100 Writing Quotes – Best Writing Quotes Of All Time
Looking for the best writing quotes for writers? Here are the 100 best writing quotes to inspire your writing today.
Let’s chat about writing quotes.
In this post I will be sharing with you the 100 best writing quotes of all time.
I’m sure I speak for most writers when I say that as a group we tend to see and understand the intricate power of a word. Words without a doubt have the magical ability to touch us, move us and cut us deep.
Now I know there are thousands of wonderful quotes on writing but here you will find a compilation of the best 100.
All of these, in a different way, somehow hit that sore spot inside my heart and dig right down to the bone, so that I can’t ignore its message or lesson, even I try.
I hope some of these inspirational writing quotes are as valuable to you as they are to me.
WRITING QUOTES | QUOTES ABOUT WRITING
1 – “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
―Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
2 – “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
― Ernest Hemingway
3 – “Tears are words that need to be written.”
― Paulo Coelho
4 – “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”
― Toni Morrison
5 – “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
6 – “If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”
― Stephen King
7 – “Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.”
― William Wordsworth
8 – “If a story is in you, it has got to come out.”
― William Faulkner
9 – “The worst thing you write is better than the best thing you did not write”.
― Unknown
10 – “I write to give myself strength. I write to be characters that I am not. I write to explore all the things I am afraid of.”
― Joss Whedon
WRITING QUOTES | QUOTES ABOUT WRITING
11 – “A professional write is an amateur who didn’t quit”.
― Richard Bach
12 – “But when people say, Did you always want to be a writer? I have to say no! I always was a writer.”
― Ursula Le Guin
13 – “Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.”
― Benjamin Franklin
14 – “Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.”
― Natalie Goldberg
15 – “You only learn to be a better writer by actually writing”.
― Doris Lessing
16 – “If you don’t see the book you want on the shelf, write it.”
― Beverly Cleary
17 – “Being a writer is like having homework every night for the rest of your life.” ―Lawrence Kasdan
18 – “When all else fails, write what your heart tells you. You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.”
― Mark Twain
19 – “Be courageous and try to write in a way that scares you a little.”
― Holley Gerth
20 – “The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”
― Sylvia Plath
WRITING QUOTES | QUOTES ABOUT WRITING
21 – “Writing eases my suffering…writing is my way of reaffirming my own existence.” ―Gao Xingjian
22 – “Good writing is clear thinking made visible.”
― Bill Wheeler
23 – “I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and I look at it, until it begins to shine”.
― Emily Dickinson
24 – “When asked “how do you write?” I invariably answer “One word at a time.” ―Stephen King
25 – “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”
― Stephen King
26 – “You might not write well every day but you can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.”
― Jodi Picoult
27 – “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 Butler
28 – “The writer is by nature a dreamer – a conscious dreamer.”
― Carson McCullers
29 – “You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
― Ray Bradbury
30 – “Write like it matters and it will.”
― Libba Bray
WRITING QUOTES | QUOTES ABOUT WRITING
31 – “Writing, to me is simply thinking through my fingers.”
― Isaac Asimov
32 – “I will write my way into another life.”
― Ann Patchett
33 – “Waiting for inspiration to write is like standing at the airport waiting for a train.” ―Unknown
34 – “As a writer you try to listen to what others aren’t saying…and write about the silence.”
― N.R. Hart
35 – “Don’t forget – no one else sees the world the way you do, so no one else can tell the stories that you have to tell.”
― Charles de Lint
36 – “Be ruthless about protecting writing days i.e. do not cave in to endless requests to have “essential” and “long overdue” meetings on those days”
― J.K. Rowling
37 – “Every writer I know has trouble writing.”
― Joseph Heller
38 – “A villain is just a victim whose story hasn’t been told.”
― Chris Colfer
39 – “If you wait for inspiration to writer, you’re not a writer; you’re a waiter.”
― Dan Poynter
40 – “Writers see the world differently. Every voice we hear, every face we see, every hand we touch could become story fabric.”
― Buffy Andrews
WRITING QUOTES | QUOTES ABOUT WRITING
41 – “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
42 – “You fail only if you stop writing.”
― Ray Bradbury
43 – “To survive, you must tell stories.”
― Umberto Eco
44 – “A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.”
― Susan Sontag
45 – “A writer never has a vacation. For a writer, life consists of either writing or thinking about writing.”
― Eugene Ionesco
46 – “A writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, or because everything she does is golden. A writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway.”
― Junot Diaz
47 – “What doesn’t kill us gives us something new to write about.”
― Julie Wright
48 – “What cannot be said above all must not be silenced but written.”
― Jacques Derrida
49 – “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”
― Anais Nin
50 – “A library is a hospital for the mind.”
― Anonymous
WRITING QUOTES | QUOTES ABOUT WRITING
51 – “Journal writing is a voyage to the interior.”
― Christina Brown
52 – “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
53 – “If I waited for perfection I would never write a word.”
― Margaret Atwood
54 – “Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.”
― Louis L’Amour
55 – “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”
― Robert Frost
56 – “The scariest moment is always just before you start.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
57 – “Fiction is the truth inside the lie.”
― Stephen King
58 – “The first draft of anything is shit.”
― Ernest Hemingway
59 – “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”
― Ernest Hemingway
60 – “You can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
WRITING QUOTES | QUOTES ABOUT WRITING
61 – “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
62 – “If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.”
― Isaac Asimov
63 – “A word after a word after a word is power.”
― Margaret Atwood
64 – “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
65 – “The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.”
― Anaïs Nin
66 – “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
66 – “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
67 – “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.”
― Anaïs Nin
68 – “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
69 – “Write what should not be forgotten.”
― Isabel Allende
70 – “I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.”
― James A. Michener
WRITING QUOTES | QUOTES ABOUT WRITING
71 – “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
72 – “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
73 – “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
74 – “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
75 – “Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write?
Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple “I must,” then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your whole life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse.
Then come close to Nature. Then, as if no one had ever tried before, try to say what you see and feel and love and lose…… Describe your sorrows and desires, the thoughts that pass through your mind and your belief in some kind of beauty – describe all these with heartfelt, silent, humble sincerity and, when you express yourself, use the Things around you, the images from your dreams, and the objects that you remember.
If your everyday life seems poor, don’t blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is not poverty and no poor, indifferent place. And even if you found yourself in some prison, whose walls let in none of the world’s sounds – wouldn’t you still have your childhood, that jewel beyond all price, that treasure house of memories?
Turn your attentions to it. Try to raise up the sunken feelings of this enormous past; your personality will grow stronger, your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes by, far in the distance. – And if out of this turning-within, out of this immersion in your own world, poems come, then you will not think of asking anyone whether they are good or not.
Nor will you try to interest magazines in these works: for you will see them as your dear natural possession, a piece of your life, a voice from it. A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke
76 – “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
77 – “A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity.”
―Franz Kafka
78 – “I write for the same reason I breathe – because if I didn’t, I would die.”
― Isaac Asimov
79 – “Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.”
― Ray Bradbury
80 – “In many cases when a reader puts a story aside because it ‘got boring,’ the boredom arose because the writer grew enchanted with his powers of description and lost sight of his priority, which is to keep the ball rolling.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
WRITING QUOTES | QUOTES ABOUT WRITING
81 – “Advice? I don’t have advice. 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.
Take a deep breath and tell us your deepest, darkest secret, so we can wipe our brow and know that we’re not alone. Write like you have a message from the king. Or don’t. Who knows, maybe you’re one of the lucky ones who doesn’t have to.”
― Alan W. Watts
82 – “Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.”
― Graham Greene, Ways of Escape
83 – “If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!”
― Jackie Collins
84 – “A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?”
― George Orwell, Politics and the English Language
85 – “If you want to change the world, pick up your pen and write.”
― Martin Luther
86 – “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, Truth and Beauty
87 – “If I do not write to empty my mind, I go mad.”
― George Gordon Byron
88 – “Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river.”
― Lisa See, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
89 – “If you show someone something you’ve written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, ‘When you’re ready’.”
― David Mitchell, Black Swan Green
90 – “Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out all the wrong words.”
– Mark Twain
WRITING QUOTES | QUOTES ABOUT WRITING
91 – “Write until it becomes as natural as breathing. Write until not writing makes you anxious.”
―Unknown
92 – “You can make anything by writing.”
― C.S Lewis
93 – “If you wish to be a writer, write.”
― Epictetus
94 – “The only writer to whom you should compare yourself is the writer you were yesterday.”
― David Schlosser
95 – “First drafts don’t have to be perfect. They just have to be written.”
― Unknown
96 – “To write means more than putting pretty words on a page; the act of writing is to share a part of your soul with the world.”
― Unknown
97 – “A true piece of writing is a dangerous thing. It can change your life.”
― Tobias Wolff
98 – “You must write for yourself and not what you think people want to read.”
― Jodi Ellen Malpas
99 – “Write. Write. Write. Don’t worry so much about being published or discovered. Worry about writing what you have to write – what you need to say and how you’re going to say it. The rest will come.”
― Uzodinma Iweala
100 – Take it one word at a time, one day at at time – Frances Vidakovic
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I’m Frances Vidakovic – a mindset & action coach for quietly ambitious women who want to stop overthinking and finally take aligned action. I help women achieve their goals and follow through on what matters, without sacrificing their sanity or soul.