t watch the clock; do what it does. Keep going.” — Sam Levenson

44. One more time…

“Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.” — Thomas Edison

45. All you’ve got…

“Give your dreams all you’ve got and you’ll be amazed at the energy that comes out of you.” — William James

46. Never gives up…

“It’s hard to beat a person who never gives up.” — Babe Ruth

47. Long perseverance…

“Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.” — George Eliot

48. Seems impossible…

“It always seems impossible until it’s done.” — Nelson Mandela

49. Have not failed…

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” — Thomas A. Edison

What are Your Favorite Writing Quotes?

These are some of the best motivational writing quotes the world has to offer, and yet we’ve merely scratched the surface — there are thousands upon thousands of great, inspirational quotes about writing.

So, I want to hear from you:

Which one is your favorite quote?

Let me know in the comments below.

Mindset , Writing

Kevin J. Duncan

The ultimate toolkit for becoming one of the highest-paid writers online. Premium training. Yours for free.

Written by Kevin J. Duncan

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25 Inspiring Quotes about Writing

Writing may be one of the most rewarding – and most frustrating – activities in the history of mankind. Few other callings result in as much crumpled paper, snapped pencils, frayed nerves and all-nighters. Writing has also given us some of the most inspirational quotes imaginable. Here, we’ve collected 25 quotes to give you the motivation and inspiration you need to finish your project, even if it takes all night.

Getting Started

Every writer has dealt with writer’s block and new writers can find the process of simply starting to be difficult. Since beginning can be difficult for even seasoned writers, much advice has been given on how to take the plunge and begin telling your story.

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” (Ernest Hemingway)
“The scariest moment is always just before you start.” (Stephen King)
“The first draft of anything is shit.” (Ernest Hemingway)
“The secret of getting ahead is getting started.” (Mark Twain)
“Begin at the beginning,” the King said gravely, “and go on till you come to the end: then stop.” (Lewis Carroll)
“You don’t have to be great to get started, but you have to get started to be great.” (Les Brown)

As we can see, the best authors in the world understand that beginning to write is as simple as it is difficult – one must simply begin.

Choosing the Right Words

Another common theme in writing is the eternal struggle to find just the right words and phrases. Many times writers throw around a number of words, searching for the one that fits like a missing puzzle piece. Rough drafts were made to be reworked and this is where a writer’s vocabulary and talent really come into play. Writing a scene requires the same dexterity and skilled hand as paining a picture, creating a sculpture or any other creative endeavor.

“The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.” (Mark Twain)
“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.” (Jack Kerouac)
“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” (Anton Chekhov)
“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly — they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.” (Aldous Huxley)
“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)
“There is no great writing, only great rewriting.” (Justice Brandeis)

On Inspiration

Creative inspiration is perhaps one of the most ephemeral things in the world. Inspiration can come from anywhere and creativity is, at best, a fickle mistress. This interest in creativity and the creative process has been with man since the earliest times. The ancient Greeks had dozens of Muses dedicated to various forms of the arts and science. The Muses are goddesses representing different arts and sciences in Greek mythology. They are the daughters of Mnemosyne and Zeus.

Kalliope – the muse of epic poetry
Euterpe – the muse of music and lyric poetry
Erato – the muse of lyric/love poetry
Melpomene – the muse of tragedy
Thalia – the muse of comedy

Although established Muses of the past are rarely referred to now, their spirit lives on. Today, the creative process may be seen differently, but the inspiration and frustration remain the same.

“You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.” (Saul Bellow)
“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.” (Scott Adams)
“Inspiration is a guest that does not willingly visit the lazy.” (Pyotr Tchaikovsky)
“Creativity is knowing how to hide your sources” (Albert Einstein)
“Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time.” (Leonard Bernstein)
“Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.” (William Wordsworth)
“Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.” (Ray Bradbury)
“I don’t know where my ideas come from, but I know where they come to. They come to my desk, and if I’m not there, they go away again.” (Philip Pullman)

On the Writing Life

It’s often said that artists are a special breed, and writers are no different. The writing life isn’t for everyone and, for those who feel the calling, taking the journey is sometimes difficult. Writers have discussed their methods, their inspirations and their styles, but here we get a glimpse into what truly drives them to follow the writer’s life.

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.” (Ray Bradbury)
“I know some people might think it odd – unworthy even – for me to have written a cookbook, but I make no apologies. The U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins thought I had demeaned myself by writing poetry for Hallmark Cards, but I am the people’s poet so I write for the people.” (Maya Angelou)
“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.” (Ernest Hemingway)
“I write for the same reason I breathe – because if I didn’t, I would die.” (Isaac Asimov)
“You fail only if you stop writing.” (Ray Bradbury)

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How to Put a Quote in an Essay

Last Updated: November 28, 2022 References

This article was co-authored by Christopher Taylor, PhD and by wikiHow staff writer, Danielle Blinka, MA, MPA . Christopher Taylor is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of English at Austin Community College in Texas. He received his PhD in English Literature and Medieval Studies from the University of Texas at Austin in 2014. There are 11 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. This article has been viewed 2,657,364 times.

Using a direct quote in your essay is a great way to support your ideas with concrete evidence, which you need to support your thesis. To select a good quote , look for a passage that supports your argument and is open to analysis. Then, incorporate that quote into your essay, and make sure you properly cite it based on the style guide you’re using.

Sample Quotes

Incorporating a Short Quote

Step 1 Incorporate short direct quotes into a sentence.

For instance, let's say this is the quote you want to use: "The brown leaves symbolize the death of their relationship, while the green buds suggest new opportunities will soon unfold."
If you just type that sentence into your essay and put quotes around it, your reader will be disoriented. Instead, you could incorporate it into a sentence like this: "The imagery in the story mirrors what's happening in Lia's love life, as 'The brown leaves symbolize the death of their relationship, while the green buds suggest new opportunities will soon unfold.'"

"Critic Alex Li says, 'The frequent references to the color blue are used to suggest that the family is struggling to cope with the loss of their matriarch.'"
"According to McKinney’s research, 'Adults who do yoga at least three times a week have lower blood pressure, better sleeping patterns, and fewer everyday frustrations.'"
"Based on several recent studies, people are more likely to sit on the park benches when they're shaded by trees."

You still need to use quotation marks even if you're only quoting a few words.
If you're in doubt, it's best to be cautious and use quotes.

For example, let’s say you used the quote, “According to McKinney’s research, ‘Adults who do yoga at least three times a week have lower blood pressure, better sleeping patterns, and fewer everyday frustrations.’” Your commentary might read, “This shows that yoga can have a positive impact on people’s health, so incorporating it into the workplace can help improve employee health outcomes. Since yoga makes employees healthier, they’ll likely have reduced insurance costs.”

When you use a paraphrase, you still need to provide commentary that links the paraphrased material back to your thesis and ideas.

Using a Long Quote

Step 1 Introduce a long direct quote, then set it off in a block.

The reader will recognize that the material is a direct quote because it's set off from the rest of the text. That's why you don't need to use quotation marks. However, you will include your citation at the bottom.

Step 2 Write an introductory lead-in to tell the reader what the quote is about.

"In The Things They Carried , the items carried by soldiers in the Vietnam war are used to both characterize them and burden the readers with the weight they are carrying: The things they carried were largely determined by necessity. Among the necessities or near-necessities were P-38 can openers, pocket knives, heat tabs, wristwatches, dog tags, mosquito repellent, chewing gum, candy cigarettes, salt tablets, packets of Kool-Aid, lighters, matches, sewing kits, Military Payment Certificates, C rations, and two or three canteens of water." (O'Brien 2)

Variation: When you're citing two or more paragraphs, you must use block quotes, even if the passage you want to quote is less than four lines long. You should indent the first line of each paragraph an extra quarter inch. Then, use ellipses (…) at the end of one paragraph to transition to the next.

Step 3 Indent the block quote by .5 inches (1.3 cm) from the left margin.

Your block quote will use the same spacing as the rest of your paper, which will likely be double-spacing.

Step 4 Use an ellipsis to omit a word or words from a direct quote.

For example, “According to Li, “Rosa is the first sister to pick a rose because she’s the only one who’s begun to move on after their mother’s death” might become “According to Li, “Rosa is the first sister to pick a rose because she’s … begun to move on after their mother’s death.”
Don’t eliminate words to change the meaning of the original text. For instance, it’s not appropriate to use an ellipsis to change “plants did not grow faster when exposed to poetry” to “plants did … grow faster when exposed to poetry.”

Step 5 Put brackets around words you need to add to a quote for clarification.

For example, let’s say you want to use the quote, “All of them experienced a more relaxed, calmer disposition after doing yoga for 6 months.” This doesn’t tell the reader who you’re talking about. You could use brackets to say, “All of [the teachers in the study] experienced a more relaxed, calmer disposition after doing yoga for 6 months.”
However, if you know the study is talking about teachers, you couldn’t use brackets to say, “All of [society experiences] a more relaxed, calmer disposition after doing yoga for 6 months.”

Step 6 Provide commentary after a quote to explain how it supports your ideas.

If you don't explain your quote well, then it's not helping your ideas. You can't expect the reader to connect the quote back to your thesis for you.

Step 7 Paraphrase the quote to condense it to 1 or 2 sentences, if you can.

For instance, you may prefer to use a long block quote to present a passage from a literary work that demonstrates the author's style. However, let's say you were using a journal article to provide a critic's perspective on an author's work. You may not need to directly quote an entire paragraph word-for-word to get their point across. Instead, use a paraphrase.

Tip: If you’re unsure about a quote, ask yourself, “Can I paraphrase this in more concise language and not lose any support for my argument?” If the answer is yes, a quote is not necessary.

Citing Your Quote

An MLA citation will look like this: (Lopez 24)
For sources with multiple authors, separate their names with the word “and:” (Anderson and Smith 55-56) or (Taylor, Gomez, and Austin 89)
If you use the author’s name in your lead-in to the quote, you just need to provide the year in parentheses: According to Luz Lopez, “the green grass symbolizes a fresh start for Lia (24).”

An APA citation for a direct quote looks like this: (Ronan, 2019, p. 10)
If you’re citing multiple authors, separate their names with the word “and:” (Cruz, Hanks, and Simmons, 2019, p. 85)
If you incorporated the author’s name into your lead-in, you can just give the year and page number: Based on Ronan’s (2019, p. 10) analysis, “coffee breaks improve productivity.”

Step 3 Use the author’s last name, date, and page number for Chicago Style.

For instance, a Chicago Style citation will look like this: (Alexander 2019, 125)
If you’re quoting a source with multiple authors, separate them with the word “and:” (Pattinson, Stewart, and Green 2019, 175)
If you already incorporated the author’s name into your quote, then you can just provide the year and page number: According to Alexander, “the smell of roses increases feelings of happiness” (2019, 125).

Step 4 Prepare a Works Cited or References page.

For MLA, you'd cite an article like this: Lopez, Luz. "A Fresh Blossom: Imagery in 'Her Darkest Sunshine.'" Journal of Stories , vol. 2, no. 5, 2019, p. 15-22. [17] X Trustworthy Source Purdue Online Writing Lab Trusted resource for writing and citation guidelines Go to source
In APA, you'd cite an article like this: Lopez, Luz. (2019). A Fresh Blossom: Imagery in "Her Darkest Sunshine." Journal of Stories , 2(5), 15-22. [18] X Trustworthy Source Purdue Online Writing Lab Trusted resource for writing and citation guidelines Go to source
For Chicago Style, your article citation would look like this: Lopez, Luz. "A Fresh Blossom: Imagery in 'Her Darkest Sunshine.'" Journal of Stories 2 no. 4 (2019): 15-22. [19] X Trustworthy Source Purdue Online Writing Lab Trusted resource for writing and citation guidelines Go to source

Selecting a Quote

Step 1 Select a quote that backs up the argument you’re making.

Tip: Quotes are most effective when the original language of the person or text you’re quoting is worth repeating word-for-word.

Step 2 Make sure the quote is something you can analyze.

If you’re struggling to explain the quote or link it back to your argument, then it’s likely not a good idea to include it in your essay.

Step 3 Avoid using too many direct quotes in your paper.

Paraphrases and summaries work just like a direct quote, except that you don’t need to put quotation marks around them because you’re using your own words to restate ideas. However, you still need to cite the sources you used.

Community Q&A

Always cite your quotes properly. If you don't, it is considered plagiarism. Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0

↑ https://www.ursinus.edu/live/files/1160-integrating-quotespdf
↑ https://lsa.umich.edu/sweetland/undergraduates/writing-guides/how-do-i-incorporate-quotes-.html
↑ https://helpfulprofessor.com/quotes/
↑ https://advice.writing.utoronto.ca/using-sources/quotations/
↑ https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/mla_style/mla_formatting_and_style_guide/mla_formatting_quotations.html
↑ https://guides.libraries.psu.edu/apaquickguide/intext
↑ https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide/citation-guide-2.html
↑ https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/mla_style/mla_formatting_and_style_guide/mla_formatting_and_style_guide.html
↑ https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/apa_style/apa_formatting_and_style_guide/reference_list_articles_in_periodicals.html
↑ https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/chicago_manual_17th_edition/cmos_formatting_and_style_guide/periodicals.html
↑ https://writingcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/quotations/

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30 Best Quotes for Essay Writing

December 10, 2023 by Sandeep

The essay is an independent, educational, and scientific student research. In writing this paper, students master the methods and gain the ability to conduct research. In addition, essay writing helps form the student’s creative thinking, test the skills of collecting, analyzing, and interpreting literature, and formulate conclusions and suggestions.

Successful essay writing depends on strict adherence to the basic requirements. These requirements relate primarily to the scientific level of the work, its content, structure, form of presentation of the material, and design. The teacher may not accept works in violation of state standards and established requirements. Inconsistencies in the design can significantly affect the final evaluation of the work. The student’s compliance with all the requirements for writing and design of the essay instills certain skills in conducting research, which will be useful in creating other types of papers.

All of the above points are important to gain the ability to complete an essay. However, this is not an as simple type of student paper as it may seem at first glance. Students often have difficulty in both essay writing and designing. Fortunately, today everyone can find someone to write a paper online. It is only necessary to pay the set price. The best writers work for an online company DoMyEssay. To get their help, you should visit the site and request, “Please, do an essay for me.” The high quality and reliability of writing services are guaranteed for everyone.

Requirements for Quotes & References in Essay Writing

A compulsory component of any scientific work is a scientific citation. It is essential to cite the source from which the materials or individual results are borrowed or the ideas and conclusions based on which the problems, tasks, issues to which the work is devoted are developed. Such links make it possible to find relevant sources, check the accuracy of citations, obtain the necessary information about these sources.

The use of references in essays is mandatory and is used in the following cases:

When quoting fragments of text, formulas, tables, illustrations;
When paraphrasing, non-verbal reproduction of a fragment of another’s text;
When analyzing the content of other publications in the text;
When referring to other publications where the material to be discussed is more complete.

The absence of a link is a copyright infringement, and an incorrect link is considered a serious error. All sources cited in the list of references must be indicated in the text of the paper.

Importance of Correct Citation in Student Papers

The importance of citation is in the need to demonstrate the breadth of research and interest in the publications of other authors, to confirm own arguments with statements from other sources. Text borrowed from other sources is used for this purpose.

Here are three main functions that quotes perform in essay writing :

Places your work in context, creates dialogue;
Pay tribute to the previous work that formed the basis of your research;
Maintains the authenticity and accuracy of scientific literature.

List of Helpful Quotes You Can Use in Your Essay Writing

Below is a list of 30 quotes you can use in your essay writing:

The simplest example is more convincing than the most eloquent sermon (Lucius Annec Seneca);
It is not people who need rules, but rules need people (S. Dube);
The one who is no longer able to serve as anything serves as a good example (Andre Siegfried);
Take an example from your elders, while they behave approximately (Jerzy Leszczynski);
The need to set a good example for your children robs middle-aged people of all pleasure (William Feder);
Remember: sooner or later, your son will follow your example and not your advice (Pierre Corneille);
An example is stronger than a threat (Pierre Corneille);
Bad examples are stronger than good rules (Joey Locke);
You only have one life. You have to live it as fully as possible (Jojo Moyes);
When life is good, there is no need to argue about it (Ray Bradbury);
There are moments in life that change us once and for all (Jeffrey Deaver);
The reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The person who never reads experiences only one (George Martin);
On our path in life, we will meet everyone who is destined to meet us (Charles Dickens);
What is the sense of life? Serve others and do good (Aristotle);
Those who illuminate the lives of others will not be left without light themselves (James Matthew Barry);
In general, I live without hesitation, so I always have fun (Francis Scott Fitzgerald);
An example is always more powerful than a sermon (Samuel Johnson);
When it comes to budget, everyone wants to go to heaven, but no one wants to die (Jean Chrétien);
Violating our duty, thereby we violate our rights (Jean-Jacques Rousseau);
You cannot talk about the budget without knowing approximately the figures of its income and expenses (Theodor Herzl);
Civilization road paved with tax receipts (Andrew McKenzie);
If you know how to spend less than you get, then you have the Philosopher’s Stone (Benjamin Franklin);
Only two incentives make people work: the thirst for wages and the fear of losing them (Henry Ford);
There is no perfection in the world (Antoine de Saint-Exupery);
You are forever responsible for the one you tamed (Antoine de Saint-Exupery);
It’s good where we are not (Antoine de Saint-Exupery);
All adults were children at first, only a few of them remember this (Antoine de Saint-Exupery);
Live and learn (Lucius Annec Seneca);
The end justifies the means (Ignatius de Loyola);
Truth is in wine (Pliny the Elder).

The Writing Center • University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

What this handout is about

Used effectively, quotations can provide important pieces of evidence and lend fresh voices and perspectives to your narrative. Used ineffectively, however, quotations can clutter your text and interrupt the flow of your argument. This handout will help you decide when and how to quote like a pro.

When should I quote?

Use quotations at strategically selected moments. You have probably been told by teachers to provide as much evidence as possible in support of your thesis. But packing your paper with quotations will not necessarily strengthen your argument. The majority of your paper should still be your original ideas in your own words (after all, it’s your paper). And quotations are only one type of evidence: well-balanced papers may also make use of paraphrases, data, and statistics. The types of evidence you use will depend in part on the conventions of the discipline or audience for which you are writing. For example, papers analyzing literature may rely heavily on direct quotations of the text, while papers in the social sciences may have more paraphrasing, data, and statistics than quotations.

Discussing specific arguments or ideas

Sometimes, in order to have a clear, accurate discussion of the ideas of others, you need to quote those ideas word for word. Suppose you want to challenge the following statement made by John Doe, a well-known historian:

“At the beginning of World War Two, almost all Americans assumed the war would end quickly.”

If it is especially important that you formulate a counterargument to this claim, then you might wish to quote the part of the statement that you find questionable and establish a dialogue between yourself and John Doe:

Historian John Doe has argued that in 1941 “almost all Americans assumed the war would end quickly” (Doe 223). Yet during the first six months of U.S. involvement, the wives and mothers of soldiers often noted in their diaries their fear that the war would drag on for years.

Giving added emphasis to a particularly authoritative source on your topic.

There will be times when you want to highlight the words of a particularly important and authoritative source on your topic. For example, suppose you were writing an essay about the differences between the lives of male and female slaves in the U.S. South. One of your most provocative sources is a narrative written by a former slave, Harriet Jacobs. It would then be appropriate to quote some of Jacobs’s words:

Harriet Jacobs, a former slave from North Carolina, published an autobiographical slave narrative in 1861. She exposed the hardships of both male and female slaves but ultimately concluded that “slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women.”

In this particular example, Jacobs is providing a crucial first-hand perspective on slavery. Thus, her words deserve more exposure than a paraphrase could provide.

Jacobs is quoted in Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987).

Analyzing how others use language.

This scenario is probably most common in literature and linguistics courses, but you might also find yourself writing about the use of language in history and social science classes. If the use of language is your primary topic, then you will obviously need to quote users of that language.

Examples of topics that might require the frequent use of quotations include:

Southern colloquial expressions in William Faulkner’s Light in August

Ms. and the creation of a language of female empowerment

A comparison of three British poets and their use of rhyme

Spicing up your prose.

In order to lend variety to your prose, you may wish to quote a source with particularly vivid language. All quotations, however, must closely relate to your topic and arguments. Do not insert a quotation solely for its literary merits.

One example of a quotation that adds flair:

President Calvin Coolidge’s tendency to fall asleep became legendary. As H. L. Mencken commented in the American Mercury in 1933, “Nero fiddled, but Coolidge only snored.”

How do I set up and follow up a quotation?

Once you’ve carefully selected the quotations that you want to use, your next job is to weave those quotations into your text. The words that precede and follow a quotation are just as important as the quotation itself. You can think of each quote as the filling in a sandwich: it may be tasty on its own, but it’s messy to eat without some bread on either side of it. Your words can serve as the “bread” that helps readers digest each quote easily. Below are four guidelines for setting up and following up quotations.

In illustrating these four steps, we’ll use as our example, Franklin Roosevelt’s famous quotation, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

1. Provide context for each quotation.

Do not rely on quotations to tell your story for you. It is your responsibility to provide your reader with context for the quotation. The context should set the basic scene for when, possibly where, and under what circumstances the quotation was spoken or written. So, in providing context for our above example, you might write:

When Franklin Roosevelt gave his inaugural speech on March 4, 1933, he addressed a nation weakened and demoralized by economic depression.

2. Attribute each quotation to its source.

Tell your reader who is speaking. Here is a good test: try reading your text aloud. Could your reader determine without looking at your paper where your quotations begin? If not, you need to attribute the quote more noticeably.

Avoid getting into the “they said” attribution rut! There are many other ways to attribute quotes besides this construction. Here are a few alternative verbs, usually followed by “that”:

add	remark	exclaim
announce	reply	state
comment	respond	estimate
write	point out	predict
argue	suggest	propose
declare	criticize	proclaim
note	complain	opine
observe	think	note

Different reporting verbs are preferred by different disciplines, so pay special attention to these in your disciplinary reading. If you’re unfamiliar with the meanings of any of these words or others you find in your reading, consult a dictionary before using them.

3. Explain the significance of the quotation.

Once you’ve inserted your quotation, along with its context and attribution, don’t stop! Your reader still needs your assessment of why the quotation holds significance for your paper. Using our Roosevelt example, if you were writing a paper on the first one-hundred days of FDR’s administration, you might follow the quotation by linking it to that topic:

With that message of hope and confidence, the new president set the stage for his next one-hundred days in office and helped restore the faith of the American people in their government.

4. Provide a citation for the quotation.

All quotations, just like all paraphrases, require a formal citation. For more details about particular citation formats, see the UNC Libraries citation tutorial . In general, you should remember one rule of thumb: Place the parenthetical reference or footnote/endnote number after—not within—the closed quotation mark.

Roosevelt declared, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself” (Roosevelt, Public Papers, 11).

Roosevelt declared, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”1

How do I embed a quotation into a sentence?

In general, avoid leaving quotes as sentences unto themselves. Even if you have provided some context for the quote, a quote standing alone can disrupt your flow. Take a look at this example:

Hamlet denies Rosencrantz’s claim that thwarted ambition caused his depression. “I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space” (Hamlet 2.2).

Standing by itself, the quote’s connection to the preceding sentence is unclear. There are several ways to incorporate a quote more smoothly:

Lead into the quote with a colon.

Hamlet denies Rosencrantz’s claim that thwarted ambition caused his depression: “I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space” (Hamlet 2.2).

The colon announces that a quote will follow to provide evidence for the sentence’s claim.

Introduce or conclude the quote by attributing it to the speaker. If your attribution precedes the quote, you will need to use a comma after the verb.

Hamlet denies Rosencrantz’s claim that thwarted ambition caused his depression. He states, “I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space” (Hamlet 2.2).

When faced with a twelve-foot mountain troll, Ron gathers his courage, shouting, “Wingardium Leviosa!” (Rowling, p. 176).

The Pirate King sees an element of regality in their impoverished and dishonest life. “It is, it is a glorious thing/To be a pirate king,” he declares (Pirates of Penzance, 1983).

Interrupt the quote with an attribution to the speaker. Again, you will need to use a comma after the verb, as well as a comma leading into the attribution.

“There is nothing either good or bad,” Hamlet argues, “but thinking makes it so” (Hamlet 2.2).

“And death shall be no more,” Donne writes, “Death thou shalt die” (“Death, Be Not Proud,” l. 14).

Dividing the quote may highlight a particular nuance of the quote’s meaning. In the first example, the division calls attention to the two parts of Hamlet’s claim. The first phrase states that nothing is inherently good or bad; the second phrase suggests that our perspective causes things to become good or bad. In the second example, the isolation of “Death thou shalt die” at the end of the sentence draws a reader’s attention to that phrase in particular. As you decide whether or not you want to break up a quote, you should consider the shift in emphasis that the division might create.

Use the words of the quote grammatically within your own sentence.

When Hamlet tells Rosencrantz that he “could be bounded in a nutshell and count [him]self a king of infinite space” (Hamlet 2.2), he implies that thwarted ambition did not cause his depression.

Ultimately, death holds no power over Donne since in the afterlife, “death shall be no more” (“Death, Be Not Proud,” l. 14).

Note that when you use “that” after the verb that introduces the quote, you no longer need a comma.

The Pirate King argues that “it is, it is a glorious thing/to be a pirate king” (Pirates of Penzance, 1983).

How much should I quote?

As few words as possible. Remember, your paper should primarily contain your own words, so quote only the most pithy and memorable parts of sources. Here are guidelines for selecting quoted material judiciously:

Excerpt fragments.

Sometimes, you should quote short fragments, rather than whole sentences. Suppose you interviewed Jane Doe about her reaction to John F. Kennedy’s assassination. She commented:

“I couldn’t believe it. It was just unreal and so sad. It was just unbelievable. I had never experienced such denial. I don’t know why I felt so strongly. Perhaps it was because JFK was more to me than a president. He represented the hopes of young people everywhere.”

You could quote all of Jane’s comments, but her first three sentences are fairly redundant. You might instead want to quote Jane when she arrives at the ultimate reason for her strong emotions:

Jane Doe grappled with grief and disbelief. She had viewed JFK, not just as a national figurehead, but as someone who “represented the hopes of young people everywhere.”

Excerpt those fragments carefully!

Quoting the words of others carries a big responsibility. Misquoting misrepresents the ideas of others. Here’s a classic example of a misquote:

John Adams has often been quoted as having said: “This would be the best of all possible worlds if there were no religion in it.”

John Adams did, in fact, write the above words. But if you see those words in context, the meaning changes entirely. Here’s the rest of the quotation:

Twenty times, in the course of my late reading, have I been on the point of breaking out, ‘this would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it!!!!’ But in this exclamation, I should have been as fanatical as Bryant or Cleverly. Without religion, this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in public company—I mean hell.

As you can see from this example, context matters!

This example is from Paul F. Boller, Jr. and John George, They Never Said It: A Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes, and Misleading Attributions (Oxford University Press, 1989).

Use block quotations sparingly.

There may be times when you need to quote long passages. However, you should use block quotations only when you fear that omitting any words will destroy the integrity of the passage. If that passage exceeds four lines (some sources say five), then set it off as a block quotation.

Be sure you are handling block quotes correctly in papers for different academic disciplines–check the index of the citation style guide you are using. Here are a few general tips for setting off your block quotations:

Set up a block quotation with your own words followed by a colon.
Indent. You normally indent 4-5 spaces for the start of a paragraph. When setting up a block quotation, indent the entire paragraph once from the left-hand margin.
Single space or double space within the block quotation, depending on the style guidelines of your discipline (MLA, CSE, APA, Chicago, etc.).
Do not use quotation marks at the beginning or end of the block quote—the indentation is what indicates that it’s a quote.
Place parenthetical citation according to your style guide (usually after the period following the last sentence of the quote).
Follow up a block quotation with your own words.

So, using the above example from John Adams, here’s how you might include a block quotation:

After reading several doctrinally rigid tracts, John Adams recalled the zealous ranting of his former teacher, Joseph Cleverly, and minister, Lemuel Bryant. He expressed his ambivalence toward religion in an 1817 letter to Thomas Jefferson:

Adams clearly appreciated religion, even if he often questioned its promotion.

How do I combine quotation marks with other punctuation marks?

It can be confusing when you start combining quotation marks with other punctuation marks. You should consult a style manual for complicated situations, but the following two rules apply to most cases:

Keep periods and commas within quotation marks.

So, for example:

According to Professor Poe, werewolves “represent anxiety about the separation between human and animal,” and werewolf movies often “interrogate those boundaries.”

In the above example, both the comma and period were enclosed in the quotation marks. The main exception to this rule involves the use of internal citations, which always precede the last period of the sentence. For example:

According to Professor Poe, werewolves “represent anxiety about the separation between human and animal,” and werewolf movies often “interrogate those boundaries” (Poe 167).

Note, however, that the period remains inside the quotation marks when your citation style involves superscript footnotes or endnotes. For example:

According to Professor Poe, werewolves “represent anxiety about the separation between human and animal,” and werewolf movies often “interrogate those boundaries.” 2

Place all other punctuation marks (colons, semicolons, exclamation marks, question marks) outside the quotation marks, except when they were part of the original quotation.

Take a look at the following examples:

I couldn’t believe it when my friend passed me a note in the cafe saying the management “started charging $15 per hour for parking”!

The coach yelled, “Run!”

In the first example, the author placed the exclamation point outside the quotation mark because she added it herself to emphasize the outrageous nature of the parking price change. The original note had not included an exclamation mark. In the second example, the exclamation mark remains within the quotation mark because it is indicating the excited tone in which the coach yelled the command. Thus, the exclamation mark is considered to be part of the original quotation.

How do I indicate quotations within quotations?

If you are quoting a passage that contains a quotation, then you use single quotation marks for the internal quotation. Quite rarely, you quote a passage that has a quotation within a quotation. In that rare instance, you would use double quotation marks for the second internal quotation.

Here’s an example of a quotation within a quotation:

In “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” Hans Christian Andersen wrote, “‘But the Emperor has nothing on at all!’ cried a little child.”

Remember to consult your style guide to determine how to properly cite a quote within a quote.

When do I use those three dots ( . . . )?

Whenever you want to leave out material from within a quotation, you need to use an ellipsis, which is a series of three periods, each of which should be preceded and followed by a space. So, an ellipsis in this sentence would look like . . . this. There are a few rules to follow when using ellipses:

Be sure that you don’t fundamentally change the meaning of the quotation by omitting material.

Take a look at the following example:

“The Writing Center is located on the UNC campus and serves the entire UNC community.”

“The Writing Center . . . serves the entire UNC community.”

The reader’s understanding of the Writing Center’s mission to serve the UNC community is not affected by omitting the information about its location.

Do not use ellipses at the beginning or ending of quotations, unless it’s important for the reader to know that the quotation was truncated.

For example, using the above example, you would NOT need an ellipsis in either of these situations:

“The Writing Center is located on the UNC campus . . .”

The Writing Center ” . . . serves the entire UNC community.”

Use punctuation marks in combination with ellipses when removing material from the end of sentences or clauses.

For example, if you take material from the end of a sentence, keep the period in as usual.

“The boys ran to school, forgetting their lunches and books. Even though they were out of breath, they made it on time.”

“The boys ran to school. . . . Even though they were out of breath, they made it on time.”

Likewise, if you excerpt material at the end of clause that ends in a comma, retain the comma.

“The red car came to a screeching halt that was heard by nearby pedestrians, but no one was hurt.”

“The red car came to a screeching halt . . . , but no one was hurt.”

Is it ever okay to insert my own words or change words in a quotation?

Sometimes it is necessary for clarity and flow to alter a word or words within a quotation. You should make such changes rarely. In order to alert your reader to the changes you’ve made, you should always bracket the altered words. Here are a few examples of situations when you might need brackets:

Changing verb tense or pronouns in order to be consistent with the rest of the sentence.

Suppose you were quoting a woman who, when asked about her experiences immigrating to the United States, commented “nobody understood me.” You might write:

Esther Hansen felt that when she came to the United States “nobody understood [her].”

In the above example, you’ve changed “me” to “her” in order to keep the entire passage in third person. However, you could avoid the need for this change by simply rephrasing:

“Nobody understood me,” recalled Danish immigrant Esther Hansen.

Including supplemental information that your reader needs in order to understand the quotation.

For example, if you were quoting someone’s nickname, you might want to let your reader know the full name of that person in brackets.

“The principal of the school told Billy [William Smith] that his contract would be terminated.”

Similarly, if a quotation referenced an event with which the reader might be unfamiliar, you could identify that event in brackets.

“We completely revised our political strategies after the strike [of 1934].”

Indicating the use of nonstandard grammar or spelling.

In rare situations, you may quote from a text that has nonstandard grammar, spelling, or word choice. In such cases, you may want to insert [sic], which means “thus” or “so” in Latin. Using [sic] alerts your reader to the fact that this nonstandard language is not the result of a typo on your part. Always italicize “sic” and enclose it in brackets. There is no need to put a period at the end. Here’s an example of when you might use [sic]:

Twelve-year-old Betsy Smith wrote in her diary, “Father is afraid that he will be guilty of beach [sic] of contract.”

Here [sic] indicates that the original author wrote “beach of contract,” not breach of contract, which is the accepted terminology.

Do not overuse brackets!

For example, it is not necessary to bracket capitalization changes that you make at the beginning of sentences. For example, suppose you were going to use part of this quotation:

“The colors scintillated curiously over a hard carapace, and the beetle’s tiny antennae made gentle waving motions as though saying hello.”

If you wanted to begin a sentence with an excerpt from the middle of this quotation, there would be no need to bracket your capitalization changes.

“The beetle’s tiny antennae made gentle waving motions as though saying hello,” said Dr. Grace Farley, remembering a defining moment on her journey to becoming an entomologist.

Not: “[T]he beetle’s tiny antennae made gentle waving motions as though saying hello,” said Dr. Grace Farley, remembering a defining moment on her journey to becoming an entomologist.

Works consulted

We consulted these works while writing this handout. This is not a comprehensive list of resources on the handout’s topic, and we encourage you to do your own research to find additional publications. Please do not use this list as a model for the format of your own reference list, as it may not match the citation style you are using. For guidance on formatting citations, please see the UNC Libraries citation tutorial . We revise these tips periodically and welcome feedback.

Barzun, Jacques, and Henry F. Graff. 2012. The Modern Researcher , 6th ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning.

Booth, Wayne C., Gregory G. Colomb, Joseph M. Williams, Joseph Bizup, and William T. FitzGerald. 2016. The Craft of Research , 4th ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Gibaldi, Joseph. 2009. MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers , 7th ed. New York: The Modern Language Association of America.

Turabian, Kate. 2018. A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, Dissertations , 9th ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

You may reproduce it for non-commercial use if you use the entire handout and attribute the source: The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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How to Quote | Citing Quotes in APA, MLA & Chicago

How to Quote | Citing Quotes in APA, MLA & Chicago

Published on April 15, 2022 by Shona McCombes and Jack Caulfield. Revised on May 31, 2023.

Quoting means copying a passage of someone else’s words and crediting the source. To quote a source, you must ensure:

The quoted text is enclosed in quotation marks or formatted as a block quote
The original author is correctly cited
The text is identical to the original

The exact format of a quote depends on its length and on which citation style you are using. Quoting and citing correctly is essential to avoid plagiarism which is easy to detect with a good plagiarism checker .

How to cite a quote in apa, mla and chicago, introducing quotes, quotes within quotes, shortening or altering a quote, block quotes, when should i use quotes, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about quoting sources.

Every time you quote, you must cite the source correctly . This looks slightly different depending on the citation style you’re using. Three of the most common styles are APA , MLA , and Chicago .

Citing a quote in APA Style

To cite a direct quote in APA , you must include the author’s last name, the year, and a page number, all separated by commas . If the quote appears on a single page, use “p.”; if it spans a page range, use “pp.”

An APA in-text citation can be parenthetical or narrative. In a parenthetical citation , you place all the information in parentheses after the quote. In a narrative citation , you name the author in your sentence (followed by the year), and place the page number after the quote.

Punctuation marks such as periods and commas are placed after the citation, not within the quotation marks .

Evolution is a gradual process that “can act only by very short and slow steps” (Darwin, 1859, p. 510) .
Darwin (1859) explains that evolution “can act only by very short and slow steps” (p. 510) .

Complete guide to APA

Citing a quote in mla style.

An MLA in-text citation includes only the author’s last name and a page number. As in APA, it can be parenthetical or narrative, and a period (or other punctuation mark) appears after the citation.

Evolution is a gradual process that “can act only by very short and slow steps” (Darwin 510) .
Darwin explains that evolution “can act only by very short and slow steps” (510) .

Complete guide to MLA

Citing a quote in chicago style.

Chicago style uses Chicago footnotes to cite sources. A note, indicated by a superscript number placed directly after the quote, specifies the author, title, and page number—or sometimes fuller information .

Unlike with parenthetical citations, in this style, the period or other punctuation mark should appear within the quotation marks, followed by the footnote number.

, 510.

Complete guide to Chicago style

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Make sure you integrate quotes properly into your text by introducing them in your own words, showing the reader why you’re including the quote and providing any context necessary to understand it. Don’t present quotations as stand-alone sentences.

There are three main strategies you can use to introduce quotes in a grammatically correct way:

Add an introductory sentence
Use an introductory signal phrase
Integrate the quote into your own sentence

The following examples use APA Style citations, but these strategies can be used in all styles.

Introductory sentence

Introduce the quote with a full sentence ending in a colon . Don’t use a colon if the text before the quote isn’t a full sentence.

If you name the author in your sentence, you may use present-tense verbs , such as “states,” “argues,” “explains,” “writes,” or “reports,” to describe the content of the quote.

In Denmark, a recent poll shows that: “A membership referendum held today would be backed by 55 percent of Danish voters” (Levring, 2018, p. 3).
In Denmark, a recent poll shows that support for the EU has grown since the Brexit vote: “A membership referendum held today would be backed by 55 percent of Danish voters” (Levring, 2018, p. 3).
Levring (2018) reports that support for the EU has grown since the Brexit vote: “A membership referendum held today would be backed by 55 percent of Danish voters” (p. 3).

Introductory signal phrase

You can also use a signal phrase that mentions the author or source, but doesn’t form a full sentence. In this case, you follow the phrase with a comma instead of a colon.

According to a recent poll, “A membership referendum held today would be backed by 55 percent of Danish voters” (Levring, 2018, p. 3).
As Levring (2018) explains, “A membership referendum held today would be backed by 55 percent of Danish voters” (p. 3).

Integrated into your own sentence

To quote a phrase that doesn’t form a full sentence, you can also integrate it as part of your sentence, without any extra punctuation .

A recent poll suggests that EU membership “would be backed by 55 percent of Danish voters” in a referendum (Levring, 2018, p. 3).
Levring (2018) reports that EU membership “would be backed by 55 percent of Danish voters” in a referendum (p. 3).

When you quote text that itself contains another quote, this is called a nested quotation or a quote within a quote. It may occur, for example, when quoting dialogue from a novel.

To distinguish this quote from the surrounding quote, you enclose it in single (instead of double) quotation marks (even if this involves changing the punctuation from the original text). Make sure to close both sets of quotation marks at the appropriate moments.

Note that if you only quote the nested quotation itself, and not the surrounding text, you can just use double quotation marks.

Carraway introduces his narrative by quoting his father: “ “ Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, ” he told me, “ just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had ” ” (Fitzgerald 1).
Carraway introduces his narrative by quoting his father: “‘Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had ” (Fitzgerald 1).
Carraway introduces his narrative by quoting his father: “‘Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had’” (Fitzgerald 1).
Carraway begins by quoting his father’s invocation to “remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had” (Fitzgerald 1).

Note: When the quoted text in the source comes from another source, it’s best to just find that original source in order to quote it directly. If you can’t find the original source, you can instead cite it indirectly .

Often, incorporating a quote smoothly into your text requires you to make some changes to the original text. It’s fine to do this, as long as you clearly mark the changes you’ve made to the quote.

Shortening a quote

If some parts of a passage are redundant or irrelevant, you can shorten the quote by removing words, phrases, or sentences and replacing them with an ellipsis (…). Put a space before and after the ellipsis.

Be careful that removing the words doesn’t change the meaning. The ellipsis indicates that some text has been removed, but the shortened quote should still accurately represent the author’s point.

Altering a quote

You can add or replace words in a quote when necessary. This might be because the original text doesn’t fit grammatically with your sentence (e.g., it’s in a different verb tense), or because extra information is needed to clarify the quote’s meaning.

Use brackets to distinguish words that you have added from words that were present in the original text.

The Latin term “ sic ” is used to indicate a (factual or grammatical) mistake in a quotation. It shows the reader that the mistake is from the quoted material, not a typo of your own.

In some cases, it can be useful to italicize part of a quotation to add emphasis, showing the reader that this is the key part to pay attention to. Use the phrase “emphasis added” to show that the italics were not part of the original text.

You usually don’t need to use brackets to indicate minor changes to punctuation or capitalization made to ensure the quote fits the style of your text.

If you quote more than a few lines from a source, you must format it as a block quote . Instead of using quotation marks, you set the quote on a new line and indent it so that it forms a separate block of text.

Block quotes are cited just like regular quotes, except that if the quote ends with a period, the citation appears after the period.

To the end of his days Bilbo could never remember how he found himself outside, without a hat, a walking-stick or any money, or anything that he usually took when he went out; leaving his second breakfast half-finished and quite unwashed-up, pushing his keys into Gandalf’s hands, and running as fast as his furry feet could carry him down the lane, past the great Mill, across The Water, and then on for a mile or more. (16)

Avoid relying too heavily on quotes in academic writing . To integrate a source , it’s often best to paraphrase , which means putting the passage in your own words. This helps you integrate information smoothly and keeps your own voice dominant.

However, there are some situations in which quoting is more appropriate.

When focusing on language

If you want to comment on how the author uses language (for example, in literary analysis ), it’s necessary to quote so that the reader can see the exact passage you are referring to.

When giving evidence

To convince the reader of your argument, interpretation or position on a topic, it’s often helpful to include quotes that support your point. Quotes from primary sources (for example, interview transcripts or historical documents) are especially credible as evidence.

When presenting an author’s position or definition

When you’re referring to secondary sources such as scholarly books and journal articles, try to put others’ ideas in your own words when possible.

But if a passage does a great job at expressing, explaining, or defining something, and it would be very difficult to paraphrase without changing the meaning or losing the weakening the idea’s impact, it’s worth quoting directly.

If you want to know more about ChatGPT, AI tools , citation , and plagiarism , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples.

ChatGPT vs human editor
ChatGPT citations
Is ChatGPT trustworthy?
Using ChatGPT for your studies
What is ChatGPT?
Chicago style
Paraphrasing
Critical thinking

Plagiarism

Types of plagiarism
Self-plagiarism
Avoiding plagiarism
Academic integrity
Consequences of plagiarism
Common knowledge

A quote is an exact copy of someone else’s words, usually enclosed in quotation marks and credited to the original author or speaker.

In academic writing , there are three main situations where quoting is the best choice:

To analyze the author’s language (e.g., in a literary analysis essay )
To give evidence from primary sources
To accurately present a precise definition or argument

Don’t overuse quotes; your own voice should be dominant. If you just want to provide information from a source, it’s usually better to paraphrase or summarize .

Every time you quote a source , you must include a correctly formatted in-text citation . This looks slightly different depending on the citation style .

For example, a direct quote in APA is cited like this: “This is a quote” (Streefkerk, 2020, p. 5).

Every in-text citation should also correspond to a full reference at the end of your paper.

A block quote is a long quote formatted as a separate “block” of text. Instead of using quotation marks , you place the quote on a new line, and indent the entire quote to mark it apart from your own words.

The rules for when to apply block quote formatting depend on the citation style:

APA block quotes are 40 words or longer.
MLA block quotes are more than 4 lines of prose or 3 lines of poetry.
Chicago block quotes are longer than 100 words.

If you’re quoting from a text that paraphrases or summarizes other sources and cites them in parentheses , APA and Chicago both recommend retaining the citations as part of the quote. However, MLA recommends omitting citations within a quote:

APA: Smith states that “the literature on this topic (Jones, 2015; Sill, 2019; Paulson, 2020) shows no clear consensus” (Smith, 2019, p. 4).
MLA: Smith states that “the literature on this topic shows no clear consensus” (Smith, 2019, p. 4).

Footnote or endnote numbers that appear within quoted text should be omitted in all styles.

If you want to cite an indirect source (one you’ve only seen quoted in another source), either locate the original source or use the phrase “as cited in” in your citation.

In scientific subjects, the information itself is more important than how it was expressed, so quoting should generally be kept to a minimum. In the arts and humanities, however, well-chosen quotes are often essential to a good paper.

In social sciences, it varies. If your research is mainly quantitative , you won’t include many quotes, but if it’s more qualitative , you may need to quote from the data you collected .

As a general guideline, quotes should take up no more than 5–10% of your paper. If in doubt, check with your instructor or supervisor how much quoting is appropriate in your field.

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If you want to cite this source, you can copy and paste the citation or click the “Cite this Scribbr article” button to automatically add the citation to our free Citation Generator.

McCombes, S. & Caulfield, J. (2023, May 31). How to Quote | Citing Quotes in APA, MLA & Chicago. Scribbr. Retrieved August 26, 2024, from https://www.scribbr.com/working-with-sources/how-to-quote/

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