100+ Inspiring Quotes for Writers: Ignite Your Creativity and Passion

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

- Toni Morrison

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

- Jodi Picoult

"I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."

- Michael Jordan

"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

"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

"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

"You can make anything by writing."

- C.S. Lewis

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

- Stephen King

"Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work."

- Stephen King

"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

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

- William Faulkner

"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

"If something inside of you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things."

- Anne Lamott

"The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart."

- Maya Angelou

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

- Louis L'Amour

"The scariest moment is always just before you start."

- Stephen King

"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

"If a story is in you, it has to come out."

- William Faulkner

"Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way."

- Ray Bradbury

"Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart."

- William Wordsworth

"And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good."

- John Steinbeck

"Writing is a calling, not a choice."

- Isabel Allende

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

- Anaïs Nin

"A word after a word after a word is power."

- Margaret Atwood

"My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way."

- Ernest Hemingway

"A writer or any artist can’t expect to be embraced by the people. I’ve done records where it seemed like no one listened to them. You write poetry books that maybe 50 people read. And you just keep doing your work because you have to, because it’s your calling. But it’s beautiful to be embraced by the people. Some people have said to me, ‘Well, don’t you think that kind of success spoils one as an artist? If you’re a punk rocker, you don’t want to have a hit record …’ And I say to them, ‘$@#* you!’ One does their work for the people. And the more people you can touch, the more wonderful it is. You don’t do your work and say, ‘I only want the cool people to read it.’ You want everyone to be transported, or hopefully inspired by it. When I was really young, William Burroughs told me, ‘Build a good name. Keep your name clean. Don’t make compromises. Don’t worry about making a bunch of money or being successful. Be concerned with doing good work. And make the right choices and protect your work. And if you can build a good name, eventually that name will be its own currency.’"

- Patti Smith

"I think all writing is a disease. You can't stop it."

- William Carlos Williams

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

- Jack London

"Writers don’t choose their craft; they need to write in order to face the world."

- Alice Hoffman

"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

"Just know that everyone’s writing is terrible. Until it’s not. No one’s stuff is right immediately. You gotta work it. Refine it. Shape it. Spend time with it. It’s a relationship. Between you and what comes from you. Not easy. Gonna be terrible before it’s not. And that’s okay."

- Ava DuVernay

"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

"There’s nothing to stop a man from writing unless that man stops himself. If a man truly desires to write, then he will. Rejection and ridicule will only strengthen him. And the longer he is held back the stronger he will become, like a mass of rising water against a dam. There is no losing in writing, it will make your toes laugh as you sleep, it will make you stride like a tiger, it will fire the eye and put you face to face with death. You will die a fighter, you will be honored in hell. The luck of the word. Go with it, send it."

- Charles Bukowski

"Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself."

- William Faulkner

"Start before you’re ready."

- Steven Pressfield

"I write one page of masterpiece to 91 pages of $@*#. I try to put the $@*# in the wastebasket."

- Ernest Hemingway

"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

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

- Toni Morrison

"Whatever you’re meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible."

- Doris Lessing

"A writer should have this little voice inside of you saying, ‘Tell the truth. Reveal a few secrets here.’"

- Quentin Tarantino

"I never dreamed about success. I worked for it."

- Estée Lauder

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

- Stephen King

"Step out of the history that is holding you back. Step into the new story you are willing to create."

- Oprah Winfrey

"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

"A year from now you may wish you had started today."

- Karen Lamb

"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

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

- Robert Frost

"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

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

- Margaret Atwood

"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

"Difficulties mastered are opportunities won."

- Winston Churchill

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

- Lady Gaga

"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

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

- C. J. Cherryh

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

- Albert Einstein

"Words are our most inexhaustible source of magic."

- J. K. Rowling

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

- Maya Angelou

"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

"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

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

- Anne Frank

"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

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

- Stephen King

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

- Joseph Joubert

"One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple."

- Jack Kerouac

"Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing."

- Benjamin Franklin

"Half my life is an act of revision."

- John Irving

"I write to discover what I know."

- Flannery O'Connor

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

- Ray Bradbury

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

- Aldous Huxley

"How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live."

- Henry David Thoreau

"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

"Let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences."

- Sylvia Plath

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

- Terry Pratchett

"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

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

- Mike Rich

"If you want to change the world, pick up your pen and write."

- Martin Luther

"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

"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

"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

"Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters."

- Neil Gaiman

"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."

- Stephen King

"There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you."

- Maya Angelou

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

- William Faulkner

"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

"It unfolds as you write it. That’s something I never believed before I wrote a book, but it does."

- Joan Didion

"When you’re stuck, go back to your characters’ motivations."

- David Mamet

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

- Herman Melville

"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

"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

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

- Patricia Fuller

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

- Terry Pratchett

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

- Isaac Asimov

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

- Malcolm X

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

- Erica Jong

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

- William H. Gass

"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

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

- Saul Bellow

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

- Thomas Mann

"Tears are words that need to be written."

- Paulo Coelho

"To survive, you must tell stories."

- Umberto Eco

"Always be a poet, even in prose."

- Charles Baudelaire

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

- John Steinbeck

"As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand."

- Ernest Hemingway

"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

"Writers live twice."

- Natalie Goldberg

"Words are a lens to focus one’s mind."

- Ayn Rand

"Writing is its own reward."

- Henry Miller

"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

"Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Though wise men at their end know dark is right, Because their words had forked no lightning they Do not go gentle into that good night."

- Dylan Thomas

"I’ve always felt that the more personal you get, the more universal the application, rather than the other way around. If you begin to address yourself to the masses like that, then I suppose you could have a hit, but to me the more accurate you get about your situation, then the more accessible it is to other people."

- Leonard Cohen

"Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass."

- Anton Chekhov

"The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity."

- Dorothy Parker

"Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one."

- Salman Rushdie

"If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking."

- Haruki Murakami

"Having spent too many years in show business, the one thing I see that succeeds is persistence. It’s the person who just ain’t gonna go home. I decided early on that I wasn’t going to go home. This is what I’ll be doing until they put me in jail or in a coffin."

- David Mamet

"So often people are working hard at the wrong thing. Working on the right thing is probably more important than working hard."

- Caterina Fake

"I believe that one defines oneself by reinvention. To not be like your parents. To not be like your friends. To be yourself. To cut yourself out of stone."

- Henry Rollins

"I got lucky because I never gave up the search. Are you quitting too soon? Or, are you willing to pursue luck with a vengeance?"

- Jill Konrath

"If you have the attention of an audience, you’re already a leader. And great leaders plan, listen, observe, inspire, and then give direction."

- Brian Clark

"Let’s get to the heart of the matter. The power, the force, the overwhelming urge to own that makes advertising work, comes from the market itself, and not from the copy. Copy cannot create desire for a product. It can only take the hopes, dreams, fears, and desires that already exist in the hearts of millions of people, and focus those already existing desires onto a particular product. This is the copywriter’s task: not to create this mass desire — but to channel and direct it."

- Eugene M. Schwartz

"I don't need an alarm clock. My ideas wake me."

- Ray Bradbury

"Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words."

- C.S. Lewis

"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

"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

"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

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

- Robert Frost

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

- Ray Bradbury

"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

"The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself."

- Albert Camus

"I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions."

- James Michener

"Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it."

- Mary Oliver

"A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world."

- Susan Sontag

"There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know where they'll take you."

- Beatrix Potter

"A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him."

- Dylan Thomas

"No need to force yourself to do something the “right way” if it’s not your right way. Your job is to honor your process."

- Andi Cumbo

"When I write, I give people access to their own emotions."

- Gord Downie

"That's the thing about books, they let you travel without moving your feet."

- Jhumpa Lahiri

"For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word."

- Catherine Drinker Bowen

"When I write an advertisement, I don’t want you to tell me that you find it ‘creative.’ I want you to find it so interesting that you buy the product."

- David Ogilvy

"You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help other people get what they want."

- Zig Ziglar

"If you are both killer and poet, you get rich."

- David Ogilvy

"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

"Don’t take shortcuts. They take too long."

- Sonia Simone

"I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in."

- Robert Louis Stevenson

"My creative muse is wabi-sabi, a practice where inessentials are trimmed away or eliminated. The intersection where wabi (minimal) and sabi (functional) meet is the platform for my creativity: space and quiet solitude, simplicity."

- Laurie Buchanan

"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

"I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter."

- Blaise Pascal

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

- Wally Lamb

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

- Douglas Adams

"The very first thing you must come to realize is that you must become a ‘student of markets.’ Not products. Not techniques. Not copywriting. Not how to buy space or whatever. Now, of course, all of these things are important and you must learn about them, but, the first and the most important thing you must learn is what people want to buy."

- Gary Halbert

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

- Sidney Sheldon

"Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it."

- Flannery O'Connor

"For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that [s]he has come upon the right word."

- Catherine Drinker Bowen

"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

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

- Thomas Jefferson

"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

"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

"A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends."

- Friedrich Nietzsche

"Nothing’s going too far. Whenever I get to the point where I think things are going too far, I know I have to go there."

- Chuck Palahniuk

"Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing."

- Norman Mailer

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

- Dr. Seuss

"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

"Address the people you seek, and them only."

- Claude C. Hopkins

"The secret of all effective advertising is not the creation of new and tricky words and pictures, but one of putting familiar words and pictures into new relationships."

- Leo Burnett

"I think perfection is ugly. Somewhere in the things humans make, I want to see scars, failure, disorder, distortion."

- Yohji Yamamoto

"People will do anything for those who encourage their dreams, justify their failures, allay their fears, confirm their suspicions, and help them throw rocks at their enemies."

- Blair Warren

"I’m not a businessman. I’m a business, man."

- Jay-Z

"I prefer to be on the side of losers, the misunderstood or lonely people rather than writing about the strong and powerful."

- Núria Añó

"Italics provide a wonderful advantage: you see, right away, that the words are in a rush. When something exists at a slant, you can’t help but consider irony."

- Ann Beattie

"Almost anyone can be an author; the business is to collect money and fame from this state of being."

- A. A. Milne

"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

"Most good copywriters fall into two categories. Poets. And killers. Poets see an ad as an end. Killers as a means to an end."

- William Maynard

"Wonder what your customer really wants? Ask. Don’t tell."

- Lisa Stone

"A big reason so many businesses compete on price is because they can’t prove what value they offer, so they’re stuck with the one selling point that’s a breeze to communicate: cheapness."

- Mish Slade

"A business man is no different from any other kind."

- Robert Collier

"Give me books, fruit, French wine, fine weather and a little music."

- John Keats

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

- Groucho Marx