Writing Quotes That Inspire, Teach and Motivate
Below you'll find some of my absolute favorite writing quotes. Some of you will also find a wealth of understanding, knowledge and inspiration that can get you through even the toughest episodes of writer's block. Although the writing quotations below are definitely slanted towards those who love the written word, I do believe they can be enjoyed by just about anyone who likes to flex their creativity from time to time. If you're a wordsmith why not pick out one or two to put on your wall where you can look at it every now and then. You'll be glad you did.
Inspirational Quotes for Writers
1- My business is to create. ~William Blake
2- What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window. ~Burton Rascoe
3- If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead, either write something worth reading or do something worth writing. ~Ben Franklin
4- Being an author is having angels whisper in your ear – and devils, too. ~Terri Guillemets
5- You pour your heart out into this, you take all this abuse, you take all this crap in grief, all for what? For a measly fortune. ~S.J. Perelman
6- Beneath the rule of men entirely great, the pen is mightier than the sword. ~Edward Bulwer-Lytton
7- We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master. ~Ernest Hemingway
8- All the words you need are to be found in the dictionary. All you have to do is put them in the right order. ~Emma Darcy
9- You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we're doing it. ~Neil Gaiman
10- Every word written is a victory against death. ~Michel Butor
11- For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain and the noise of battle. ~John Cheever
12- Most editors are failed writers – but so are most writers. ~T.S. Eliot
13- Words are the most powerful drug used by mankind. ~Rudyard Kipling
14- That terrible mood of depression of whether it's any good or not is what is known as The Artist's Reward. ~Ernest Hemingway
15- It all starts on the page. ~Steven Spielberg
16- If I fall asleep with a pen in my hand, don't remove it – I might be writing in my dreams. ~Terri Guillemets
17- If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud. ~Emile Zola
Writing Advice Disguised As Writing Quotations
1- Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. ~Jim Jarmusch
2- Stories may well be lies, but they are good lies that say true things, and which can sometimes pay the rent. ~Neil Gaiman
3- You can't say, I won't write today because that excuse will extend into several days, then several months, then… you are not a writer anymore, just someone who dreams about being a writer. ~Dorothy C. Fontana
4- The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense. ~Tom Clancy
5- If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. ~Stephen King
6- At night, when the objective world has slunk back into its cavern and left dreamers to their own, there come inspirations and capabilities impossible at any less magical and quiet hour. No one knows whether or not he is a writer unless he has tried writing at night. ~H.P. Lovecraft
7- Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark. ~Annie Dillard
8- The work never matches the dream of perfection the artist has to start with. ~William Faulkner
9- When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand. ~Raymond Chandler
10- Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and adventures are the shadow truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes and forgotten. ~Neil Gaiman
11- I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter. ~James A. Michener
12- If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor. ~Edgar Rice Burroughs
13- When you take stuff from one writer, its plagiarism. But when you take it from many writers, its research. ~William Mizner
14- The imagination doesn't crop annually like a reliable fruit tree. The writer has to gather whatever's there: sometimes too much, sometimes too little, sometimes nothing at all. And in the years of glut there is always a slatted wooden tray in some cool, dark attic, which the writer nervously visits from time to time; and yes, oh dear, while he's been hard at work downstairs, up in the attic there are puckering skins, warning spots, a sudden brown collapse and the sprouting of snowflakes. What can he do about it? ~Julian Barnes
15- 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
16- There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein. ~Walter Wellesley Smith
17- If you're going to be a writer, the first essential is just to write. Do not wait for an idea. Start writing something and the ideas will come. You have to turn the faucet on before the water starts to flow. ~Louis L'Amour
18- I try to create sympathy for my characters, then turn the monsters loose. ~Stephen King
19- The first chapter sells the book. The last chapter sells the next book. ~Mickey Spillane
20- Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original; whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring two pence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it. ~C.S. Lewis
21- Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule. ~Stephen King
22- The ideas aren't that important. Really they aren't. Everyone's got an idea for a book, a movie, a story, a TV series. ~Neil Gaiman
23- The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightening bug. ~Mark Twain
Funny Writing Quotes
1- As far as I'm concerned, the entire reason for becoming a writer is not having to get up in the morning. ~Neil Gaiman
2- A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the other one. ~Baltasar Gracian
3- I get up in the morning, torture a typewriter until it scrams, then stop. ~Clarence Budington Kelland
4- Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia. ~Edgar Lawrence Doctorow
5- Easy reading is damn hard writing. ~Nathaniel Hawthorne
6- I was kind of excited about going to jail the first time and I learnt some great dialogue. ~Quentin Tarantino
7- Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good. ~Author Unknown
8- Loafing is the most productive part of a writer's life. ~James Norman Hall
9- I try to leave out the parts that people skip. ~Elmore Leonard
10- Writing is a fairly lonely business unless you invite people in to watch you do it, which is often distracting and then have to ask them to leave. ~Marc Lawrence
11- If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster. ~Isaac Asimov
12- All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
Quotations from Writers That Don't Necessarily Have To Do With Writing
1- There's a lot of mystery in the world, a lot of dark, shadowy corners we haven't explored yet. We shouldn't be too smug about dismissing out of hand everything we can't understand. The dark can have teeth man! ~Stephen King
2- Give them pleasure. The same pleasure they have when they wake up from a nightmare. ~Alfred Hitchcock
3- Don't mind criticism. If it's untrue, disregard it; if it's unfair, keep from irritation; if it's ignorant, smile; if it's justified, learn from it. ~Old Chinese Saying
4- I don't know if proud is the right word, but I am somebody who does not, on the whole, have the highest regard for my own stuff in that when I look all I get to see are the flaws. ~Neil Gaiman
5- There is no such thing as fiction. It's either all happened before or will happen in the future. If not on our world, then on another. If not in our reality, then in another. ~Mark Morrow (an as yet unknown writer)
6- Wait until you are hungry to say something, until there is an aching in you to speak. ~Natalie Goldberg
7- Only in men'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
8- Be regular and orderly in your life, that you may be violent and original in your work. ~Clive Barker
9- The only way to avoid being miserable is not to have enough leisure to wonder whether you are happy or not. ~George Bernard Shaw
10- There is no mistake so great as the mistake of not going on. ~William Blake
11- Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. ~Mark Twain
12- One writes out of one thing only… one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from the experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. ~James Baldwin
13- Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep. ~Scott Adams
14- The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies. ~Ray Bradbury
15- I wanted to write about the moment when your addictions no longer hide the truth from you. When your whole life breaks down. That's the moment when you have to somehow choose what your life is going to be about. ~Chuck Palahniuk
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Comments
These are all awesome, thanks for sharing them!
Fantastic Job! thanks for the inspiration.
Thanks for the comments. My friends are always surprised when they see quotes such as these on my wall. They can't believe that writers also need inspiration. I tell them that writers often need it the most.
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