For me writing relives stress and is therapeutic. It also makes me feel fulfilled and joyous. That is for most days! Then there are days when I keep staring at the blank page.
I try to get help by scanning incredible examples and pursuing writing exercises. However sometimes all you need are the words of great authors and thinkers.
If you’re also suffering from writer’s block, then here are few powerful writing quotes for inspiration.
1. “The first draft is you telling yourself the story.” -Terry Pratchett
2. “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” -Toni Morrison
3. “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” -Ernest Hemingway
4. “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” -Anaïs Nin
5. “Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.” -Benjamin Franklin
6. “You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.” -Jodi Picoult
7. “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.” -Robert Frost
8. “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
9. “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
10. “One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.” -Jack Kerouac
11. “A professional writer is an amateur that didn’t quit.” -Richard Bach
12. “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.” -Henry David Thoreau
13. “To defend what you’ve written is a sign that you are alive.” -William Zinsser
14. “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
15. “Write. Rewrite. When not writing or rewriting, read. I know of no shortcuts.” -Larry L. King
16. “You can make anything by writing.” -C.S. Lewis
17. “I write to discover what I know.” -Flannery O’Connor
18. “You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.” -Ray Bradbury
19. “Style means the right word. The rest matters little.” -Jules Renard
20. “The road to hell is paved with adverbs.” -Stephen King
21. “A word after a word after a word is power.” -Margaret Atwood
22. “Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.” -Anne Lamott
23. “After nourishment, shelter, and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.” -Philip Pullman
24. “The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes.” -Andre Gide
25. “Words are a lens to focus one’s mind.” -Ayn Rand
26. “All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.” -F. Scott Fitzgerald
27. “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is … the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.” -Mark Twain
28. “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
29. “Always be a poet, even in prose.” -Charles Baudelaire
30. “There’s no such thing as perfect writing, just like there’s no such thing as perfect despair.” -Haruki Murakami
31. “A book is simply the container of an idea—like a bottle; what is inside the book is what matters.” -Angela Carter
32. “Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.” -Stephen King
33. “Easy reading is damn hard writing.” -Nathaniel Hawthorne
34. “The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.” -Thomas Jefferson
35. “Good writing is rewriting.” -Truman Capote
36. “The secret of good writing is telling the truth.” -Gordon Lish
37. Writing should be the settlement of dew on the leaf.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson
38. “Serious writers write, inspired or not. Over time they discover that routine is a better friend than inspiration.” -Ralph Keyes
39. “You can fix anything but a blank page.” -Nora Roberts
40. “If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.” -Isaac Asimov
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