Quotes about writing can be inspiring, motivating, and downright helpful in getting your creative juices flowing. Whether you’re a seasoned writer or just starting out, these quotes can provide some insight and guidance on the writing process.
Why do you write? For many people, writing is a form of release—a way to express themselves and their thoughts. For others, writing is a tool, a way to communicate and share information. And for still others, writing is a passion, something they love to do for the sheer joy of it.
Whatever your reason for writing, it’s important to understand why you write. Once you know why you write, you can focus on your writing goals and find the motivation to achieve them.
So why do you write? What is your motivation? Once you know that, you can work on developing the skills you need to achieve your writing goals.
There is no one way to start a story. Some writers prefer to start with action, others with dialogue. But one of the most common ways to start a story is with a prompt.
A prompt is a sentence or paragraph that provides a starting point for a story. It can be a sentence that provides a setting, a character, or a situation. It can be a question that the writer uses to start thinking about a story.
The best prompts are those that are open-ended, that allow the writer to explore different possibilities. They provide a starting point, but allow the writer to create their own story.
Prompts can be a great way to start a story, but they can also be a challenge. It can be difficult to come up with a story that is inspired by a prompt. But with a little creativity, it can be done.
Here are a few prompts to get you started:
- A man walks into a bar and orders a drink.
- A woman wakes up in a strange room and can’t remember how she got there.
- A group of friends go on a camping trip and discover a strange creature in the woods.
76 Quotes About Writing
- “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
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 no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” – Maya Angelou
4. “What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though.” – J.D. Salinger
5. “You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.” – Saul Bellow
6. “You can make anything by writing.” – C.S. Lewis
7. “Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.” – Ray Bradbury
8. “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” – Anais Nin
9. “Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters.” – Neil Gaiman
10. “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
Inspirational Writing Quotes
11. “Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted.” – Jules Renard
12. “There is creative reading as well as creative writing.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
13. “It doesn’t matter how many book ideas you have if you can’t finish writing your book.” – Joe Bunting
14. “What’s writing really about? It’s about trying to take fuller possession of the reality of your life.” – Ted Hughes
15. “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
16. “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.” – Robert Frost
17. “Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.” – James Baldwin
18. “If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.” – Stephen King
19. “Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.” – Benjamin Franklin
20. “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” – Ernest Hemingway
Famous Quotes About Writing
21. “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” – Ernest Hemingway
22. “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” – Joan Didion
23. “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
24. “Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.” – Louis L’Amour
25. “Sometimes the ideas just come to me. Other times I have to sweat and almost bleed to make ideas come. It’s a mysterious process, but I hope I never find out exactly how it works. I like a mystery, as you may have noticed.” – J.K. Rowling
26. “There are some books that refuse to be written. They stand their ground year after year and will not be persuaded. It isn’t because the book is not there and worth being written — it is only because the right form of the story does not present itself. There is only one right form for a story and, if you fail to find that form, the story will not tell itself.” – Mark Twain
27. “The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.” – Albert Camus
28. “Tears are words that need to be written.” – Paulo Coelho
29. “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
30. “Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time.” – Howard Nemerov
Motivational Quotes About Writing
31. “There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know where they’ll take you.” – Beatrix Potter
32. “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
33. “Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.” – Natalie Goldberg
34. “I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.” – James Michener
35. “You can fix anything but a blank page.” – Nora Roberts
36. “Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.” – Leonard Cohen
37. “Anyone who says writing is easy isn’t doing it right.” – Amy Joy
38. “I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.” – Robert Louis Stevenson
39. “You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.” – Ray Bradbury
40. “Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.” – John Steinbeck
Quotes about Writing Awaken Your Creative Muse
41. “History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.” – Winston S. Churchill
42. “The best advice on writing was given to me by my first editor, Michael Korda, of Simon and Schuster, while writing my first book. ‘Finish your first draft and then we’ll talk,’ he said. It took me a long time to realize how good the advice was. Even if you write it wrong, write and finish your first draft. Only then, when you have a flawed whole, do you know what you have to fix.” – Dominick Dunne
43. “I write for the same reason I breathe – because if I didn’t, I would die.” – Isaac Asimov
44. “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
45. “A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”- Thomas Man
46. “The Six Golden Rules of Writing: Read, read, read, and write, write, write.” – Ernest Gaines
47. “Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.” – Norman Mailer
48. “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
49. “If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word.” – Margaret Atwood
50. “A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.” – Richard Bach
Quotes about Writing that will Bring Out The Writer In You
51. “Your writing voice is the deepest possible reflection of who you are. The job of your voice is not to seduce or flatter or make well-shaped sentences. In your voice, your readers should be able to hear the contents of your mind, your heart, your soul.” – Meg Rosoff
52. “The hard part about writing a novel is finishing it.” – Ernest Hemingway
53. “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
54. “The best time to plan a book is while you’re doing the dishes.” – Agatha Christie
55. “The story must strike a nerve in me. My heart should start pounding when I hear the first line in my head. I start trembling at the risk.” – Susan Sontag
56. “In writing, you must kill all your darlings.” – William Faulkner
57. “A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” – Thomas Mann
58. “A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
59. “Write what should not be forgotten.” – Isabel Allende
60. “Indeed, learning to write may be part of learning to read. For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.” – Eudora Welty
Inspiring Quotes About Writing and Writers
61. “Good writing is remembering detail. Most people want to forget. Don’t forget things that were painful or embarrassing or silly. Turn them into a story that tells the truth.” – Paula Danziger
62. “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.” – Stephen King
63. “I am not at all in a humor for writing; I must write on until I am.” – Jane Austen
64. “A writer is working when he’s staring out of the window.” – Burton Rascoe
65. “Be willing to write really badly.” – Jennifer Egan
66. “There’s no better teacher for writing than reading… Get a library card. That’s the best investment.” – Alisa Valdes
67. “The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.” – Anais Nin
68. “Easy reading is damn hard writing.” – Nathaniel Hawthorne
Quotes That Will Encourage Your Writing
69. “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 one book.” – Samuel Johnson
70. “When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.” – Ernest Hemingway
71. “To write well, express yourself like the common people, but think like a wise man.” – Aristotle
72. “So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads.” – Dr. Seuss
73. “We can destroy what we have written, but we cannot unwrite it.” – Anthony Burgess
74. “If a story is not about the hearer, he will not listen. And here I make a rule – a great and interesting story is about everyone or it will not last.” – John Steinbeck
75. “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
76. “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 E. Butler