For me, writing relieves 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. “One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.” -Jack Kerouac
7. “A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” –Thomas Mann
8. “Serious writers write, inspired or not. Over time they discover that routine is a better friend than inspiration.” -Ralph Keyes
9. “You can fix anything but a blank page.” -Nora Roberts
10. “If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.” -Isaac Asimov
11. “If you wait for inspiration to write you’re not a writer, you’re a waiter.” –Dan Poynter
12. “A professional writer is an amateur that didn’t quit.” -Richard Bach
13. “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.” -Henry David Thoreau
14. “The more you leave out, the more you highlight what you leave in.” –Henry Green
15. “You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.” -Jodi Picoult
16. “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.” -Robert Frost
17. “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
18. “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
19. “You can make anything by writing.” -C.S. Lewis
20. “I write to discover what I know.” -Flannery O’Connor
21. “Step into a scene and let it drip from your fingertips.” –M J Bush
22. “Style means the right word. The rest matters little.” -Jules Renard
23. “The road to hell is paved with adverbs.” -Stephen King
24. “A word after a word after a word is power.” -Margaret Atwood
25. “Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.” -Anne Lamott
26. “After nourishment, shelter, and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.” -Philip Pullman
27. “The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes.” -Andre Gide
28. “As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand.” –Ernest Hemingway
29. “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
30. “Always be a poet, even in prose.” -Charles Baudelaire
31. “There’s no such thing as perfect writing, just like there’s no such thing as perfect despair.” -Haruki Murakami
32. “A book is simply the container of an idea—like a bottle; what is inside the book is what matters.” -Angela Carter
33. “Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.” -Stephen King
34. “You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.” -Ray Bradbury
35. “Be courageous and try to write in a way that scares you a little.” –Holley Gerth
36. “Easy reading is damn hard writing.” -Nathaniel Hawthorne
37. “The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.” -Thomas Jefferson
38. “Good writing is rewriting.” -Truman Capote
39. “The secret of good writing is telling the truth.” -Gordon Lish
40. “Writing should be the settlement of dew on the leaf.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson
41. “Words are a lens to focus one’s mind.” -Ayn Rand
42. “A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.” –Friedrich Nietzsche
43. “To defend what you’ve written is a sign that you are alive.” -William Zinsser
44. “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
45. “Write. Rewrite. When not writing or rewriting, read. I know of no shortcuts.” -Larry L. King
46. “All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.” -F. Scott Fitzgerald
47. “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is … the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.” -Mark Twain
48. “A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity.” –Franz Kafka
49. “When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature”. –Ernest Hemingway
50. “A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.” –Susan Sontag
51. “A great writer reveals the truth even when he or she does not wish to.” –Tom Bissell
52. “Writing well means never having to say, “I guess you had to be there.” –Jef Mallett
53. “Even those who write against fame wish for the fame of having written well, and those who read their works desire the fame of having read them.” –Blaise Pascal
54. “Don’t forget— no one else sees the world the way you do, so no one else can tell the stories you have to tell.” –Charles de Lint
55. “You know how writers are… they create themselves as they create their work. Or perhaps they create their work in order to create themselves.” –Orson Scott Card
56. “I always tell audiences when I talk about writing: Writing isn’t something I do; writing is something that I am. I am writing – it’s just an expression of me”. –Wayne Dyer
57. “I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.” –Robert Frost
58. “The writer is by nature a dreamer— a conscious dreamer.” –Carson McCullers
59. “The universe is made of stories, not of atoms. –Muriel Rukeyser
60. “Good writing is like a windowpane”. –George Orwell
61. “The heart and soul of good writing is research; you should write not what you know but what you can find out about”. –Robert J. Sawyer
62. “Easy reading is damn hard writing. But if it’s right, it’s easy. It’s the other way round, too. If it’s slovenly written, then it’s hard to read. It doesn’t give the reader what the careful writer can give the reader”. –Maya Angelou
63. “Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure, only death can stop it”. –Ernest Hemingway
64. “Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.” –E. L. Doctorow
65. “The only writer to whom you should compare yourself is the writer you were yesterday.” –David Schlosser
Do You Care To Share Your Favorite Writing Quote?
Hope you liked these inspirational writing quotes. You can also check out creativity quotes for more motivation.
Also, don’t forget to share your favorite quotes about writing with me in the comments below.
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The universe is made of stories, not atoms. +1 for that quite.
It’s actually been proven (to an extent) that we make sense of the world through a running narrative or story.