quotes to use in creative writing

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Blog • Perfecting your Craft

Posted on Mar 29, 2019

170 Writing Quotes by Famous Authors for Every Occasion

When you're feeling stuck on your novel, an important thing to remember is that we've all been there in the past. That's right — even the J.K Rowling's and Ernest Hemingway's of this world. Which is why it's always a great idea to turn to your most famous peers (and their writing quotes) for inspiration.

Without further ado, here are 170 writing quotes  to guide you through every stage of writing. ( Yes! We've added more since we first published this post! )

The number one piece of advice that most authors have for other authors is to read, read, read. Here’s why.

1. “If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time ( or the tools ) to write. Simple as that.” — Stephen King

2. “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

3. “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

4. “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

5. “I kept always two books in my pocket: one to read, one to write in.” — Robert Louis Stevenson

6. “The Six Golden Rules of Writing: Read, read, read, and write, write, write.” — Ernest Gaines

7. “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

8. “Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river.” ― Lisa See

9. “One sure window into a person’s soul is his reading list.” — Mary B. W. Tabor

The well of inspiration, we’re afraid, often does run dry. Here are the writing quotes to replenish it and, hopefully, remind you that there might be a story idea waiting for you just around the corner of life.

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

11. “Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don’t see any.” — Orson Scott

12. “Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.” — Stephen King

13. “Most writers regard the truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are most economical in its use.” — Mark Twain

14. “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

15. “Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.” — Natalie Goldberg

16. “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

17. “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.” — Henry David Thoreau

18. “Cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can’t fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.” — William S. Burroughs

19. “Write what should not be forgotten.” — Isabel Allende

20. “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

21. “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

22. “As for ‘Write what you know,’ I was regularly told this as a beginner. I think it’s a very good rule and have always obeyed it. I write about imaginary countries, alien societies on other planets, dragons, wizards, the Napa Valley in 22002. I know these things. I know them better than anybody else possibly could, so it’s my duty to testify about them.” — Ursula K. Le Guin

23. “I’m very lucky in that I don’t understand the world yet. If I understood the world, it would be harder for me to write these books.” — Mo Willems

24. “Ideas are cheap. It’s the execution that is all important.” — George R.R. Martin

25. “If you wait for inspiration to write you’re not a writer, you’re a waiter.” — Dan Poynter

Now, finding your "voice" is not as simple as entering a nationally-televised competition on NBC ( nyuk nyuk! ). Yet your voice will define you as a writer, and these famous writers have plenty of tips and writing quotes for you when it comes to finding it.

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26. “To gain your own voice, you have to forget about having it heard.” — Allen Ginsberg

27. “One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.” — Jack Kerouac

28. “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.” —Robert Frost

29. “It is only by writing, not dreaming about it, that we develop our own style.” — P.D. James

30. “Voice is not just the result of a single sentence or paragraph or page. It’s not even the sum total of a whole story. It’s all your work laid out across the table like the bones and fossils of an unidentified carcass.” — Chuck Wendig

31. “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

32. “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

33. “I don’t want just words. If that’s all you have for me, you’d better go.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald

34. “Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.” — Virginia Woolf

35. “Everywhere I go, I’m asked if the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them.” — Flannery O’Connor

36. “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

37. “Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.” — Louis L’Amour

38. “First, find out what your hero wants, then just follow him.” — Ray Bradbury

39. “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” — Ernest Hemingway

40. “Focus more on your desire than on your doubt, and the dream will take care of itself.” — Mark Twain

41. “Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of job: It’s always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.” — Neil Gaiman

42. “It’s none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think you were born that way.” — Ernest Hemingway

43. “It doesn’t matter how many book ideas you have if you can’t finish writing your book.” — Joe Bunting

44. “If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word.” — Margaret Atwood

45. “A blank piece of paper is God's way of telling us how hard it is to be God.” — Sidney Sheldon

46. “I am not at all in a humor for writing; I must write on until I am.” — Jane Austen

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

48. “One thing that helps is to give myself permission to write badly. I tell myself that I’m going to do my five or 10 pages no matter what, and that I can always tear them up the following morning if I want. I’ll have lost nothing — writing and tearing up five pages would leave me no further behind than if I took the day off.” — Lawrence Block

49. “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

50. “You can fix anything but a blank page.” — Nora Roberts

51. “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

52. “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at the typewriter and bleed.” — Ernest Hemingway

Don’t get discouraged if you get this far and you’re thinking that your first draft is rather poor. These writing quotes are reminders that it’s just part of the process.

53. “The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.” — Terry Pratchett

54. “Get through a draft as quickly as possible.” — Joshua Wolf Shenk

55. “I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.” — Douglas Adams

56. “The first draft of everything is shit.” — Ernest Hemingway

57. “There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story.” — Frank Herbert

58. “I would advise any beginning writer to write the first drafts as if no one else will ever read them — without a thought about publication — and only in the last draft to consider how the work will look from the outside.” — Anne Tyler

59. “I just give myself permission to suck. I delete about 90 percent of my first drafts, so it doesn’t really matter much if on a particular day I write beautiful and brilliant prose that will stick in the minds of my readers forever, because there’s a 90 percent chance I’m just going to delete whatever I write anyway. I find this hugely liberating.” — John Green

60. “Be willing to write really badly.” — Jennifer Egan

61. “On first drafts: It is completely raw, the sort of thing I feel free to do with the door shut — it’s the story undressed, standing up in nothing but its socks and undershorts.” — Stephen King

62. “I do not over-intellectualise the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.” — Tom Clancy

63. “Anyone who says writing is easy isn’t doing it right.” — Amy Joy

64. “You fail only if you stop writing.” — Ray Bradbury

65. “If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster.” — Isaac Asimov

66. “Just write every day of your life. Read intensely. Then see what happens. Most of my friends who are put on that diet have very pleasant careers.” — Ray Bradbury

67. “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

68. “I believe myself that a good writer doesn’t really need to be told anything except to keep at it.” — Chinua Achebe

69. “The secret to being a writer is that you have to write. It’s not enough to think about writing or to study literature or plan a future life as an author. You really have to lock yourself away, alone, and get to work.” — Augusten Burroughs

70. “It is by sitting down to write every morning that one becomes a writer.” — Gerald Brenan

71. “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

72. “You just have to go on when it is worst and most helpless — there is only one thing to do with a novel and that is go straight on through to the end of the damn thing.” — Ernest Hemingway

73. “We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.” — Kurt Vonnegut

74. “The nearest I have to a rule is a Post-it on the wall in front of my desk saying ‘Faire et se taire’ from Flaubert. Which I translate for myself as ‘Shut up and get on with it.’” — Helen Simpson

75. “I’ve been writing since I was six. It is a compulsion, so I can’t really say where the desire came from; I’ve always had it. My breakthrough with the first book came through persistence, because a lot of publishers turned it down.” — J.K. Rowling

76. “Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old-fashioned virtues of hard, constant labor, he’ll eventually make some kind of career for himself as a writer.” — Ray Bradbury

77. “It is worth mentioning, for future reference, that the creative power which bubbles so pleasantly in beginning a new book quiets down after a time, and one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in. Then one becomes resigned. Determination not to give in, and the sense of an impending shape keep one at it more than anything.” — Virginia Woolf

78. “A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.” — Richard Bach

“Write drunk, edit sober” might be one of the most famous writing quotes about editing, but we can’t all outdrink Ernest Hemingway. Which is why these other words of wisdom and writing quotes exist!

79. “You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.” ― Jodi Picoult

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80. “When your story is ready for a 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

81. “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

82. “Editing might be a bloody trade, but knives aren’t the exclusive property of butchers. Surgeons use them too.” — Blake Morrison

83. “The main thing I try to do is write as clearly as I can. I rewrite a good deal to make it clear.” — E.B. White

84. “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

85. “Half my life is an act of revision.” — John Irving

86. “I'm all for the scissors. I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.” — Truman Capote

87. “It is perfectly okay to write garbage — as long as you edit brilliantly.” — C. J. Cherryh

88. “I've found the best way to revise your own work is to pretend that somebody else wrote it and then to rip the living shit out of it.” ― Don Roff

89. “Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial 'we'.” — Mark Twain

90. “So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads.” ― Dr. Seuss

91. “Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.” — Henry David Thoreau

92. “I would write a book, or a short story, at least three times — once to understand it, the second time to improve the prose, and a third to compel it to say what it still must say. Somewhere I put it this way: first drafts are for learning what one's fiction wants him to say. Revision works with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to reform it. Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.” — Bernard Malamud

93. “No author dislikes to be edited as much as he dislikes not to be published.” — Russell Lynes

94. “Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now.” — Annie Dillard

95. “No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft.” — H.G. Wells

96. “A writer is a world trapped in a person.” — Victor Hugo

97. “A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” — Thomas Mann

98. “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

99. “As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand.” ― Ernest Hemingway

100. “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

101. “Let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences.” — Sylvia Plath

102. “I go out to my little office, where I’ve got a manuscript, and the last page I was happy with is on top. I read that, and it’s like getting on a taxiway. I’m able to go through and revise it and put myself — click — back into that world.” — Stephen King

103. “I think all writing is a disease. You can’t stop it.” — William Carlos Williams

104. “Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players. I have 10 or so, and that’s a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.” — Gore Vidal

105. “For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.” — Catherine Drinker Bowen

106. “The task of a writer consists of being able to make something out of an idea.” — Thomas Mann

107. “Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.” — T.S. Eliot

108. “Many people hear voices when no one is there. Some of them are called mad and are shut up in rooms where they stare at the walls all day. Others are called writers and they do pretty much the same thing.” — Margaret Chittenden

109. “A writer never has a vacation. For a writer life consists of either writing or thinking about writing.” — Eugene Ionesco

110. “Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.” — Benjamin Franklin

111. “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

112. “Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.” — Gloria Steinem

From cavemen to our modern day in the 21st-century, we have written our joys and sorrows throughout history. What compels us to write? Here’s what some of the most beloved writers we know have to say.

113. “I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.” — Anne Frank

114. “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” — Anais Nin

115. “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” ― Maya Angelou

116. “The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.” — Zadie Smith

117. “The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone’s neurosis.” — William Styron

118. “No matter what people tell you, words and ideas can change the world.” — Robin Williams

119. “Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly — they'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced.” — Aldous Huxley

120. “You can make anything by writing.” — C.S. Lewis

121. “Writers live twice.” —  Natalie Goldberg

122. “History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.” — Winston Churchill

123. “Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.” — Oscar Wilde

124. “You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.” — Ray Bradbury

125. “Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass .” ― Anton Chekhov

126. “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

127. “There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.” — Somerset Maugham

128. “Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.” — Stephen King

129. “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

130. “Find your best time of the day for writing and write. Don’t let anything else interfere. Afterwards it won’t matter to you that the kitchen is a mess.” — Esther Freud

131. “Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. [...] All they do is show you've been to college.” — Kurt Vonnegut

132. “To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.” — Herman Melville

133. “Write drunk, edit sober.” — Ernest Hemingway

134. “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.” — Mark Twain

135. “The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it ­honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.” — Neil Gaiman

136. “Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up.” — Jane Yolen

137. “Style means the right word. The rest matters little.” — Jules Renard

138. “My aim in constructing sentences is to make the sentence utterly easy to understand, writing what I call transparent prose. I’ve failed dreadfully if you have to read a sentence twice to figure out what I meant.” — Ken Follett

139. “And one of [the things you learn as you get older] is, you really need less… My model for this is late Beethoven. He moves so strangely and quite suddenly sometimes from place to place in his music, in the late quartets. He knows where he’s going and he just doesn’t want to waste all that time getting there… One is aware of this as one gets older. You can’t waste time.” — Ursula K. Le Guin

140. “ Part 1. I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English — it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don’t let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in . Part 2. When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don’t mean utterly, but kill most of them – then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart. Part 3. An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice.” — Mark Twain

“You miss 100% of the shots that you never take — Wayne Gretsky,” as Michael Scott once said. In tribute to this sentiment, these writing quotes help show why it’s important not to let failure or rejection get you down.

141. “You can’t let praise or criticism get to you. It’s a weakness to get caught up in either one.” — John Wooden

142. “Rejection slips, or form letters, however tactfully phrased, are lacerations of the soul, if not quite inventions of the devil — but there is no way around them.” — Isaac Asimov

143. “Was I bitter? Absolutely. Hurt? You bet your sweet ass I was hurt. Who doesn’t feel a part of their heart break at rejection. You ask yourself every question you can think of, what, why, how come, and then your sadness turns to anger. That’s my favorite part. It drives me, feeds me, and makes one hell of a story.” — Jennifer Salaiz

144. “I love my rejection slips. They show me I try.” — Sylvia Plath

145. “I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing his talent, he would be wise to develop a thick hide.” — Harper Lee

147. “I used to save all my rejection slips because I told myself, one day I’m going to autograph these and auction them. And then I lost the box.” — James Lee Burke

148. “This manuscript of yours that has just come back from another editor is a precious package. Don’t consider it rejected. Consider that you’ve addressed it ‘to the editor who can appreciate my work’ and it has simply come back stamped ‘Not at this address’. Just keep looking for the right address.” — Barbara Kingsolver

149. “To ward off a feeling of failure, she joked that she could wallpaper her bathroom with rejection slips, which she chose not to see as messages to stop, but rather as tickets to the game.” — Anita Shreve

150. “Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.” — Neil Gaiman

151. “The artist doesn’t have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don’t have the time to read reviews.” — William Faulkner

152. “I think that you have to believe in your destiny; that you will succeed, you will meet a lot of rejection and it is not always a straight path, there will be detours — so enjoy the view.” — Michael York

153. “I went for years not finishing anything. Because, of course, when you finish something you can be judged.” — Erica Jong

154. “I tell writers to keep reading, reading, reading. Read widely and deeply. And I tell them not to give up even after getting rejection letters. And only write what you love.” — Anita Diamant

155. “I could write an entertaining novel about rejection slips, but I fear it would be overly long.” — Louise Brown

156. “I had immediate success in the sense that I sold something right off the bat. I thought it was going to be a piece of cake and it really wasn’t. I have drawers full of — or I did have — drawers full of rejection slips.” — Fred Saberhagen

157. “An absolutely necessary part of a writer’s equipment, almost as necessary as talent, is the ability to stand up under punishment, both the punishment the world hands out and the punishment he inflicts upon himself.” — Irwin Shaw

158. “Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.” — C. S. Lewis

Why does writing matter? If there’s anyone who might know the answer, it’s the people who write — and continue to write, despite adverse circumstances. Here are a few pennies for their thoughts.

159. “Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works.” — Virginia Woolf

160. “If the book is true, it will find an audience that is meant to read it.” — Wally Lamb

161. “A word after a word after a word is power.” — Margaret Atwood

162. “If you want to change the world, pick up your pen and write.” — Martin Luther

163. “The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.” — Albert Camus

164. “Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” — David Foster Wallace

165. “After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.” — Philip Pullman

166. “All stories have to at least try to explain some small portion of the meaning of life.” — Gene Weingarten

167. “If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.” — Peter Handke

168. “The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.” — Tom Clancy

169. “If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don’t listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.” — Lillian Hellman

170. “Don’t take anyone’s writing advice too seriously.” — Lev Grossman

Of course, writing quotes by themselves won't write the book for you — you alone have that power. However, we hope that this post has helped inspire you in some way! If you're looking for more in-depth resources, you can check out these guides:

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• How to Develop a Strong Theme ( read here )
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• How to Become a Better Writer Today ( read here )

2 responses

Brian Welte says:

08/05/2019 – 12:28

Here's a quote I absolutely adore: "The author, in his work, must be like God in the Universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere" [Quote from Gustave Flaubert]

Comments are currently closed.

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50 Inspiring Quotes About Writing From the World’s Greatest Authors

Writing can be hard, but it doesn’t have to be lonely. Learn from the masters of the craft.

By  Glenn Leibowitz   @ GlennLeibowitz

AUG 24, 2017

It’s never been a better time to be a writer  –or aspire to become one.

Platforms like LinkedIn , Medium, and WordPress have placed millions of dollars of technology, and the power that once only belonged to major publishing and media firms, into the hands of millions of writers  – entirely for free.

But technology can take a writer only so far. Writing is an art and a craft that needs to be developed through deliberate practice and study over a long period of time. Fortunately, some of the world’s greatest writers, the ones who mastered the craft and whose names have been passed down to us through time, gifted us not only with their stories. Many of them took time between the creation of their novels and short stories and poems to codify their writing philosophies, their writing strategies, and their writing habits.

Some of these authors recorded their thoughts on writing in books, some as essays, and some as letters to their friends, lovers, and editors.

If you’re ever in need of inspiration or just want a few quick tips to help keep your words flowing onto the screen, just dip into the wisdom of these great authors. Here are 50 nuggets of writing wisdom from some of the greatest authors of all time:

“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

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” –Anaïs Nin

“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

“If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” –Toni Morrison

“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.” –Jack Kerouac, T he Dharma Bums

“Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.” –Benjamin Franklin

“You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.” –Saul Bellow

“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.” –Robert Frost

“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

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.” –Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly – they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.” –Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.” –Henry David Thoreau

“I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.” –Anne Frank

“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” –Thomas Mann, Essays of Three Decades

“Let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences.” –Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“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 Jr., A Man Without a Country

“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

“I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.” –Robert Louis Stevenson

“You can make anything by writing.” –C.S. Lewis

“A word after a word after a word is power.” –Margaret Atwood

“Tears are words that need to be written.” –Paulo Coelho

“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

“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

“To survive, you must tell stories.” –Umberto Eco, The Island of the Day Before

“Always be a poet, even in prose.” –Charles Baudelaire

“If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.” –Isaac Asimov

“The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.” –Albert Camus

“I write to discover what I know.” –Flannery O’Connor

“Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.” — John Steinbeck

“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

“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

“Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.” — Norman Mailer

“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

“As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand.” — Ernest Hemingway

“A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

“The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.” –Thomas Jefferson

“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

“To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.” — Herman Melville

“Words are a lens to focus one’s mind.” — Ayn Rand

“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

“Writing is its own reward.” — Henry Miller

“A blank piece of paper is God’s way of telling us how hard it is to be God.” — Sidney Sheldon

“I went for years not finishing anything. Because, of course, when you finish something you can be judged.” — Erica Jong

“I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.” — Douglas Adams

“Half my life is an act of revision.” — John Irving

“Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it’s the only way you can do anything really good.” — William Faulkner

“Almost anyone can be an author; the business is to collect money and fame from this state of being.” — A. A. Milne

“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

The daily digest for entrepreneurs and business leaders

50+ Inspiring Quotes By Famous Authors About Writing

• June 17, 2024
• Freelancing Tips

Table of Contents Hide

Inspiring quotes by famous authors about writing, inspiring quotes by famous authors about reading, inspiring quotes by famous authors about editing and revising, recommendation.

The hardest part of writing is putting down the first word. It happens to me often. I have unorganized thoughts, and organizing them in my head takes forever.  

Once I can overcome the initial stress, it is plug-and-play.

Many famous authors have put up encouraging words to help younger writers. These quotes by famous authors about writing will be a strong source of inspiration.

#1: “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’Engl

#2: “If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.” –Stephen King

#3: “Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.” – Louis L’Amour

#4: “Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it’s the only way you can do anything really good.” – William Faulkner

#5: “The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.” – Terry Pratchett

#6: “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

#7: “Start before you’re ready.” – Steven Pressfield

#8: “You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page” – Jodi Picoult

#9: “You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”- Jack London

#10: “I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.” – Robert Frost

#11: “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”- Toni Morrison

#12: “Good writing can be defined as having something to say and saying it well. When one has nothing to say, one should remain silent. Silence is always beautiful at such times.”― Edward Abbey

#13: “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

#14: “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

#15: “Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.”–Benjamin Franklin

16: “You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.”–Saul Bellow

#17: “In writing. Don’t use adjectives, which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the thing you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us a thing was “terrible,” describe it so that we’ll be terrified. Don’t say it was “delightful”; make us say “delightful” when we’ve read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers, “Please, will you do my job for me.”― C.S. Lewis

#18: “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”–Robert Frost

#19: “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

#20: “A good story is a dream shared by the author and the reader. Anything that wakes the reader from the dream is a mortal sin.”― Victor J. Bani

#21: “You can make anything by writing.”–C.S. Lewis

#22: “A word after a word after a word is power.”–Margaret Atwood

#23: “Tears are words that need to be written.”–Paulo Coelho

#24: “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

#25: “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

See also: 25 Inspiring Freelance Writing Quotes

#26: “To survive, you must tell stories.”–Umberto Eco, The Island of the Day Before

#27:  “If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.”–Isaac Asimov

#28: “The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.”–Albert Camus

#29: “I write to discover what I know.”–Flannery O’Connor

#30: “Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.”–John Steinbeck

#31: “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

#32: “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

#33: “Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.”–Norman Mailer

#34: “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

#35: “A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.”–Friedrich Nietzsche

#36: “The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.”–Thomas Jefferson

#37: “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

#38: “Writers live twice.” – Natalie Goldberg

#39 “To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.” –Herman Melville

#40: “If it can be cut out, then CUT IT OUT. Everything non-essential that you can eliminate strengthens what’s left.” ― Alexander Mackendrick

See also: “Content is King” | Is this still Truth? | Reasons & Quotes

#41: “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

#42: “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

#43: “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

#44: “Description begins in the writer’s imagination but should finish in the reader’s.” – Stephen King

#45:: “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.” – Robert Frost

#46: “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.” – Stephen King

#47: “Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It’s the one and only thing you have to offer.” – Barbara Kingsolver

See also: 10 Types of Creative Nonfiction Books and Genres and How to Write It

#48 “Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure. Emotion is easily transferred from the writer to the reader.” – Joseph Joubert

#49 “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

#50 “It is perfectly okay to write garbage as long as you edit brilliantly.” – C. J. Cherryh

#51 “Half my life is an act of revision.” – John Irving

#52 “Writing without revising is the literary equivalent of waltzing gaily out of the house in your underwear.” – Patricia Fuller

#53 “Write your first draft with your heart. Rewrite with your head.” – Mike Rich

#54 “So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads.” – Dr. Seuss

#55 “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

#56 “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

#57 “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

We believe you have been greatly inspired by these quotes by famous authors on your writing journey. Start writing away!

• Inc – quotes by famous authors about writing
• Getfreewrite – quotes by famous authors about writing
• 10 Types of Creative Nonfiction Books and Genres and How to Write It
• “Content is King” | Is this still Truth? | Reasons & Quotes
• Proposal Vs Quote: 5 Must-Know Facts | How & When To Use

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75 Inspiring Writing Quotes From The World’s Best & Greatest Writers

• March 7, 2022

Whether you are a beginner writer or have been working on your craft for years already, reading some words of inspiration and wisdom is always helpful. Writing can be both incredibly satisfying and, at the same time, frustrating when you experience writer’s block. However, if you love to write, you know that creative blocks are simply a part of the process. If you are a professional writer, you know how heavy the process can be, but the satisfaction of getting your thoughts and ideas on the page with clarity and impact is such a joy.

In this article, we have included some inspiring, motivating, thoughtful, and creative ideas to overcome that writers block and get your creative juices flowing, from some of the world’s most renowned novelists such as Stephen King and Haruki Murakami to classic writers such as Mark Twain and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Below we have included writing quotes for inspiration and motivation, quotes for students and beginner writers, quotes about bad writing, and quotes about nonfiction writing. So, no matter your niche, you will find something below to get your mind working and your heart ready for the page.

Quotes About Writing

“You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of job: It’s always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.” – Neil Gaiman

“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.” – Somerset Maugham

“We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. So medicine, law, business, engineering… these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love… these are what we stay alive for.” – Walt Whitman

Writing and Reading Quotes

“Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.” – Annie Proulx

“If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time to write. Simple as that.” – Stephen King

“For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.” – Eudora Welty

“The Six Golden Rules of Writing: Read, read, read, and write, write, write.” – Ernest Gaines

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.” – Stephen King

Writing Quotes for Students

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.” – Henry David Thoreau

“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.” – Robert Frost

“It is only by writing, not dreaming about it, that we develop our own style.” – P.D. James

“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

“I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing his talent he would be wise to develop a thick hide.” – Harper Lee

“The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.” – Terry Pratchett

“There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story.” – Frank Herbert

“I just give myself permission to suck. I delete about 90 percent of my first drafts, so it doesn’t really matter much if on a particular day I write beautiful and brilliant prose that will stick in the minds of my readers forever because there’s a 90 percent chance I’m just going to delete whatever I write anyway. I find this hugely liberating.” – John Green

 “I would advise any beginning writer to write the first drafts as if no one else will ever read them — without a thought about publication — and only in the last draft to consider how the work will look from the outside.” – Anne Tyler

“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

“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

“ Start writing, no matter what . The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.” – Louis L’Amour

“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 write every day of your life. Read intensely. Then see what happens. Most of my friends who are put on that diet have very pleasant careers.” – Ray Bradbury

“ Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up.” – Jane Yolen

Writing Motivation Quotes

 “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” – Toni Morrison

 “Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.” – Stephen King

“Most writers regard the truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are most economical in its use.” – Mark Twain

“When I start to write, I don’t have any plan at all. I just wait for the story to come. I don’t choose what kind of story it is or what’s going to happen.” – Haruki Murakami

“I believe myself that a good writer doesn’t really need to be told anything except to keep at it.” – Chinua Achebe

“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

“Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.” – Natalie Goldberg

“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

“If you wait for inspiration to write, you’re not a writer, you’re a waiter.” – Dan Poynter

“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

 “You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page.” – Annie Proulx

“All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. . . . For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. . . . But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you.” – Ira Glass

“[Be] willing to write really badly.” – Jennifer Egan

“Go inside where silence is. Stay there. Let words bubble up.” – Maxime Lagacé

“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.” – Jack Kerouac

“My short stories are like soft shadows I have set out in the world, faint footprints I have left. I remember exactly where I set down each and every one of them and how I felt when I did. Short stories are like guideposts to my heart.” – Haruki Murakami

“Find your best time of the day for writing. Don’t let anything else interfere. Afterward, it won’t matter to you that the kitchen is a mess.” – Esther Freud

“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

“Write while the heat is in you… The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with.” – Henry David Thoreau

“A writer has the duty to be good, not lousy; true, not false; lively, not dull; accurate, not full of error. He should tend to lift people up, not lower them down. Writers do not merely reflect and interpret life, they inform and shape life.” – E.B. White

“A short story I have written long ago would barge into my house in the middle of the night, shake me awake and shout, ‘Hey, this is no time for sleeping! You can’t forget me, and there’s still more to write!’ Impelled by that voice, I would find myself writing a novel. In this sense, too, my short stories and novels connect inside me in a very natural, organic way.” – Haruki Murakami

“You have to dream intentionally. Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally.” – Haruki Murakami

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” – Maya Angelou

“Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don’t see any.” – Orson Scott Card

“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

“I hate writing, I love having written.” – Dorothy Parker

“You can only write regularly if you’re willing to write badly… Accept bad writing as a way of priming the pump, a warm-up exercise that allows you to write well.” – Jennifer Egan

“I’ve always said, ‘I have nothing to say, only to add.’ And it’s with each addition that the writing gets done. The first draft of anything is really just a track.” – Gore Vidal

“I know how fiction matters to me because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it’s not imagination. It’s just a way of watching.” – Haruki Murakami

“Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.” – Stephen King

“Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It’s the one and the only thing you have to offer.” – Barbara Kingsolver

“Nonfiction speaks to the head. Fiction speaks to the heart. Poetry speaks to the soul. It’s the essence of beauty. The essence of pain. It pleases the eye and the ear.” – Ellen Hopkins

“Every writer I know has trouble writing.” – Joseph Heller

“Write at a pace that doesn’t surpass your creative flow. Don’t be hasty; don’t be sloppy. Don’t forfeit impressive writing for an impressive word count. Because eventually it will all have to be edited, and you’ll find that it is harder to make bad writing good than to make good writing better.” – Richelle E. Goodrich

“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

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” – Anais Nin

Quotes About Bad Writing

“Bad writing usually arises from a stubborn refusal to tell stories about what people actually do― to face the fact, let us say, that murderers sometimes help old ladies cross the street.” – Stephen King

“True mysticism should not be confused with incompetence in writing which seeks to mystify where there is no mystery but is really only the necessity to fake to cover lack of knowledge or the inability to state clearly. Mysticism implies a mystery, and there are many mysteries, but incompetence is not one of them, nor is overwritten journalism made literature by the injection of a false epic quality. Remember this too: all bad writers are in love with the epic.” – Ernest Hemingway

“A person who wrote badly did better than a person who does not write at all. A bad writing can be corrected. An empty page remains an empty page.” – Israelmore Ayivor

“If you open a book and find that the writer is trying to impress you with his knowledge of long, unusual words or by his use of foreign phrases, close the book quickly with no sense of loss or of deficiency or of having missed anything; for the author has not learned how to write and perhaps never will, and there is no need for you to offer yourself as a sounding board for his incompetence.” – Burton Rascoe

Quotes About Nonfiction Writing

“Nonfiction means that our stories are as true and accurate as possible. Readers expect – demand – diligence.” – Lee Gutkind

“I think the goal with any writing, but especially narrative nonfiction is to put the blockade of putting your thoughts in this unnatural medium of print and then to try to reach through that and actually convey what’s going on, what you think, and make people laugh and recognize themselves while doing it. Definitely the laughing thing.” – Sloane Crosley

“The challenge for a nonfiction writer is to achieve a poetic precision using the documents of truth but somehow to make people and places spring to life as if the reader was in their presence.” – Simon Schama

“Truth is stranger than nonfiction. And life is too interesting to be left to journalists. People have stories, but journalists have ‘takes,’ and it’s their takes that usually win out when the stories are too complicated or, as happens, not complicated enough.” – Walter Kirn

“I wanted to write about looking at the world, so it’s more about helping people, or persuading people, to see what is around us; both the marvelous and the terrible.” – John Berger

Quotes About Writer’s Block

“Writer’s block is a misnomer and can be compared with turning off a faucet. Like the ability to write, faucets can develop problems when they’re seldom used. You get all this rust in the pipes. When you turn on the faucet, a lot of rust comes out.” – Susan Neville

“Don’t stop because you’ve hit a block. Finish the page, even if you write nothing but your own name. The block will break if you don’t give in to it. Remember, writing is a physical habit as well as whatever you want to think it is—calling, avocation, talent, genius, art.” – Isabelle Holland

“Writer’s block is the biggest myth out there. The idea that you’re just lost for any possible words isn’t some vague illness that strikes people when they’re trying to be creative. You’re not missing the words; you’re missing the research. All ideas are a combination of preexisting ideas. So if you’re “out” of new ideas it’s probably because you don’t have enough old ideas to combine. Go back and read more. Or spend more time mapping out the book. Don’t show up to the keyboard without a plan, and then tell the world you have writer’s block. You’re lying to us, and to yourself.” – David Burkus

“When I have writer’s block, it is because I have not done enough research or I have not thought hard enough about the subject about which I’m writing. That’s a signal for me to go back to the archives or to go back into my thoughts and think through what it is I am supposed to be doing.” – Annette Gordon-Reed

“Do you ever go into the bathroom and sit on the toilet when you don’t need to take a shit? Do you ever just sit there completely empty and sit there and push? No, you don’t. You go eat something, and then you live your life and what happens, happens. It’s the same thing with writing. If I don’t have an idea that I’m not absolutely terrified of losing, then I don’t bother to write.” – Chuck Palahniuk

“You can’t think yourself out of a writing block; you have to write yourself out of a thinking block.” – John Rogers

Hopefully, the long list of writing quotes above will help you take a step back and approach the page with a fresh perspective. Feel free to revisit the page and find a new quote to inspire you if you are ever stuck. On a final note, keep writing. Some days you will flow like a waterfall, and some days, you will not. Still, do not let the ebb and flow of creativity discourage you from pursuing your craft.

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138 Quotes About Writing by the Most Inspiring Authors of All Time

Writing is a craft that has captivated, inspired, and frustrated people throughout history, and some of the greatest minds of all time have left behind words of wisdom on the subject. From novelists to poets, playwrights to essayists, the world’s most inspiring authors have shared their insights in the form of writing quotes, providing guidance and inspiration to aspiring writers everywhere.

In the following you will discover a stunning collection with the best quotes about the art of writing. Whether you’re looking for tips on how to improve your craft, or seeking motivation to keep going in the face of obstacles, these quotes are sure to inspire and guide you on your writing journey.

Writing Process

The writing process can be both exhilarating and challenging, and every writer has their own unique approach to it. The following quotes offer a few ideas on how some great minds in literature approach the craft of writing and may provide guidance to those seeking to improve the process for themselves.

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”

― Ernest Hemingway (about)

“Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

― E.L. Doctorow (about)

“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.”

― Kurt Vonnegut (about)

“It may be observed of good writing, as of good blood, that it is much easier to say what it is composed of than to compose it.”

― Charles Caleb Colton (about)

“Writing is a manual labor of the mind: a job, like laying pipe.”

― John Gregory Dunne (about)

“The scariest moment is always just before you start.”

― Stephen King (about)

“Write drunk, edit sober.”

“Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft.”

― Anne Lamott (about)

“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 (about)

“Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”

― George Orwell (about)

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

― Margaret Atwood (about)

“A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?”

“What is the essence of the art of writing? Part One: Have something to say. Part Two: Say it well.”

― Edward Abbey (about)

“I would advise any beginning writer to write the first drafts as if no one else will ever read them — without a thought about publication — and only in the last draft to consider how the work will look from the outside.”

― Anne Tyler (about)

“Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.”

― David Foster Wallace (about)

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Inspiration & Creativity

Inspiration and creativity are the lifeblood of writing, and without them, the written word would lack the power to move, inspire, and connect with readers. The quotes in this section express the insights of some great authors and may provide inspiration to writers seeking to tap into their own creative potential.

“The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”

― Sylvia Plath (about)

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

― Saul Bellow (about)

“Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don’t see any.”

― Orson Scott Card (about)

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

― John Steinbeck (about)

“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 (about)

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

― Louis L’Amour (about)

“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.”

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

― William Faulkner (about)

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

― Jack London (about)

“Imagination is like a muscle. I found out that the more I wrote, the bigger it got.”

― Philip José Farmer (about)

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

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

― Ray Bradbury (about)

“All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.”

― Jorge Luis Borges (about)

“Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten. Then when you hit puberty they take the crayons away and replace them with dry, uninspiring books on algebra, history, etc. Being suddenly hit years later with the ‘creative bug’ is just a wee voice telling you, ‘I’d like my crayons back, please.”

― Hugh MacLeod (about)

“Write what should not be forgotten.”

― Isabel Allende (about)

Storytelling

At the heart of every great piece of writing lies a compelling story. Whether it’s a novel, a play, or a poem, the power of storytelling is what captures readers’ imaginations and keeps them engaged from start to finish. The following insights provide a glimpse into how some of the greatest storytellers in history approach their craft, and may motivate you to create your own captivating narratives.

“A good story is a dream shared by the author and the reader. Anything that wakes the reader from the dream is a mortal sin.”

― Victor J. Banis (about)

“Stories may well be lies, but they are good lies that say true things, and which can sometimes pay the rent.”

― Neil Gaiman (about)

“I do not over-intellectualise the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.”

― Tom Clancy (about)

“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 (about)

“In many cases when a reader puts a story aside because it ‘got boring,’ the boredom arose because the writer grew enchanted with his powers of description and lost sight of his priority, which is to keep the ball rolling.”

“A well-composed book is a magic carpet on which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter in any other way.”

― Caroline Gordon (about)

“If you want to write a fantasy story with Norse gods, sentient robots, and telepathic dinosaurs, you can do just that. Want to throw in a vampire and a lesbian unicorn while you’re at it? Go ahead. But the endless possibility of the genre is a trap. It’s easy to get distracted by the glittering props available to you and forget what you’re supposed to be doing: telling a good story.”

― Patrick Rothfuss (about)

“All stories are about wolves. There’s escaping from the wolves, fighting the wolves, capturing the wolves, taming the wolves. Being thrown to the wolves, or throwing others to the wolves so the wolves will eat them instead of you. Running with the wolf pack. Turning into a wolf. Best of all, turning into the head wolf. No other decent stories exist.”

“After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.”

― Philip Pullman (about)

“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 (about)

“The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.”

― Voltaire (about)

“All stories have to at least try to explain some small portion of the meaning of life.”

― Gene Weingarten (about)

“Writing controlled fiction is called “plotting.” Buckling your seatbelt and letting the story take over, however… that is called “storytelling.” Storytelling is as natural as breathing; plotting is the literary version of artificial respiration.”

“What monster sleeps in the deep of your story? You need a monster. Without a monster there is no story.”

― Billy Marshall (about)

Revision & Editing

Writing is a process of constant refinement, and every writer knows that revision and editing are crucial steps in the journey from the messy first draft to the brilliant final product. Have a look at these quotes from some accomplished authors on the art of, and need for, revising and editing.

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”

“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.”

“Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. […] All they do is show you’ve been to college.”

“Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.”

― F. Scott Fitzgerald (about)

“The first draft of anything is shit.”

“You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.”

― Jodi Picoult (about)

“I’m writing a first draft and reminding myself that I’m simply shovelling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.”

― Shannon Hale (about)

“On first drafts: It is completely raw, the sort of thing I feel free to do with the door shut — it’s the story undressed, standing up in nothing but its socks and undershorts.”

“You do an awful lot of bad writing in order to do any good writing. Incredibly bad. I think it would be very interesting to make a collection of some of the worst writing by good writers.”

― William S. Burroughs (about)

“I just give myself permission to suck. I delete about 90 percent of my first drafts, so it doesn’t really matter much if on a particular day I write beautiful and brilliant prose that will stick in the minds of my readers forever, because there’s a 90 percent chance I’m just going to delete whatever I write anyway. I find this hugely liberating.”

― John Green (about)

“The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.”

― Terry Pratchett (about)

“In writing, you must kill all your darlings.”

“I’ve found the best way to revise your own work is to pretend that somebody else wrote it and then to rip the living shit out of it.”

― Don Roff (about)

“When your story is ready for a 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.”

“If you show someone something you’ve written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, ‘When you’re ready’.”

― David Mitchell (about)

“A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it.”

“It was like removing layers of crumpled brown paper from an awkwardly shaped parcel, and revealing the attractive present which it contained.”

― Diana Athill (about)

“Editing might be a bloody trade, but knives aren’t the exclusive property of butchers. Surgeons use them too.”

― Blake Morrison (about)

“Making love to me is amazing. Wait, I meant: making love, to me, is amazing. The absence of two little commas nearly transformed me into a sex god.”

― Dark Jar Tin Zoo (about)

“No author dislikes to be edited as much as he dislikes not to be published.”

― Russell Lynes (about)

The Power of Language

Language has the power to move, inspire, and transform us. The quotes in this section reveal how great writers have harnessed the power of language to create works that resonate deeply with readers, and may inspire you to tap into the full potential of your own words.

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

― Anton Chekhov (about)

“Reading your words, what you wrote, how you were lonely sometimes and afraid, but always brave; the way you saw the world, its colors and textures and sounds, I felt–I felt the way you thought, hoped, felt, dreamt.”

― Cassandra Clare (about)

“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.”

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

― Aldous Huxley (about)

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

― James Michener (about)

“Ideas are cheap. It’s the execution that is all important.”

― George R.R. Martin (about)

“Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader – not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.”

― E. L. Doctorow (about)

“You don’t write about the horrors of war. No. You write about a kid’s burnt socks lying in the road.”

― Richard Price (about)

“My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel–it is, before all, to make you see.”

― Joseph Conrad (about)

“In writing. Don’t use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the thing you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us a thing was “terrible,” describe it so that we’ll be terrified. Don’t say it was “delightful”; make us say “delightful” when we’ve read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers, “Please will you do my job for me.”

― C.S. Lewis (about)

Characters & Dialogue

Compelling characters and engaging dialogue are essential elements of any great work of fiction. In this section, you will find quotes from some talented writers on the art of creating memorable characters and crafting realistic dialogue, which may inspire you to breathe life into your own fictional world.

“I write to give myself strength. I write to be the characters that I am not.”

― Joss Whedon (about)

“Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of.”

“First, find out what your hero wants, then just follow him.”

“The characters in my novels are my own unrealised possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented.”

― Milan Kundera (about)

“Don’t resist the urge to burn down the stronghold, kill off the main love interest or otherwise foul up the lives of your characters.”

― Patricia Hamill (about)

“You take people, you put them on a journey, you give them peril, you find out who they really are.”

“Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players. I have 10 or so, and that’s a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.”

― Gore Vidal (about)

“Which of us has not felt that the character we are reading in the printed page is more real than the person standing beside us?”

― Cornelia Funke (about)

“My only conclusion about structure is that nothing works if you don’t have interesting characters and a good story to tell. ”

― Harold Ramis (about)

“Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations.”

“When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.”

“Let’s face it, characters are the bedrock of your fiction. Plot is just a series of actions that happen in a sequence, and without someone to either perpetrate or suffer the consequences of those actions, you have no one for your reader to root for, or wish bad things on.”

― Icy Sedgwick (about)

“Fictional characters are made of words, not flesh; they do not have free will, they do not exercise volition. They are easily born, and as easily killed off.”

― John Banville (about)

“I don’t have ugly ducklings turning into swans in my stories. I have ugly ducklings turning into confident ducks.”

― Maeve Binchy (about)

Writer’s Block

Writer’s block is a common and frustrating obstacle that many writers face at some point in their careers. These quotes express the thoughts of successful writers and may provide inspiration and guidance if you are struggling with your own bouts of creative paralysis.

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

― Sidney Sheldon (about)

“You just have to go on when it is worst and most helpless — there is only one thing to do with a novel and that is go straight on through to the end of the damn thing.”

“Writer’s block is a fancy term made up by whiners so they can have an excuse to drink alcohol.”

― Steve Martin (about)

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

― Isaac Asimov (about)

“Writer’s block is just a symptom of feeling like you have nothing to say, combined with the rather weird idea that you should feel the need to say something.”

“You fail only if you stop writing.”

“The cure for writer’s block is to write.”

“The writer’s block is just a failure of the ego.”

― Norman Mailer (about)

The Writer’s Life

The life of a writer is often romanticized, but it can also be challenging, isolating, and unpredictable. The following quotes on the joys and struggles of writing life may provide comfort and inspiration while you navigate your own creative journey.

“I write for the same reason I breathe – because if I didn’t, I would die.”

“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 (about)

“Rejection slips, or form letters, however tactfully phrased, are lacerations of the soul, if not quite inventions of the devil — but there is no way around them.”

“I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing his talent, he would be wise to develop a thick hide.”

― Harper Lee (about)

“Writing is something you do alone. It’s a profession for introverts who want to tell you a story but don’t want to make eye contact while doing it.”

“A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.”

― Richard Bach (about)

“Many people hear voices when no one is there. Some of them are called mad and are shut up in rooms where they stare at the walls all day. Others are called writers and they do pretty much the same thing.”

― Margaret Chittenden (about)

“Closed in a room, my imagination becomes the universe, and the rest of the world is missing out.”

― Criss Jami (about)

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

“It is worth mentioning, for future reference, that the creative power which bubbles so pleasantly in beginning a new book quiets down after a time, and one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in. Then one becomes resigned. Determination not to give in, and the sense of an impending shape keep one at it more than anything.”

― Virginia Woolf (about)

“Put down everything that comes into your head and then you’re a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff’s worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.”

― Colette (about)

“There is nothing harder to estimate than a writer’s time, nothing harder to keep track of. There are moments—moments of sustained creation—when his time is fairly valuable; and there are hours and hours when a writer’s time isn’t worth the paper he is not writing anything on.”

― E.B. White (about)

“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 (about)

“Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it’s always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.”

“Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.”

“A writer never has a vacation. For a writer life consists of either writing or thinking about writing.”

― Eugène Ionesco (about)

“Work like hell! I had 122 rejection slips before I sold a story.”

“A writer who is a pro can take on almost any assignment, but if he or she doesn’t much care about the subject, I try to dissuade the writer, as in that case the book can be just plain hard labor.”

― Sterling Lord (about)

“A good writer refuses to be socialized. He insists on his own version of things, his own consciousness. And by doing so he draws the reader’s eye from its usual groove into a new way of seeing things.”

― Bill Barich (about)

“You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you’re working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success – but only if you persist.”

Writing & Reading

Writing and reading are two sides of the same coin, with each shaping and influencing the other. The quotes in this section provide some thoughts on the interplay between these two essential elements of literature, and may provide inspiration to writers and readers alike.

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

― Toni Morrison (about)

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

“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.”

“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 (about)

“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”

― Robert Frost (about)

“Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river.”

― Lisa See (about)

“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 (about)

Discipline & Routine

Discipline and routine are key components of a successful writing practice, helping authors to stay focused, motivated, and productive. These quotes offer some insights on the ability to stay on track and may guide and inspire you to establish your own writing habits.

“A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.”

― Anthony Trollope (about)

“First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won’t. Habit is persistence in practice.”

― Octavia Butler (about)

“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 (about)

“Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine coal? They do not. They simply dig.”

― Cheryl Strayed (about)

“One thing that helps is to give myself permission to write badly. I tell myself that I’m going to do my five or 10 pages no matter what, and that I can always tear them up the following morning if I want. I’ll have lost nothing — writing and tearing up five pages would leave me no further behind than if I took the day off.”

― Lawrence Block (about)

“It is by sitting down to write every morning that one becomes a writer.”

― Gerald Brenan (about)

“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.”

“The secret to being a writer is that you have to write. It’s not enough to think about writing or to study literature or plan a future life as an author. You really have to lock yourself away, alone, and get to work.”

― Augusten Burroughs (about)

“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 (about)

“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 (about)

“Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up.”

― Jane Yolen (about)

Funny & Cheerful

While writing can be a serious and challenging pursuit, it can also be infused with humor and joy. These lighthearted and witty quotes can provide a chuckle or two to writers in need of a little levity.

“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”

― Douglas Adams (about)

“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”

― W. Somerset Maugham (about)

“When writing a novel, that’s pretty much entirely what life turns into: ‘House burned down. Car stolen. Cat exploded. Did 1500 easy words, so all in all it was a pretty good day.”

“Everywhere I go, I’m asked if the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them.”

― Flannery O’Connor (about)

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55 Motivational Writing Quotes from Famous Authors

Sometimes, the hardest part of writing is simply getting started. Whether you’re taking your first dip in the storytelling pool, or you’re opening a fresh, blank document after finishing your last project, that empty page can be a little daunting.

So, to help combat those moments of doubt, here are some quotes from professional authors and artists who have been right where you are now, and who know exactly how you feel.

First, you just have to start.

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

-  Louis L’Amour

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

-  William Faulkner

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

-  Terry Pratchett

4. "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

5. "Start before you’re ready."

-  Steven Pressfield

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

-  Jodi Picoult

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

-  Jack London

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

-  Robert Frost

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

-  Toni Morrison

10. "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

11. "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

Then, keep going!

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

- Ray Bradbury

13. "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

14. "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

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

-  Herman Melville

16. "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

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

-  Stephen King

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

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

- Stephen King

20. "Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It’s the one and only thing you have to offer."

- Barbara Kingsolver

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

-  Joseph Joubert

Editing is vital.

22. "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

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

- Thomas Jefferson

24. "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." 

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

-  C. J. Cherryh

26. "Half my life is an act of revision."

-  John Irving

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

-  Patricia Fuller

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

-  Mike Rich

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

-  Dr. Seuss

30. "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

31. "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

32. "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." 

Don’t lose your sense of humor.

33. "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

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

- Terry Pratchett

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

-  Groucho Marx

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

- Douglas Adams

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

- Isaac Asimov

Believe in yourself.

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

-  Malcolm X

39. "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

40. "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

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

-  Wally Lamb

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

-  Erica Jong

43. "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

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

-  Margaret Atwood

45. "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

46. "Difficulties mastered are opportunities won."

-  Winston Churchill

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

-  Lady Gaga

Remember, being a writer is awesome.

48. "You can make anything by writing."

-  C.S. Lewis

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

-  William H. Gass

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

-  Albert Einstein

51. "Words are our most inexhaustible source of magic."

-  J. K. Rowling

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

- Maya Angelou

53. "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

54. "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

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

-  Anne Frank

Now that you've been inspired, the next step is writing consistently! Writers who use our Freewrite distraction-free writing tools have seen their word counts double.  Could be a Freewrite be right for you!?

Learn more about the "Draft First, Edit Later" Freewrite philosophy that drives prolific output. And, check out the Freewrite Alpha for an on-the-go writing partner.

Claire Wilkins is a freelance copywriter and editor from New Zealand. After a career in financial services spanning almost three decades, Claire left the corporate world behind to start Unmistakable - her writing and editing business. She creates website copy, blogs, and newsletters for creative agencies and small businesses, and specializes in polishing existing content until it shines. In her spare time, Claire enjoys cloud-spotting, singing in the car and editing video.

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Writing Quotes: 101 Quotes for Writers to Inspire You

Need a little motivation to write? These 101 Quotes for Writers from best selling authors are sure to inspire you!

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Today I wanted to share a great round-up of my favorite writing quotes for writers, because sometimes it can be just that little bit of motivational inspiration you need to keep going.

An encouraging word from a published author is always reassurance that the madness of sitting at your laptop typing words for hours is worth the sacrifice!

We can also learn a lot about how to write from these famous author quotes included in this list of quotes about writing! Many of these quotes come from well known authors who share their best tips, advice, and secrets to learn all about writing.

While these quotes are no substitute for taking an online writing class, you’ll definitely find some inspiration here!

From tips for staying motivated to inspiring ideas for how to develop great characters in your writing, you are sure to find a lot of great writing advice to be found in these words of wisdom from successful authors!

Here are 101 Writing Quotes for Writers

“Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.” – Anne Lamott

“Words are a lens to focus one’s mind.” – Ayn Rand

“Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.” – W.H. Auden

“There are reasons people seek escape in books, and one of those reasons is that the boundary of what can happen is beyond what we do – or would want to see in real life.” – James Patterson

“All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald

“The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words.” –  William H. Gass

“Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them. There’s many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.” – Flannery O’Connor

Writing Advice Quotes: Tips to Write Better from Writers

“Always be a poet, even in prose.” – Charles Baudelaire

“There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story.” – Frank Herbert

“I almost always urge people to write in the first person. … Writing is an act of ego and you might as well admit it.” – William Zinsser

“First, find out what your hero wants, then just follow him!” –  Ray Bradbury

“There is only one plot — things are not what they seem.” – Jim Thompson

“Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.” – Stephen King

“You don’t write about the horrors of war. No. You write about a kid’s burnt socks lying in the road.” – Richard Price

“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.” – Robert Frost

“You always get more respect when you don’t have a happy ending.” – Julia Quinn

“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” – Anton Chekhov

“The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.” – Thomas Jefferson

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” – Maya Angelou

“The secret of good writing is telling the truth.” – Gordon Lish

“Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up.” – Jane Yolen

“So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads.” –  Dr. Seuss

Quotes About Creativity and Finding Inspiration as a Writer

“There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.” – Willa Cather

“Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.” – Ray Bradbury

“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

“I start with a question. Then try to answer it.” – Mary Lee Settle

“If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” – Toni Morrison

“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

Hobbes: Do you have an idea for your story yet? Calvin: No, I’m waiting for inspiration. You can’t just turn on creativity like a faucet. You have to be in the right mood. Hobbes: What mood is that? Calvin: Last-minute panic. – Bill Watterson

“Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.” –  William Wadsworth

“Love is the only energy I’ve ever used as a writer. I’ve never written out of anger, although anger has informed love.” – Athol Fugard

“It’s none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think you were born that way.” – Ernest Hemingway

“Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players. … I have 10 or so, and that’s a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.” – Gore Vidal

“Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.” – Oscar Wilde

“Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don’t see any.” – Orson Scott Card

“If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads.” – Ray Bradbury

“Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.” – Willa Cather

Quotes On Writing for Children

“Let children read whatever they want and then talk about it with them. If parents and kids can talk together, we won’t have as much censorship because we won’t have as much fear.” – Judy Blume

“I don’t believe that there’s a demarcation. ‘Oh, you mustn’t tell them that. You mustn’t tell them that.’ You tell them anything you want. Just tell them if it’s true. If it’s true, you tell them.” – Maurice Sendak

“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

“It is the writer who might catch the imagination of young people, and plant a seed that will flower and come to fruition.” – Isaac Asimov

“Many adults feel that every children’s book has to teach them something…. My theory is a children’s book… can be just for fun.” – R.L. Stine

“In this modern world where activity is stressed almost to the point of mania, quietness as a childhood need is too often overlooked. Yet a child’s need for quietness is the same today as it has always been—it may even be greater—for quietness is an essential part of all awareness. In quiet times and sleepy times a child can dwell in thoughts of his own, and in songs and stories of his own.” – Margaret Wise Brown

“I know what I liked as a child, and I don’t do any book that I, as a child, wouldn’t have liked.” – H. A. Rey

“I’m very lucky to write for children, because I don’t have to deal with popular culture. I can just deal with core fundamental issues: jealousy, love, hatred, sadness, joy, wanting to drive a bus.” – Mo Willems

“I’ve always been into ‘fast-paced, don’t bore ’em, keep it moving along, stick with the story.’ You know: tell a story the way I want to hear a story. I find it more rewarding to write for kids, but I also find it a little easier, because you can just let loose a little bit more in terms of fantasy and stuff.” – James Patterson

Quotes from Writers About Reading and Books

You’ll probably notice a common theme about all of these next quotes from writers – if you wish to write a book, you better get reading! Here are some of our favorite quotes about reading and books from a variety of authors.

“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

“If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.” – Stephen King

“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

“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

“I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.” – Robert Louis Stevenson

“One sure window into a person’s soul is his reading list.” – Mary B. W. Tabor

“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

Motivational Quotes for Writers

“The most important thing in life is to stop saying ‘I wish’ and start saying ‘I will.’ Consider nothing impossible, then treat possibilities as probabilities.” – Charles Dickens

“Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.” – Louis L’Amour

“This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It’s that easy, and that hard.” – Neil Gaiman

“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

“That’s what fiction is for. It’s for getting at the truth when the truth isn’t sufficient for the truth.” – Tim O’Brien

“You can make anything by writing.” – C.S. Lewis

“You can fix anything but a blank page.” – Nora Roberts

“Keep a small can of WD-40 on your desk—away from any open flames—to remind yourself that if you don’t write daily, you will get rusty.” – George Singleton

“If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor.” –  Edgar Rice Burroughs

“The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it ­honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.” –  Neil Gaiman

Writing Quotes About Not Giving Up

These writing quotes about not giving up are a good thing to remember when you start submitting your manuscript to publishers ! It’s easy to want to give up, but it is worth the trials and tribulations to keep working at becoming a successful published author.

“Focus more on your desire than on your doubt, and the dream will take care of itself.” – Mark Twain

“If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.” – Isaac Asimov

“A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.” – Richard Bach

“What seems to us as bitter trials are often blessings in disguise.” – Oscar Wilde

“The hard part about writing a novel is finishing it.” – Ernest Hemingway

“Serious writers write, inspired or not. Over time they discover that routine is a better friend than inspiration.” – Ralph Keyes

Writing Quotes About Editing and Revising

“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

“Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.”  – F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.”  – Stephen King

“Half my life is an act of revision.” –  John Irving

“Not a wasted word. This has been a main point to my literary thinking all my life.” – Hunter S. Thompson

“Good writing is rewriting.” – Truman Capote

“Rejection slips, or form letters, however tactfully phrased, are lacerations of the soul, if not quite inventions of the devil—but there is no way around them.” –  Isaac Asimov

“It is perfectly okay to write garbage—as long as you edit brilliantly.” – C. J. Cherryh

“Most editors are failed writers – but so are most writers.” – T.S. Eliot

“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

More Great Quotes for Writers

“Writing is something you do alone. Its a profession for introverts who want to tell you a story but don’t want to make eye contact while doing it.” – John Green

“I write for the same reason I breathe – because if I didn’t, I would die.” – Isaac Asimov

“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

“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

“A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.” – Lorrie Moore

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” – Anaïs Nin

“The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.” – Eleanor Roosevelt

“A person who can write a long letter with ease, cannot write ill.” – Jane Austen

“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

“Some things are hard to write about. After something happens to you, you go to write it down, and either you over dramatize it, or underplay it, exaggerate the wrong parts or ignore the important ones. At any rate, you never write it quite the way you want to.” – Sylvia Plath

“Stop aspiring and start writing. If you’re writing, you’re a writer. Write like you’re a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there’s no chance for a pardon. Write like you’re clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last breath, and you’ve got just one last thing to say, like you’re a bird flying over us and you can see everything, and please, for God’s sake, tell us something that will save us from ourselves.” – Alan W. Watts

“I don’t think of literature as an end in itself. It’s just a way of communicating something.” –   Isabel Allende

“I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.” – Blaise Pascal

“A writer can do nothing for men more necessary, satisfying, than just simply to reveal to them the infinite possibilities of their own souls.” – Walt Whitman

“Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.” – Benjamin Franklin

“All that I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say, is that I love the world.” – E.B. White

“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

“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.” – Ernest Hemingway

“There is no such thing as fantasy unrelated to reality.” – Maurice Sendak

“A blank piece of paper is God’s way of telling us how hard it to be God.” – Sidney Sheldon

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

“I’m very lucky in that I don’t understand the world yet. If I understood the world, it would be harder for me to write these books.” — Mo Willems

“I don’t care if a reader hates one of my stories, just as long as he finishes the book.” – Roald Dahl

What are your favorite writing quotes?

After reading these writing quotes, do you have a favorite? Which ones inspire you to start writing? Are there any quotes that offer writing tips you find useful? Are there any writing quotes you like that we may not have included on this list?

Your thoughts, comments, suggestions and ideas are always welcome in the comments section below!

Chelle Stein wrote her first embarrassingly bad novel at the age of 14 and hasn't stopped writing since. As the founder of ThinkWritten, she enjoys encouraging writers and creatives of all types.

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115 Inspirational Writing Quotes by Famous Authors

Writing can change lives. Many authors have found peace in writing and have been quoted conveying the magic they have found in writing. We wanted to share some of the most famous writing quotes with you. Thank you to Goodreads for the quotes.

“I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.” ― James Michener

“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.” ― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences” ― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.” ― Kurt Vonnegut, If This Isn’t Nice, What Is?: Advice for the Young

“I haven’t any right to criticize books, and I don’t do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.” ― Mark Twain

“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, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words.” ― William H. Gass, A Temple of Texts

“History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.” ― Winston S. Churchill

“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, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Make up a story… For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don’t tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief’s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear’s caul.” ― Toni Morrison, The Nobel Lecture In Literature, 1993

“A well-composed book is a magic carpet on which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter in any other way.” ― Caroline Gordon

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.” ― Stephen King

“Tears are words that need to be written.” ― Paulo Coelho

“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.” ― Robert Frost

“Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.” ― John Steinbeck

“Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.” ― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” ― Ernest Hemingway

“A word after a word after a word is power.” ― Margaret Atwood

“If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.” ― Stephen King

“Fiction is the truth inside the lie.” ― Stephen King

“”Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day , and on the good writing days nothing else matters.”” ― Neil Gaiman

“A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.” ― G.K. Chesterton, Heretics

“You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.” ― Saul Bellow

“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

“The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.” ― Albert Camus

“So what? All writers are lunatics!” ― Cornelia Funke, Inkspell

“Stories may well be lies, but they are good lies that say true things, and which can sometimes pay the rent.” ― Neil Gaiman

“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, A Room of One’s Own

“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly — they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story.” ― Frank Herbert

“I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.” ― Franz Kafka

“The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.” ― Anais Nin

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” ― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

“A short story is a different thing altogether – a short story is like a quick kiss in the dark from a stranger.” ― Stephen King, Skeleton Crew

“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.” ― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt

“You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.” ― Jack London

“Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.” ― Louis L’Amour

“A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.” ― Lorrie Moore

“I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.” ― Anne Frank

“If you can’t annoy somebody, there is little point in writing.” ― Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim

“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

“Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It’s a way of understanding it.” ― Lloyd Alexander

“If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I’m not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.” ― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

“Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.” ― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” ― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” ― Anais Nin

“you can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will.” ― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“One always has a better book in one’s mind than one can manage to get onto paper.” ― Michael Cunningham

“Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that’s where it should stay.” ― Christopher Hitchens

“I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which ‘Escape’ is now so often used. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?” ― J.R.R. Tolkien

“Which of us has not felt that the character we are reading in the printed page is more real than the person standing beside us?” ― Cornelia Funke

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.” ― Henry David Thoreau

“If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” ― Toni Morrison

“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

“This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It’s that easy, and that hard.” ― Neil Gaiman

“You know, it’s hard work to write a book. I can’t tell you how many times I really get going on an idea, then my quill breaks. Or I spill ink all over my writing tunic.” ― Ellen DeGeneres, The Funny Thing Is…

“Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.” ― Pablo Picasso

“”You must write every single day of your life… You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads… may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.” ― Ray Bradbury

“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, The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain

“We live and breathe words. …. It was books that made me feel that perhaps I was not completely alone. They could be honest with me, and I with them. Reading your words, what you wrote, how you were lonely sometimes and afraid, but always brave; the way you saw the world, its colors and textures and sounds, I felt–I felt the way you thought, hoped, felt, dreamt. I felt I was dreaming and thinking and feeling with you. I dreamed what you dreamed, wanted what you wanted–and then I realized that truly I just wanted you.” ― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Prince

“Always be a poet, even in prose.” ― Charles Baudelaire

“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

“Imagination is like a muscle. I found out that the more I wrote, the bigger it got.” ― Philip José Farmer

“A little talent is a good thing to have if you want to be a writer. But the only real requirement is the ability to remember every scar.” ― Stephen King

“There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.” ― Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist

“Write what should not be forgotten.” ― Isabel Allende

“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, The Catcher in the Rye

“Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.” ― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time.” ― Howard Nemerov

“After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.” ― Philip Pullman

“Ordinary life is pretty complex stuff.” ― Harvey Pekar

“This is what love does: It makes you want to rewrite the world. It makes you want to choose the characters, build the scenery, guide the plot. The person you love sits across from you, and you want to do everything in your power to make it possible, endlessly possible. And when it’s just the two of you, alone in a room, you can pretend that this is how it is, this is how it will be.” ― David Levithan, Every Day

“The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.” ― Eleanor Roosevelt

“The first draft of anything is shit.” ― Ernest Hemingway

“If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories — science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.” ― Ray Bradbury

“There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know where they’ll take you.” ― Beatrix Potter

“Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.” ― Stephen King

“The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them — words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they’re brought out. But it’s more than that, isn’t it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you’ve said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That’s the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.” ― Stephen King

“Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos… to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream.” ― John Cheever

“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” ― Anton Chekhov

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” ― Ernest Hemingway

“You can make anything by writing.” ― C.S. Lewis

“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

“A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea, this by no means signifies that he respects her opinions, admires her understanding, or will refuse, though the rapier is denied him, to run through the body with his pen.” ― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“”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

“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

“By now, it is probably very late at night, and you have stayed up to read this book when you should have gone to sleep. If this is the case, then I commend you for falling into my trap. It is a writer’s greatest pleasure to hear that someone was kept up until the unholy hours of the morning reading one of his books. It goes back to authors being terrible people who delight in the suffering of others. Plus, we get a kickback from the caffeine industry…” ― Brandon Sanderson, Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians

“If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write, because our culture has no use for it.” ― Anais Nin

“People love a happy ending. So every episode, I will explain once again that I don’t like people. And then Mal will shoot someone. Someone we like. And their puppy.” ― Joss Whedon

“The scariest moment is always just before you start.” ― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.” ― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.” ― William Wordsworth

“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” ― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.” ― George Orwell

“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, A Man Without a Country

“”There are three rules for writing a novel . Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.” ― W. Somerset Maugham

“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

“If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.” ― Isaac Asimov

“Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.” ― E.L. Doctorow

“That’s what fiction is for. It’s for getting at the truth when the truth isn’t sufficient for the truth.” ― Tim O’Brien

“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” ― Thomas Mann, Essays of Three Decades

“Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it’s always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.” ― Neil Gaiman

“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

“Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them. There’s many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.” ― Flannery O’Connor

“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

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.” ― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

“You don’t write about the horrors of war. No. You write about a kid’s burnt socks lying in the road.” ― Richard Price

“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

“Easy reading is damn hard writing.” ― Nathaniel Hawthorne

“You always get more respect when you don’t have a happy ending.” ― Julia Quinn

“A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche

“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

“I was a late bloomer. But anyone who blooms at all, ever, is very lucky. ” ― Sharon Olds

“Women want love to be a novel. Men, a short story.” ― Daphne du Maurier

“I hate writing, I love having written.” ― Dorothy Parker

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Renowned authors and imaginative minds have long been a fountain of encouragement and wisdom for those of us undertaking creative pursuits. When we’re craving a spark of motivation or a nugget of wisdom, a compelling quote can often light the way.

The masters of the written word have a unique way of distilling their vast experiences and profound insights into succinct, impactful statements. So, we've curated a collection of quotes that encapsulate the essence of inspiration, creativity, and the art of writing itself.

Whether you're in search of the perfect quote to share with a fellow writer or seeking inspirational words to boost your own creative journey, this collection is designed to ignite your passion for storytelling and spark your imagination.

Quotes about writing

• Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers — Isaac Asimov
• Home is the cats, my books, and my work never done — Patti Smith
• There is nothing at all to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed — Ernest Hemingway
• The only way to write is to write — John Steinbeck
• 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
• It’s terribly dangerous for an artist to fulfil other people’s expectations — David Bowie
• The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance — Aristotle
• Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand — George Orwell

Quotes on being a writer

• If you're writing, you're a writer — Neil Gaiman
• The terrible thing about being a writer is that you don’t decide to become one, you discover that you are one — James Baldwin
• The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself — Albert Camus
• 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
• The role of a writer is not to say all we can say, but what we are unable to say — Anaïs Nin
• The writer's job is to tell the truth — Ernest Hemingway
• One role of the writer today is to sound the alarm. The environment is disintegrating, the hour is late, and not much is being done — E.B White
• To name something truly is to lay bare what may be brutal or corrupt (or important or possible) and key to the work of changing the world is changing the story — Rebecca Solnit
• You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say — F. Scott Fitzgerald
• A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people — Thomas Mann
• Writers have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live really. The second one is romantic, it is separate from themselves, it is not real but it is really there — Gertrude Stein
• Writers do not merely reflect and interpret life, they inform and shape life — E.B. White
• A writer is someone who has taught his mind to misbehave — Oscar Wilde

Famous quotes about creativity

• Creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes and having fun — Mary Lou Cook
• Creativity is intelligence having fun — Albert Einstein
• Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work — Gustave Flaubert
• The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenalin but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity — Glenn Gould
• Creativity is the combination of discipline and a childlike spirit — Robert Greene
• An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail — Dr Edwin Land
• Creativity takes courage — Henri Matisse
• I tell you: one must have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star — From Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
• The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt — Sylvia Plath

Famous quotes on writing a book

• There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you — Maya Angelou
• There is something compelling about the blank page that beckons you in to write something on it. It must be filled — Margaret Atwood
• You’ve got to be able to look at your thoughts on paper and discover what a fool you were — Ray Bradbury
• 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
• The best time for planning a book is while you're doing the dishes — Agatha Christie
• Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go — E.L. Doctorow
• What you cannot fix is the perfection of a blank page. What you cannot fix is that pristine, unsullied whiteness of a screen or a page with nothing on it, because there's nothing there to fix — Neil Gaiman
• You are ready. Start making stuff — Austin Kleon
• The scariest moment is always just before you start — Stephen King
• A blank page is also a door — it contains infinity, like a night sky with a supermoon really close to the Earth, with all the stars and the galaxies, where you can see very, very clearly… — David Mitchell
• Start with a phrase, a line, a quote. Questions are very helpful. Begin with a few you’re carrying right now — Naomi Shihab Nye
• I always in writing start with a name. Give me a name and it produces a story, not the other way about normally — JRR Tolkien

Inspirational writing quotes

• I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by — Douglas Adams
• Be not afraid of going slowly, be afraid of standing still — Chinese Proverb
• Don't be a writer; be writing — William Faulkner
• Writing is easy: All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead — Gene Fowler
• People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are — Steve Jobs
• It always seems impossible, until it's done — Nelson Mandela
• The depths are obscured in us when we try to force feelings; we clarify them by giving them adequate time and space and letting them come — Stephen Nachmanovich
• The first draft is just you telling yourself the story — Terry Pratchett
• Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar — E.B. White
• We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection — Anaïs Nin
• Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but that's the only way you can do anything really good — William Faulkner

Quotes about editing and revising a novel

• The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon — Robert Cormier
• Perfection is not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away — Antoine de Saint-Exupery
• In writing, you must kill all your darlings — William Faulkner
• Write drunk; edit sober — Ernest Hemmingway
• The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do — Thomas Jefferson
• The road to hell is paved with adverbs — Stephen King
• I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter — James Michener
• The most important thing in writing is to have written. I can always fix a bad page. I can't fix a blank one — Nora Roberts
• The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightening and a lightening bug — Mark Twain
• There's no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written — Oscar Wilde
• Usually I compose only with great difficulty and endless rewriting — JRR Tolkien
• There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are - W Somerset Maugham

Quotes about using emotion in your writing

• Learning the craft, understanding what language can do, gaining control of the language, enables one to make people weep, make them laugh… — Maya Angelou
• No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader — Robert Frost
• All romance books are about one theme: love conquers all... That journey from hole-hearted to whole-hearted is the romance arc for each character — Gwen Hayes
• Any fool with steady hands and a working set of lungs can build up a house of cards and then blow it down, but it takes a genius to make people laugh — Stephen King
• Novels ought to have hope; at least, American novels ought to have hope. French novels don't need to — Anne Lamott
• Our sense of enchantment is not triggered only by grand things... The awe-inspiring, the numinous, is all around us, all the time. It becomes valuable when we value it — Katherine May
• A work responds to the reader’s, not the author’s, questions. Once written, the work has a life of its own distinct from that of its author, a life granted by its successive readers — Octavio Paz
• The best stories don't come from ‘good vs bad’, but from ‘good vs good’ — Leo Tolstoy
• Maybe we can’t draw flesh from reverie nor retrieve a dusty spur, but we can gather the dream itself and bring it back uniquely whole — Patti Smith
• Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works — Virginia Woolf

Quotes about mastering the writing craft

• A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit — Richard Bach
• My responsibility as a writer is to be as good as I can be at my craft — Maya Angelou
• Don't tell me the moon is shining: show me the glint of light on broken glass — Anton Chekhov
• A good writer is always a people watcher — Patricia Highsmith
• The only way to do great work is to love what you do — Steve Jobs
• If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write — Stephen King
• If you want to be a writer, you have to write. Everyday. No excuses — Walter Mosley
• In the exposition we put a pot of water on the stove; getting the action to rise is making the water boil — George Saunders
• A scene without conflict is a scene without tension... which is to say, a scene that gives us no reason to read it — Chuck Wendig
• I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing his talent he would be wise to develop a thick hide — Harper Lee
• It is a writer's greatest pleasure to hear that someone was kept up until the unholy hours of the morning reading one of his books. It goes back to authors being terrible people who delight in the suffering of others — Brandon Sanderson

Writing motivation quotes

• Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it — Maya Angelou
• I can't give you a sure fire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure: try to please everybody all the time — Herbert Bayard Swope
• The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do — Steve Jobs
• If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete — Jack Kornfield
• The best way to predict your future is to create it — Abraham Lincoln
• Care about what other people think and you will always be their prisoner — Lao Tzu
• Do one thing everyday that scares you — Eleanor Roosevelt
• And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is’ — Kurt Vonnegut

Quotes about getting ideas

• Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats — Howard Aiken
• I don't need an alarm clock. My ideas wake me — Ray Bradbury
• Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to split open — Natalie Goldberg
• Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like — Paul Graham
• If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it — Toni Morrison
• A writer should concern himself with whatever absorbs his fancy, stirs his heart, and unlimbers his typewriter — E.B. White
• 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

Learning from the greats

For us, quotes from famous writers are like beacons guiding us through the writing process. Ernest Hemingway tells us to pour our feelings out. Antoine de Saint-Exupery teaches us to keep our stories simple, taking away anything that's not needed. Stephen King warns us to use our words carefully to make our writing strong. These tips show us how to become better writers. They tell us to trust our own way of writing and to keep learning and getting better. If these writers did it, so can you!

Writing philosophy in practice

When you read a lot of advice from different writers, you'll notice they don't all agree. Hemingway's idea of writing being tough doesn't quite match Stephen King's idea of it being an adventure. Flaubert liked things orderly, but Kerouac loved just letting ideas flow freely. That's okay, though. Writing is about finding what works for you.

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Looking for a little advice or motivation to inspire your creativity? Below, we have put together a list of 25 quotes from famous authors, mentors, and other wise individuals to help you on your writing journey.

1) “There comes a point in your life when you need to stop reading other people’s books and write your own.” – Albert Einstein

2) “Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” – David Foster Wallace

3) “A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.” – Richard Bach

4) “The good ideas come first. The skill to communicate them brilliantly in a way that appeals to readers or to an audience takes years of practice.” – Robin Mizell

5) “The key to all story endings is to give the audience what it wants, but not in the way it expects.” – William Goldman

6) “Description begins in the writer’s imagination but should finish in the readers’s.” – Stephen King

7) “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; truth isn’t.” – Mark Twain

8) “Write about what really interests you, whether it is real things or imaginary things, and nothing else.” – C.S. Lewis

9) “Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.” – Anne Lamont

10) “Don’t ‘be a writer.’ Be writing.” – William Faulkner

11) “A writer never finds the time to write. A writer makes it. If you don’t have the drive, the discipline, and the desire, then you can have all the talent in the world, and you aren’t going to finish a book.” – Nora Roberts

12) “A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper.” – E.B. White

13) “When all else fails, write what your heart tells you. You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.” – Mark Twain

14) “You have to follow your own voice. You have to be yourself when you write. In effect, you have to announce, ‘This is me, this what I stand for, this is what you get when you read me. I’m doing the best I can – buy me or not – but this is who I am as a writer.” – David Morrell

15) “Ideas come from curiosity.” – Walt Disney

16) “To write something, you have to risk making a fool of yourself.” – Anne Rice

17) “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

18) “Voice is not just the result of a single sentence or paragraph or page. It’s not even the sum total of a whole story. It’s all your work laid out across the table like the bones and fossils of an unidentified carcass.” – Chuck Wendig

19) “Focus more on your desire than on your doubt, and the dream will take care of itself.” – Mark Twain

20) “Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.” – Louis L’Amour

21) “Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it’s the only way you can do anything really good.” – William Faulkner

22) Rejection slips, or form letters, however tactfully phrased, are lacerations of the soul, if not quite inventions of the devil – but there is no way around them.” – Isaac Asimov

23) “Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works.” – Virginia Woolf

24) “Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don’t see any.” – Orson Scott

25) “You can only write by putting words on a paper one at a time.” – Sandra Brown

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85 Writing Quotes By Famous Authors For Your Writing Inspiration

The writing process starts with a writer’s inspiration. Read these writing quotes by famous authors to help your motivation.

You can close your eyes and wait for the thoughts and feelings to arrive to get your good writing ideas flowing . But sometimes, the waiting can seem like forever.

You can try to listen to music or watch television to find sources of inspiration. You might go for a walk to do a little people-watching .

Or, seeing as you are here, you can read some author quotes about writing.

Article Contents

Finding your writing inspiration

All good writers know how the process works or doesn’t work when they sit down to write a story or even blog posts.

Some might call it a writer block, writer’s block , laziness, or procrastination.

But it doesn’t matter what you call it. It is part and parcel of creative writing.

From the time you started writing, you must have experienced this idea void many times.

If you’re struggling to come up with ideas for your writing, you might take inspiration from Ray Bradbury.

He famously said, “Write a short story every week. It’s not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.”

This quote encourages writers to make a habit of writing and to trust in the process of generating ideas.

Stephen King, the author of bestselling novels like The Shining and It, said, “The scariest moment is always just before you start.”

Perhaps the next time it happens, the inspirational words of famous authors and writers on writing may help.

I have to start my list of great writing quotes by famous authors with my all-time favorite author.

85 Writing quotes by famous authors and writers

Douglas adams.

• “At the end of all this being-determined-to-be-a-jack-of-all-trades, I think I’m better off just sitting down and putting a hundred thousand words in a cunning order.” – Douglas Adams

2. “It’s an odd feeling, actually typing ‘qwerty’ as a word; try it, and you’ll see what I mean.” – Douglas Adams

3. “I get very worried about this idea of art. Having been an English literary graduate, I’ve been trying to avoid the idea of doing art ever since. I think the idea of art kills creativity.” – Douglas Adams

4. “Capital letters were always the best way of dealing with things you didn’t have a good answer to.” – Douglas Adams

5. “I find that writing is a constant battle with exactly the same problems you’ve always had.” – Douglas Adams

6. “It takes an awful lot of time to not write a book.” – Douglas Adams

7. “You cannot see what I see because you see what you see. You cannot know what I know because you know what you know.

What I see and what I know cannot be added to what you see and what you know because they are not of the same kind. Neither can it replace what you see and what you know, because that would be to replace you yourself.”

“Hang on, can I write this down?” said Arthur, excitedly fumbling in his pocket for a pencil.” – Douglas Adams

8. “When the idea comes, I often can’t remember where it came from. I remember very little about writing the first series of Hitchhikers. It’s almost as if someone else wrote it.” – Douglas Adams

9. “There’s nothing worse than sitting down to write a novel and saying, “Well, okay, I’m going to do something of high artistic worth.” It’s funny.” – Douglas Adams

10. “The books people are writing today, they’re too long.

You get a little bit of plot, and then pages and pages of Creative Writing. They teach classes in how to do this. They should teach classes in how to stop!” – Douglas Adams

Ray Bradbury

11. “Just write every day of your life. Read intensely. Then see what happens. Most of my friends who are put on that diet have very pleasant careers.” – Ray Bradbury

12. “You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.” – Ray Bradbury

13. “Let the world burn through you. Throw the prism light, white-hot, on paper.” -Ray Bradbury

14. “I don’t need an alarm clock. My ideas wake me.” – Ray Bradbury

15. “Remember: Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations.” – Ray Bradbury

Madeleine L’Engle

16. “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

17. “Just because we don’t understand doesn’t mean that the explanation doesn’t exist.” – Madeleine L’Engle

18. “Inspiration usually comes during work, rather than before it.” – Madeleine L’Engle

19. “We can’t take any credit for our talents. It’s how we use them that counts.” – Madeleine L’Engle

20. “Artistic temperament sometimes seems a battleground, a dark angel of destruction and a bright angel of creativity wrestling.” – Madeleine L’Engle

21. “That’s the way things come clear. All of a sudden. And then you realize how obvious they’ve been all along.” – Madeleine L’Engle

22. “Maybe you have to know the darkness before you can appreciate the light.” – Madeleine L’Engle

Stephen King

23. “The road to hell is paved with adverbs .” – Stephen King

24. “If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time or the tools to write.” – Stephen King

25. “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.” – Stephen King

26. “Books are a uniquely portable magic.” – Stephen King

27. “The most important things are the hardest to say, because words diminish them.” – Stephen King

28. “Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.” – Stephen King

29. “Fiction is the truth inside the lie.” – Stephen King

30. “Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.” – Stephen King

31. “Write what you know.” – Mark Twain

32. “Don’t say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream.”- Mark Twain

33. “A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it.”- Mark Twain

34. “It takes a heap of sense to write good nonsense”- Mark Twain

35. “One should never use exclamation points in writing. It is like laughing at your own joke.”- Mark Twain

36. “ Writing is easy . All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.”- Mark Twain

37. “The test of any good fiction is that you should care something for the characters; the good to succeed, the bad to fail. The trouble with most fiction is that you want them all to land in hell together, as quickly as possible.”- Mark Twain

38. “To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself…

Anybody can have ideas–the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.” – Mark Twain

39. “I conceive that the right way to write a story for boys is to write so that it will not only interest boys but strongly interest any man who has ever been a boy. That immensely enlarges the audience.”- Mark Twain

40. “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”- Mark Twain

41. “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

Ernest Hemingway

42. “My working habits are simple: long periods of thinking, short periods of writing.” – Ernest Hemingway

43. “In order to write about life first you must live it.” – Ernest Hemingway

44. “Writing is something that you can never do as well as it can be done. It is a perpetual challenge and it is more difficult than anything else that I have ever done–so I do it. And it makes me happy when I do it well.” – Ernest Hemingway

45. “We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.” – Ernest Hemingway

46. “Writing, at its best, is a lonely life.” – Ernest Hemingway

47. “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” – Ernest Hemingway

48. “As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand.” – Ernest Hemingway

49. “A man’s got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.” – Ernest Hemingway

50. “I have to write to be happy whether I get paid for it or not. But it is a hell of a disease to be born with. I like to do it. Which is even worse.  That makes it from a disease into a vice.

Then I want to do it better than anybody has ever done it which makes it into an obsession. An obsession is terrible. Hope you haven’t gotten any . That’s the only one I’ve got left.” – Ernest Hemingway

51. “My attitude toward punctuation is that it ought to be as conventional as possible. The game of golf would lose a good deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green.

You ought to be able to show that you can do it a good deal better than anyone else with the regular tools before you have a license to bring in your own improvements.” – Ernest Hemingway

Isaac Asimov

52. “Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.” – Isaac Asimov

53. “Writing is a lonely job. Even if a writer socializes regularly, when he gets down to the real business of his life, it is he and his typewriter or word processor. No one else is or can be involved in the matter.” – Isaac Asimov

54. “It’s the writing that teaches you.” – Isaac Asimov

55. “It is the writer who might catch the imagination of young people, and plant a seed that will flower and come to fruition.” – Isaac Asimov

56. “Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.” – Isaac Asimov

57. “I write for the same reason I breathe … because if I didn’t, I would die.” – Isaac Asimov

58. “If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.” – Isaac Asimov

Sylvia Plath

59. “Let me live, love and say it well in good sentences.” – Sylvia Plath

60. “I write only because There is a voice within me That will not be still.” – Sylvia Plath

61. “The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” – Sylvia Plath

62. “Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.” – Sylvia Plath

63. “Some things are hard to write about. After something happens to you, you go to write it down, and either you over dramatize it, or underplay it, exaggerate the wrong parts or ignore the important ones.

At any rate, you never write it quite the way you want to.” – Sylvia Plath

64. “I could never be a complete scholar or a complete housewife or a complete writer: I must combine a little of all, and thereby be imperfect in all.” – Sylvia Plath

65. “I must be lean and write and make worlds beside this to live in.” – Sylvia Plath

66. “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

R. L. Stine

67. “I’ve had a very sheltered life. What can happen to you if you stay home writing all day?” – R. L. Stine

68. “If you want to be a writer, don’t worry so much about writing. Read as much as you can. Read as many different writers as you can. Soak up the styles.” – R. L. Stine

69. “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

70. “I started writing when I was 9 years old. I was like this weird kid who would just stay in my room, typing little funny magazines and drawing comic strips.” – R. L. Stine

71. “If you do enough planning before you start to write, there’s no way you can have writer’s block. I do a complete chapter by chapter outline.” – R. L. Stine

72. “I’ve never dreamed of a story idea. I have such boring dreams.” – R. L. Stine

73. “I should be concentrating on writing pages.” – R. L. Stine

Franz Kafka

74. “I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.” – Franz Kafka

75. “All language is but a poor translation.” – Franz Kafka

76. “There are some things one can only achieve by a deliberate leap in the opposite direction.” – Franz Kafka

77. “I do not see the world at all; I invent it.” – Franz Kafka

78. “The purpose of a story is to be an axe that breaks up the ice within us.” – Franz Kafka

79. “Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self.” – Franz Kafka

80. “A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity.” – Franz Kafka

William Faulkner

81. “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

Some fun writing quotes to finish

82. “When I was a little boy, they called me a liar, but now that I am a grown-up they call me a writer.” – Isaac Bashevis Singer

83. “Writing is a socially acceptable form of getting naked in public.” – Paulo Coelho

84. “About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment.” – Josh Billings

85. “A bad review may spoil your breakfast, but you shouldn’t allow it to spoil your lunch.” – Kingsley Amis

Are you inspired by all these writing quotes by famous authors?

I am sure you are now more than ready to get back to writing your novel, your short stories , or perhaps your next blog post.

It will be much more productive than reading writing quotes.

Related Reading: 55 Funny English Grammar Rules To Help You Write Better

About The Author

Derek Haines

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4 thoughts on “85 writing quotes by famous authors for your writing inspiration”.

Love this one! thanks for sharing, a few of them I still havent heard of til now… Keep up the great work, u r such a great help for me and sure so many other!

Excellent!!!!!!!!!!!!

Thanks! These are great.

I LOVE these quotes. My favorite authors on the craft of writing (and then their own beautiful prose) include Madeleine L’Engle and Ray Bradbury.

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99 Quotes About Creativity To Inspire Your Writing

As a writer , you know the importance of creativity . It’s what keeps your brain alive and opens it to new possibilities.

It leads you into the world beyond your limited experience.

But it doesn’t get far without curiosity.

When you’re curious about something, you take action to learn more about it. You test limits and take risks. 

That’s the point of these 99 creativity quotes for inspiratio n with your writing project. Find your favorites and see how much further your creativity can take you.

Albert Einstein Creativity Quotes

Dr. seuss creativity quotes, steve jobs creativity quotes, short creativity quotes, more famous creativity quotes.

Enjoy these quotes from one of the most influential scientists of the 20th century, who valued imagination and curiosity over logical precision. 

“True art is characterized by an irresistible urge in the creative artist.”

“The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.”

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” 

“Small is the number of people who see with their eyes and think with their minds.”

“No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.”

 “It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.”

 “The only way to escape the corruptible effect of praise is to go on working.”

“The monotony and solitude of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind.”

“Once we accept our limits, we go beyond them.” 

“The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.”

“Nothing happens until something moves.”

“Only those who attempt the absurd can achieve the impossible.”

“A man should look for what is, and not for what he thinks should be.”

“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

.ugb-903a2f4 .ugb-blockquote__item{background-color:#4791bb !important;border-radius:50px !important}.ugb-903a2f4 .ugb-blockquote__item:before{background-color:#4791bb !important}.ugb-903a2f4 .ugb-blockquote__quote{fill:#fcb900 !important;width:70px !important;height:70px !important}.ugb-903a2f4 .ugb-blockquote__text{color:#ffffff}.ugb-903a2f4 .ugb-inner-block{text-align:center} “Creativity is seeing what everyone else has seen, and thinking what no one else has thought.”

“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.”

“I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.”

“Invention is not the product of logical thought, even though the final product is tied to a logical structure.”

“Once you stop learning, you start dying.”

“I believe in intuitions and inspirations. I sometimes feel that I am right. I do not know that I am.”

“Creativity is intelligence having fun.”

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

“I never made one of my discoveries through the process of rational thinking”

Who knows more about the power of creative imagination than Dr. Seuss? Generations of children unleashed their own imaginations with his whimsical stories and characters.

“You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You’re on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the one who’ll decide where to go…”

“Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try!”

“You can get help from teachers, but you are going to have to learn a lot by yourself, sitting alone in a room.”

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

“Think and wonder, wonder and think.”

“It’s not about what it is, it’s about what it can become.”

“If you never did you should. These things are fun, and fun is good.”

“It is better to know how to learn than to know.”

.ugb-907ba63 .ugb-blockquote__item{background-color:#5c84a3 !important;border-radius:50px !important}.ugb-907ba63 .ugb-blockquote__item:before{background-color:#5c84a3 !important}.ugb-907ba63 .ugb-blockquote__quote{fill:#e3bb9f !important;width:70px !important;height:70px !important}.ugb-907ba63 .ugb-blockquote__text{color:#ffffff}.ugb-907ba63 .ugb-inner-block{text-align:center} “I’m telling you this ‘cause you’re one of my friends. My alphabet starts where your alphabet ends!”

“You have to be odd to be number one”

“Nothing is going to change, unless someone does something soon”

“So, open your mouth, lad! For every voice counts!”

“Oh the things you can find, if you don’t stay behind!”

“He who makes a beast out of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man”

The visionary co-founder of Apple Computers had plenty to say about creativity and its role in both human evolution and happiness.

“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something.” 

“Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.”

“Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

“I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what’s next.”

“None of us are as creative as all of us.”

“Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.”

“We do not say anything about future products. We work on them in secret, then we announce them.”

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.”

“That’s been one of my mantras – focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”

.ugb-b1a6745 .ugb-blockquote__item{background-color:#8961ae !important;border-radius:50px !important}.ugb-b1a6745 .ugb-blockquote__item:before{background-color:#8961ae !important}.ugb-b1a6745 .ugb-blockquote__quote{fill:#7bdcb5 !important;width:70px !important;height:70px !important}.ugb-b1a6745 .ugb-blockquote__text{color:#ffffff}.ugb-b1a6745 .ugb-inner-block{text-align:center} “You have to be burning with an idea, or a problem, or a wrong that you want to right. If you’re not passionate enough from the start, you’ll never stick it out.”

“Older people sit down and ask, ‘What is it?’ but the boy asks, ‘What can I do with it?’”

“The ones who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”

Powerful quotes on creativity don’t have to be long; something short and sweet is easier to use as a mantra when you’re feeling tapped out.

“Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.” – Vincent van Gogh

“Have no fear of perfection, you’ll never reach it.”– Salvador Dali

“Creativity is a wild mind and a disciplined eye.”– Dorothy Parker

“It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.” – Henry David Thoreau

“If you want creative workers, give them enough time to play.”– John Cleese

“If you’re not doing some things that are crazy, then you’re doing the wrong things.”- Larry Page

“Create with the heart; build with the mind.”- Criss Jami

“Originality is the best form of rebellion.”- Mike Sasso

“If it doesn’t sell; it isn’t creative.”- David Ogilvy

“When we build, let us think that we build forever.”- John Ruskin

“The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.” — Dorothy Parker

“Art, freedom and creativity will change society faster than politics.”– Victor Pinchuk

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“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”– Carl Sagan

“Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.”- Leo Tolstoy

“Absurdity and anti-absurdity are the two poles of creative energy.”– Karl Lagerfeld

“The question isn’t who is going to let me; It’s who is going to stop me.”– Ayn Rand

“Perfection is no small thing, but it is made up of small things.”– Michelangelo

“The creative adult is the child who survived.” — Ursula Leguin

“The desire to create is one of the deepest yearnings of the human soul.” — Dieter F. Uchtdorf

.ugb-77c3a35 .ugb-blockquote__item{background-color:#b9a15c !important;border-radius:50px !important}.ugb-77c3a35 .ugb-blockquote__item:before{background-color:#b9a15c !important}.ugb-77c3a35 .ugb-blockquote__quote{fill:#8ed1fc !important;width:70px !important;height:70px !important}.ugb-77c3a35 .ugb-blockquote__text{color:#ffffff}.ugb-77c3a35 .ugb-inner-block{text-align:center} “Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.”- Henry Thomas Buckle

“Everything you can imagine is real.” — Pablo Picasso

 “The chief enemy of creativity is “good” sense.” — Pablo Picasso

“Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.”― Pablo Picasso

“Doors are for people with no imagination.”― Derek Landy

“I dwell in possibility.” – Emily Dickinson

“The urge to destroy is also a creative urge.”― Mikhail Bakunin

“You don’t base records on success; you base it on creativity.”– Nikki Sixx

Some of the following creativity quotes will probably sound familiar, but that doesn’t make them less inspiring. 

“Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine, and at last, you create what you will.” – George Bernard Shaw

“Creativity is more than just being different. Anybody can plan weird; that’s easy. What’s hard is to be as simple as Bach. Making the simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.” – Charles Mingus

“When you can do a common thing in an uncommon way; you will command the attention of the world.”- George Washington Carver

“The important thing for you is to be alert, to question, to find out, so that your own initiative may be awakened.”- Bruce Lee

“The principal mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers.”– Arthur Koestler

“To practice any art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow. So do it.” — Kurt Vonnegut

“Creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes, and having fun.” — Mary Lou Cook

“Creativity involves breaking out of expected patterns in order to look at things in a different way.” — Edward de Bono

“Creativity is the key to success in the future, and primary education is where teachers can bring creativity in children at that level.”–  A. P. J. Abdul Kalam

“The painter has the Universe in his mind and hands.”― Leonardo da Vinci

“Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity and change.”― Brene Brown

.ugb-0c27bd5 .ugb-blockquote__item{background-color:#6ea890 !important;border-radius:50px !important}.ugb-0c27bd5 .ugb-blockquote__item:before{background-color:#6ea890 !important}.ugb-0c27bd5 .ugb-blockquote__quote{fill:#ffadc2 !important;width:70px !important;height:70px !important}.ugb-0c27bd5 .ugb-blockquote__text{color:#ffffff}.ugb-0c27bd5 .ugb-inner-block{text-align:center} “Use anything you can think of to understand and be understood, and you’ll discover the creativity that connects you with others.” — Martha Beck

“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.” ― Ken Robinson

“Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.” — Arthur Ashe

“Develop a passion for learning. If you do, you will never cease to grow.” — Anthony J. D’Angelo

“If you cannot do great things, do small things in a great way.” – Napoleon Hill

“There is no such thing as a new idea. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope.” – Mark Twain

What is your favorite quote about creativity to inspire your writing?

I hope you enjoyed these inspiring creativity quotes and found some new favorites to keep close at hand. Now that you have the words of famous creatives circulating in your head, what do you feel inspired to do today?

Maybe you’ll start a new creative project. Or you’ll pick up a long-neglected one. 

What can I do to help? My goal here is to help you become a well-paid writer, and I see providing a high-quality supply of inspiration as part of that. 

Plus, it doesn’t hurt that quotes like these inspire me to do more, too. They get me thinking about all kinds of fun and (I hope) useful article ideas.

May they lead you to something that lights you up inside.

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20 Inspiring Quotes for Writers to Fuel Creativity

Boost your writing inspiration with the best collection of inspiring quotes for writers. Read on to find the most thought-provoking and motivating words to spark your creativity and keep you motivated. Writing can be a challenging task, even for the most experienced writers. There are times you might feel stuck, uninspired, or unmotivated. But don’t worry; you’re not alone. 

Whether you’re struggling to start your first draft or searching for the perfect ending to your story, inspiring quotes for writers can provide you with the guidance and inspiration you need . Most writers have been in your shoes, and many have found ways to overcome these uncreative downturns. One of the best ways to rekindle your inspiration and motivation is by reading inspiring quotes for writers. These quotes can help you find the right words, inspire new ideas, and keep you motivated to keep writing.  Below is a list of the most inspiring quotes for writers to help you find the inspiration you need to push through writer’s block.

Inspiring Quotes for Writers

From famous authors to modern-day poets, the world is full of inspiring quotes for writers to help them overcome self-doubt and procrastination. Check out The Reliable Narrator’s picks below.

1. The scariest moment is always just before you start. – Stephen King

It can be scary to take the first put words down on paper, especially when you’re not sure if they will be good enough. However, King’s quote serves as a reminder that this fear is normal but temporary. Once you start writing, that fear dissipates, and the words begin to flow. The anticipation of starting can be the scariest part. Incorporating inspiring quotes for writers into a writing routine can help writers stay focused and inspired throughout the creative process. These motivational words can help push through the fear and roadblocks.

2. 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

For Whedon, writing is a way to overcome personal fears and limitations. Through his writing, he can become the characters he wishes he could be and explore the things that scare him the most. There is a lot to learn from his words – that’s the power of inspiring quotes for writers.

Writing can be a way to express feelings, work through emotions, and connect with others. It’s a way to explore the many different facets of the human experience and to connect with readers on a deeper level. Ultimately, we create worlds and characters that reflect some part of ourselves. 

3. A word after a word after a word is power. – Margaret Atwood

Every word writers choose has the potential to make a difference, inspire, educate, and connect with others. Atwood’s quote highlights the importance of persistence and dedication when it comes to writing. 

It can be a slow and challenging process, but every word we put on paper has the power to shape our ideas, our stories, and our world. The beauty of these inspiring quotes for writers is their ability to remind. Atwood’s quote is a reminder that even if we can only write a few words a day, those words are still significant and can accumulate to create something truly powerful.

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4. you fail only if you stop writing. – ray bradbury.

Writing is a journey that requires persistence, determination, and a willingness to keep going even when things get tough . Failure is not the end of the road. Sometimes all it takes is a few words from a favorite author to reignite the passion for writing. That’s the power of inspiring quotes for writers.

Many writers face rejection, criticism, and self-doubt throughout their careers. Failure is not the opposite of success but rather a necessary part of the creative process. Every mistake, every rejection, and every struggle is an opportunity to learn and grow. By continuing to write, writers are moving forward and growing. 

5. There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you. – Maya Angelou

As human beings, we all have stories to tell, whether they are personal anecdotes, historical accounts, or works of fiction. As writers, we know how keeping these stories inside us can weigh us down. Sharing our stories with others can help us find healing, connection, and meaning. Writing can be a solitary and challenging pursuit, but the right words of inspiration can help you stay the course. Seek out and embrace inspiring quotes for writers along the way. Your words may inspire the next generation of writers.

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

When we write stories featuring diverse characters and perspectives, we can help create a more inclusive and understanding world. Ultimately, Morrison’s quote reminds us that writing is about more than entertainment or self-expression. It’s about creating something that resonates with readers and has the potential to change the world. Reading inspiring quotes for writers can ignite the spark of creativity and motivate you to pick up your pen and paper.

7. The first draft is just you telling yourself the story. – Terry Pratchett

Writing can be a daunting process, and the pressure to create something polished and perfect can sometimes stifle a writer’s creativity. To overcome this hurdle, it is important for writers to remember the role of a first draft.

The first draft is an opportunity for writers to get their ideas on paper and explore different elements of their writing. It’s a time to experiment with characters, plot twists, and themes without worrying too much about getting everything right.

Of course, the first draft is only the beginning of the process. Editing and revision are crucially important. But by viewing the first draft as a starting point rather than a finished product, writers can free themselves to take risks and create something unique and impactful.

8. The beautiful part of writing is that you don’t have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon. – Robert Cormier

Unlike brain surgery, writing offers the luxury of being able to revise and edit one’s work until it’s right. Writing is not an exact science- there is no one “right” way to do it. This means that writers have the freedom to experiment, take risks, and make mistakes along the way.

Cormier’s inspirational quotes for writers remind us that writing is a craft that takes time, effort, and a willingness to learn and grow. But with patience, persistence, and a willingness to take risks and make mistakes, writers can produce work that is truly beautiful and meaningful.

9. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt. – Sylvia Plath

Self-doubt can be a paralyzing force , preventing writers from trying new things and fully expressing themselves on the page. It can make even the most talented writers feel inadequate and unworthy of success.

Self-doubt is not a necessary part of the creative process. In fact, it can be the thing that holds writers back from achieving their full potential. By learning to recognize and confront self-doubt, writers can push past their fears and create work that is truly inspiring and meaningful.

Incorporating inspiring quotes for writers into your writing routine can help you stay focused and inspired throughout the creative process.

10. You can make anything by writing. – C.S. Lewis

Whether it’s a story, a poem, an essay, or a memoir, writing has the ability to create something new. Through the written word, writers can explore their own experiences and emotions, share their perspectives on the world, and connect with readers in profound and meaningful ways. Writing can also be a powerful tool for advocacy, education, and social change, as it allows writers to share their ideas and inspire others to take action.

Ultimately, C.S. Lewis’ inspiring quotes for writers speak to the limitless potential of writing as a form of expression and creation. With the power of words, writers have the ability to shape the world in their own unique way. 

11. Write what should not be forgotten. – Isabel Allende

Writers have the ability to preserve memories, traditions, and experiences that might otherwise fade away with time. This is the essence of inspiring quotes for writers – to inspire us to tell the stories that need to be told. It’s an invitation to explore the world and shine a light on the things that matter most.

12. Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass. – Anton Chekhov

It’s not enough to simply tell the reader what’s happening; writers must also paint a vivid picture of the scene with words . Chekhov’s quote is a reminder to pay attention to the details and to use them to create a sensory experience for the reader. This is the beauty of inspiring quotes for writers – they offer insights and guidance that can help us improve our craft.

13. There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” – Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway’s quote suggests writing is a deeply personal and often painful experience, but it’s also an essential one. His quote is a reminder that writing can be difficult and challenging, but it’s also incredibly rewarding. Inspiring quotes for writers like this one can help us embrace the struggle and find meaning in the process.

14. 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 Butler

Writing is a skill that takes time to develop, and it’s important to give allow for mistakes along the way. Butler’s quote is an encouragement to keep going , even when writers feel like their writing isn’t up to par. Inspiring quotes for writers like this one can help us maintain a growth mindset and stay focused on our goals.

15. The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of because words diminish them — words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they’re brought out. – Stephen King

As writers, sensitive or uncomfortable subjects can be difficult to discuss, and it’s important to approach these topics with care and respect. King’s quote is a reminder that the most important stories are often the most difficult to tell and are also the ones that can have the greatest impact. Inspiring quotes for writers like this one can help us find the courage to tackle tough subjects and use our writing to effect change.

Many successful authors credit inspiring quotes for writers as the fuel that helped them achieve their writing goals.

16. There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are. – W. Somerset Maugham

17. 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, 18. the role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say. – anaïs nin, 19. the pen is mightier than the sword. – edward bulwer-lytton, 20. good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader—not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon. – e.l. doctorow.

In conclusion, inspiring quotes for writers can help fuel creativity and provide motivation to keep writing. Writing can be a challenging process, and it’s important to remember that even the best writers face self-doubt and struggle with their craft. But these inspiring quotes for writers serve as a reminder that the act of writing itself is powerful and can lead to incredible things. Whether it’s Isabel Allende’s reminder to write what should not be forgotten, or Ernest Hemingway’s famous inspiring quote for writers about bleeding onto the page, they capture the essence of what it means to be a writer. They encourage us to embrace our unique voices, persevere through tough times, and always strive for improvement. So the next time you’re feeling stuck or overwhelmed in your writing journey, take a moment to reflect on these inspiring quotes for writers. Allow them to fuel your creativity, spark new ideas, and remind you of the incredible power that words can hold. And most importantly, remember that as a writer, you have the ability to make a difference in the world through your words.

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Creative Writing Quotes

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The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.

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

The muscles of writing are not so visible, but they are just as powerful: determination, attention, curiosity, a passionate heart.

Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer.

Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.

Becoming a writer means being creative enough to find the time and the place in your life for writing.

The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.

Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say.

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

The scariest moment is always just before you start.

What I like in a good author is not what he says but what he whispers.

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.

One should be able to return to the first sentence of a novel and find the resonances of the entire work.

I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter.

A piece of creative writing, like a day-dream, is a continuation of, and a substitute for, what was once the play of childhood.

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

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.

The faster I write the better my output. If I'm going slow, I'm in trouble. It means I'm pushing the words instead of being pulled by them.

Literature is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none

To be the kind of writer you want to be, you must first be the kind of thinker you want to be.

One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment.

The maker of a sentence launches out into the infinite.

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

Creativity is a habit, and the best creativity is a result of good work habits. That's it in a nutshell ... In order to be creative you have to know how to prepare to be creative.

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56 of the Most Popular Quotes About Writing to Inspire You

56 quotes about writing to motivate and inspire.

Being a writer is something I’ve always dreamed of. I love helping other women ditch their 9-5 to work from home as writers and control their schedule.

It’s much better to work towards your own goals instead of someone else’s. Controlling my own schedule and spending more time with my family and friends was huge for me, and all the hard work of starting an online writing business was worth it.

So, here are some great writing quotes to motivate you to succeed and help you achieve your dreams of becoming a writer .

Most Popular Quotes About Writing

Write what should not be forgotten.   Isabel Allende 

A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.  Susan Sontag ]

Stay faithful to the stories in your head.   Paula Hawkins

Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you not been able to speak about. Be willing to be split open.  Natalie Goldberg

It’s your object to convey everything to the reader so that he remembers it not as a story he had read but something that happened to himself. That’s the true test of writing.  Ernest Hemingway

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

Don’t forget – no one else sees the world the way you do. So, no one else can tell the stories that you have to tell.   Charles de Lint

The best part of writing is really to educate yourself. I don’t want to be anybody’s expert. I came to learn.  Ta-Nehisi Coates

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Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.  David Foster Wallace

Writing is its own reward.   Henry Miller

The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it.  Dylan Thomas

You can make anything by writing.  C.S. Lewis

Write with conviction. Pick a side and be bold. And if you’re wrong, admit it.  Jeff Goins

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Famous Quotes About Writing

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

You can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will. Writing is magic, as much the water or life as any other creative art. The water is free, so drink. Drink and be filled up.  Stephen King

Writing – the art of communicating thoughts to the mind, through the eye –  is the great invention of the world.  Abraham Lincoln

Easy reading is damn hard writing.   Nathaniel Hawthorne

I write what amuses me. It’s totally for myself. I never in my wildest dreams expected this popularity. There’s no formula.  J. K. Rowling

Writing is the only that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.   Gloria Steinem

There’s no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story.   Frank Herbert

Write while the heat is on you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron that has cooled to burn a hole with.  Henry David Thoreau

 No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.  George Moore

Overnight success is almost always a myth. Half of this industry is luck, and half is the refusal to quit.   Victoria Schwab

The task of a writer consists of being able to make something out of an idea.  Thomas Mann

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

There are three rules for writing. Unfortunately, no one can agree what they are.   Somerset Maugham

You may be able to take a break from writing, but you won’t be able to take a break from being a writer.  Stephen Leigh

Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.  Truman Capote

Words are the most powerful drug used by mankind.   Rudyard Kipling

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

Lock up the 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

A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but the spirit of his friends.  Friedrich Nietsche

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

Writing is the painting of the voice.   Voltaire

Quotes About Writing-Focused on Being a Writer

Writing eases my suffering. It is my way of reaffirming my own existence.  Gao Xingjian

Anything’s possible if you’ve got enough nerve.   J. K. Rowling

I start with a question. Then I try to answer it.  Mary Lee Settle

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

If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.   George Orwell

Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up.  Jane Yolen

The six golden rules of writing: Read, read, read, and write, write, write.  Ernest Gaines

You don’t start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it’s good stuff, and then gradually get better at it. That’s why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.  Octavia E. Butler

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

Be strategic and resilient in the pursuit of your dreams. That sounds like a cheesy quote, right? But nah, I’m serious. Resilience is one hell of a quality to master, and not many have the skin for it.  Tiffany D. Jackson

It is by sitting down to write every morning that one becomes a writer .   Gerald Brenan

On writers: They belong not to one system, one nation only, but to the universe. And just because they are so very far away, it is usually many years before their light is visible to the inhabitants of this earth.  Arthur Schopenhauer

The writer must have a good imagination to begin with, but the imagination has to be muscular, which means it must be exercised in a disciplined way, day in and day out, by writing, failing, succeeding, and revising.  Stephen King

Final Thoughts on Quotes About Writing

I hope these quotes inspire you to achieve everything you wanted with your writing career.

Perhaps one day you’ll be famous and contribute your own quotes about writing. Writing is such a rewarding profession and provides the lifestyle you’ve always dreamed of.

Stay tuned for more quotes about writing and other tips and hacks to get you making money as soon as possible.

Related Posts to Quotes About Writing

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8 thoughts on “56 of the most popular quotes about writing to inspire you”.

Needful content. Keep creating content like this! Tons of love for you

Lovely quotes!! 🙂

I love writing. I believe we can say so much while writing. That’s my favorite way of expressing myself. Thank you for the quotes. They are inspiring <3

You’re welcome and I love writing too. I think it’s one of the best forms of communication and sharing knowledge. 🙂

So many wonderful quotes! It’s hard to choose a favourite, but I think Margaret Atwood’s “if I waited for perfection I would never write a word” tops the list for me. It’s such powerful advice for all creatives. But I am a huge Atwood fan so I might be a little biased 🙂 thanks for sharing!

You’re welcome. I love her too and that’s a fabulous quote.

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68 Inspiring Creativity Quotes To Spark Fresh Thinking

Are you looking for some inspiring creativity quotes? If so, you’re in the right place.

Writing apps are nice, but we all need a little inspiration sometimes.

To be creative describes combining old and new ideas in ways people don’t expect. It’s less about originality than it is about interpreting what went before you.

When you’re stuck or feeling creatively drained, the best place to look is often in the writings of creative people you admire. I’ve gathered some great quotes about creativity that inspire other writers and me.

1. Maya Angelou

2. arthur ashe, 3. saul bellow, 4. paulo coelho, 5. anthony j. d’angelo, 6. emily dickinson, 7. albert einstein, 8. henry ford, 9. robert frost, 10. napoleon hill, 11. steve jobs, 12. tom wolfe, 13. oscar wilde, 14. david foster wallace, 15. mark twain, 16. john steinbeck, 17. gertrude stein, 18. aaron sorkin, 19. arthur schopenhauer, 20. george saunders, 21. anna quindlen, 22. pablo picasso, 23. anaïs nin, 24. charles mingus, 25. john maynard keynes, 26. pablo picasso − pablo picasso: metamorphoses of the human form: graphic works, 1895-1972, 27. sylvia plath , 28. derek landy − skulduggery pleasant, 29. jacob bronowski , 30. john steinbeck , 31. austin kleon , 32. madeleine l’engle , 33. ray bradbury , 34. deepak chopra , 35. chuck palahniuk , 36. freeman dyson, 37. g.k. chesterton , 38. julio cortázar , 39. jim butcher , 40. a.p.j. abdul kalam , 41. arthur koestler , 42. scarlett thomas , 43. charles baudelaire , 44. antoine de saint-exupéry , 45. haruki murakami , 46. pablo picasso, 47. joan miro, 48. richard branson, 49. larry page, 50. criss jami, 51. neil gaiman, 52. edward debono, 53. brené brown, 55. mary lou cook, 56. dr. seuss, 57. salvador dali, 58. scott adams, 59. jack london, 60. julia cameron, 61. kurt vonnegut, 62. george bernard shaw, 63. donatella versace, 64. steve jobs, 65. leo burnett, 66. vincent van gogh, 67. eric fromm, 68. elizabeth gilbert, the final word on these top creativity quotes.

“You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.” Maya Angelou

Creativity is contagious. As this quote shows, the more time you spend writing and working on your ideas, the more you’ll have. In other words, don’t worry about the well running dry of ideas.

“Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.” Arthur Ashe

“You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.” Saul Bellow

“One day you will wake up and there won’t be any more time to do the things you’ve always wanted. Do it now.” Paulo Coelho

“Develop a passion for learning. If you do, you will never cease to grow.” Anthony J. D’Angelo

“I dwell in possibility.” Emily Dickinson

“Those who have the privilege to know have the duty to act.” Albert Einstein

I particularly like this creativity quote as Einstein had a brilliant scientific mind. But he still understood the creative process and often completed thought experiments to solve complex problems, akin to visualizing your work.

I also like his other quote, “Creativity is intelligence having fun.”

“A business that makes nothing but money is a poor business.” Henry Ford

“The best way out is always through.” Robert Frost

This quote shows, if you have a conflict of ideas, that’s normal. Keep going; keep pressing forward with your work.

“If you cannot do great things, do small things in a great way.” Napoleon Hill

“Quality is more important than quantity. One home run is much better than two doubles.” Steve Jobs

This is one of my favorite creativity quotes! It’s instructive for overcoming problems like self-doubt. Basically, it’s better to learn from a public failure than to try and perfect a masterpiece in private. Don’t let a fear of perfection hold you back.

“Put your good where it will do the most.” Tom Wolfe

“Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.” Oscar Wilde

In other words, stop waiting for the perfect moment to write, draw, or paint. Don’t let a fear of perfectionism hold you back either. Have fun with it.

“The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.” David Foster Wallace

This is a particularly popular creativity quote on social media, and for a good reason. Readers enjoy creative people who are honest and don’t hold themselves back.

“There is no such thing as a new idea. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope.” Mark Twain

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

“One must dare to be happy. “ Gertrude Stein

As creativity quotes go, this one reveals the secret of many great creative people. They spend as much time on their personal life as their work. It’s impossible to create if another part of your life is on fire.

“The world doesn’t care how many times you fall down, as long as it’s one fewer than the number of times you get back up.” Aaron Sorkin

“Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.” Arthur Schopenhauer

“What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.” George Saunders

As creativity quotes go, Saunders shows that small thing’s matter. Perhaps you can help a reader or fan of your work in some unexpected way?

“You cannot be really first rate at your work if your work is all you are.” Anna Quindlen

Sometimes we’re our own worst enemy. Unless you like burnout, it makes good sense to cultivate interests and pursuits outside of creative work.

“Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.” Pablo Picasso

Along with Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso is one of my favorite creative people. I had the pleasure of seeing some of his paintings while holidaying in Barcelona. His commitment to lifelong creative projects is inspiring. I bought a magnet with this quote and stuck it on my wall in my office.

“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” Anaïs Nin

As this quote shows, living a creative life is often deeply personal and interpreted through our own experiences and viewpoint of the world. There is no such thing as a single correct viewpoint of the world.

“Making the simple complicated is commonplace. Making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.” Charles Mingus

“The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.” John Maynard Keynes

“Others have seen what is and asked why. I have seen what could be and asked why not. ” Pablo Picasso

“The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” Sylvia Plath

“Doors are for people with no imagination.” Derek Landy

“It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it.” Jacob Bronowski

“Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.” John Steinbeck

“Draw the art you want to see, start the business you want to run , play the music you want to hear, write the books you want to read, build the products you want to use – do the work you want to see done.” Austin Kleon

“But unless we are creators we are not fully alive. What do I mean by creators? Not only artists, whose acts of creation are the obvious ones of working with paint of clay or words. Creativity is a way of living life, no matter our vocation or how we earn our living. Creativity is not limited to the arts , or having some kind of important career.” Madeleine L’Engle

“That’s the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.” Ray Bradbury

“What keeps life fascinating is the constant creativity of the soul.” Deepak Chopra

“Anymore, no one’s mind is their own.” Chuck Palahniuk

“We must be careful not to discourage our twelve-year-olds by making them waste the best years of their lives preparing for examinations.” Freeman Dyson

“The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic.” G.K. Chesterton

“All profound distraction opens certain doors. You have to allow yourself to be distracted when you are unable to concentrate.” Julio Cortázar

“I’ve always felt that the best whips and chains are in the mind. With a little creativity, the physical ones are hardly necessary.” Jim Butcher

This quote shows that creative people sometimes use their inner demons, worries, and fears to inform their work. A creative mind is sometimes a troubling place!

“When learning is purposeful, creativity blossoms. When creativity blossoms, thinking emanates. When thinking emanates, knowledge is fully lit. When knowledge is lit, economy flourishes.” A.P.J. Abdul Kalam

“Creative activity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.” Arthur Koestler

“Routine kills creative thought.” Scarlett Thomas

Creative people must find a balance between having solitude to work on their ideas and seeking new experiences to inform them. Finding that balance is a learning process.

“Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man’s physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.” Charles Baudelaire

“If a composer suffers from loss of sleep and his sleeplessness induces him to turn out masterpieces, what a profitable loss it is!” Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

“Artists are those who can evade the verbose.” Haruki Murakami

The chief enemy of creativity is good sense Pablo Picasso

The works must be confused with fire in the soul but executed with clinical coolness Joan Miro

The most talented, thought-provoking, game-changing people are never normal Richard Branson

As inspirational quotes go, this is a good one, particularly considering that Branson has set up over 40 virgin companies.

If you’re not doing some things that are crazy, then you’re doing the wrong things Larry Page

Create with the heart; build with the mind Criss Jami

Fiction is the lie that tells the truth. Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman was quoting Albert Camus here, demonstrating that the creative process involves learning from your peers.

“An idea that is developed and put into action is more important than an idea that exists only as an idea.” Edward DeBono

“The only unique contribution that we will ever make in this world will be born of our creativity.” Brené Brown

“Creativity is the greatest rebellion in existence.” Osho

“Creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes and having fun” Mary Lou Cook

“Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try! Dr. Seuss

“Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.” Salvador Dali

“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.” Scott Adams

“You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.” Jack London

“Leap, and the net will appear.” Julia Cameron

“Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, “It might have been.” Kurt Vonnegut

“Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.” George Bernard Shaw

“Creativity comes from a conflict of ideas.” Donatella Versace

“Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly and get on with improving your other innovations.” Steve Jobs

“When you reach for the stars, you might not quite get one, but you won’t come up with a handful of mud either.”  Leo Burnett

“I dream my painting and I paint my dream.” Vincent Van Gogh

“Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.” Eric Fromm

“Done is better than good.” Elizabeth Gilbert

Whether or not creativity can be taught is open to debate.

When I find a great creativity quote, I sometimes use it as a writing prompt to overcome problems like writer’s block .

I write the quote at the top of the page and spend a little time freewriting what the creativity quote means to me.

When I’m done, I remove the quote and keep what I’ve written.

I also keep a file with some of the best quotes about creativity in my computer that I draw upon when looking for something special to sprinkle over a piece of writing.

If you enjoyed these quotes about creativity, please share this post with a friend or check out my Pinterest board of quotes.

You can also check out our list of top author quotes .

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Famous Quotes on Writing

Need some writing inspiration and courage to keep going? Here are wise words from famous writers.

“A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.” ~ Richard Bach

“i only write when i’m inspired, so i see to it that i’m inspired every morning at nine o’clock.” ~ peter de vries, “talent is cheaper than table salt. what separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.” ~ steven king.

“It’s none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.” ~ Ernest Hemingway

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.” ~ Stephen King

“there is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” ~ maya angelou, “i love deadlines. i love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.” ~ douglas adams, the salmon of doubt.

“A writer is working when he’s staring out of the window.” ~ Burton Rascoe

“just write every day of your life. read intensely. then see what happens. most of my friends who are put on that diet have very pleasant careers.” ~ ray bradbury, “close the door. write with no one looking over your shoulder. don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. it’s the one and only thing you have to offer.” ~ barbara kingsolver, “the english language is an arsenal of weapons. if you are going to brandish them without checking to see whether or not they are loaded, you must expect to have them explode in your face from time to time.” ~ stephen fry, “if my doctor told me i had only six minutes to live, i wouldn’t brood. i’d type a little faster.” ~ isaac asimov.

“Every writer I know has trouble writing.” ~ Joseph Heller

“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

“there is no rule on how to write. sometimes it comes easily and perfectly: sometimes it’s like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.” ~ ernest hemingway.

“The scariest moment is always just before you start. After that, things can only get better.” ~ 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

“the best time to plan a book is while you’re doing the dishes.” ~ agatha christie, “there are three rules for writing the novel. unfortunately, no one knows what they are.” ~ w. somerset maugham, “[as a writer] you have to have the three d’s: drive, discipline and desire. if you’re missing any one of those three, you can have all the talent in the world, but it’s going to be really hard to get anything done.” ~ nora roberts, “i try to write a certain amount each day, five days a week. a rule sometimes broken is better than no rule.” ~ herman wouk.

“Never, never, never, never give up.” ~Winston Churchill

“We will open the book. Its pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year’s Day.” ~ Edith Lovejoy Pierce

“there’s no better teacher for writing than reading… get a library card. that’s the best investment.” ~ alisa valdes.

“Beginning a novel is always hard. It feels like going nowhere. I always have to write at least 100 pages that go into the trashcan before it finally begins to work. It’s discouraging, but necessary to write those pages. I try to consider them pages -100 to zero of the novel.” ~ Barbara Kingsolver

“you have to follow your own voice. you have to be yourself when you write. in effect, you have to announce, ‘this is me, this is what i stand for, this is what you get when you read me. i’m doing the best i can—buy me or not—but this is who i am as a writer.” ~ david morrell.

“A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” ~Thomas Mann

“The miraculous connection between writing and the immune system results from cracking through inhibition. It seems that when we don’t speak the truth of our experience, we inhibit our emotions, and that inhibits our immune function. Keeping secrets and maintaining denial require physical energy, energy our bodies could use in healthier ways were it available.” ~ Peggy Tabor Millin

‘if you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor.’ ~ edgar rice burroughs, “being a good writer is 3% talent, 97% not being distracted by the internet.” ~ anon.

“If you wait for inspiration to write you’re not a writer, you’re a waiter.” ~ Dan Poynter.

 “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

“words can be like x-rays if you use them properly – they’ll go through anything. you read and you’re pierced.” ~ aldous huxley, brave new world, “my first feeling was that there was no way to continue. writing isn’t like math; in math, two plus two always equals four no matter what your mood is like. with writing, the way you feel changes everything.” ~ stephenie meyer, “there is probably no hell for authors in the next world – they suffer so much from critics and publishers in this one.” ~ c.n. bovee, “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, “there is no greater threat to the critics and cynics and fearmongers than those of us who are willing to fall because we have learned how to rise.” ~ brené brown.

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April 20, 2012.

Wise Ink in Motivational | April 20, 2012

20 memorable quotes on writing and publishing from famous creatives.

Happy Friday! Phew—how was your week?

We had an awesome week filled with humbly helping and serving some incredibly creative, brilliant, and talented people to navigate the world of writing, publishing, and marketing. But sometimes…you just need some advice from the greats. The list below is compiled of some of the best quotes  we know on writing and publishing  from famous creatives. Enjoy!

“To write is human, to edit is divine.” – Stephen King “Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very’; the editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.” – Mark Twain “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” – Ernest Hemingway “All I’m writing is just what I feel, that’s all. I just keep it almost naked. And probably the words are so bland.” – Jimi Hendrix “My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living.” -Anaïs Ni “Heartbreak can definitely give you a deeper sensibility for writing songs. I drew on a lot of heartbreak when I was writing my first album. I didn’t mean to but I just did.” – Adele “I think some aspects of writing can be taught. Obviously, you can’t teach vision or talent. But you can help with comfort.” – Toni Morrison “Having listened to great songwriters like James Taylor and Carole King, I felt there was nothing new that was coming out that really represented me and the way I felt. So I started writing my own stuff.” – Amy Winehouse “Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.” -Sylvia Plath “Writing is hard work and bad for the health.” – E. B. White “And eventually as I kept writing it, something emerged that was not quite me but a version of me.” – Larry David “Publishing is a business. Writing may be art, but publishing, when all is said and done, comes down to dollars.” -Nicholas Sparks “Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.” – Alice Walker “The studios don’t seem to foster good writing. They’re not so interested in that, but they’re more interested in what worked most recently. They’re definitely very serious about making money, and that’s not a wrong thing, but you don’t have to make money the same way all the time.” – Bill Murray “When Shakespeare was writing, he wasn’t writing for stuff to lie on the page; it was supposed to get up and move around.” – Ken Kesey “In writing and politicking, it’s best not to think about it, just do it.” – Gore Vidal “And the nice thing about writing a novel is you take your time, you sit with the character sometimes nine years, you look very deeply at a situation, unlike in real life when we just kind of snap something out.” – Sandra Cisneros “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” – Maya Angelou “Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters.” -Neil Gaiman “Be ruthless about protecting writing days, i.e., do not cave in to endless requests to have ‘essential’ and ‘long overdue’ meetings on those days. The funny thing is that, although writing has been my actual job for several years now, I still seem to have to fight for time in which to do it. Some people do not seem to grasp that I still have to sit down in peace and write the books, apparently believing that they pop up like mushrooms without my connivance. ” – J.K. Rowling

Writers, whose famed guidance do you follow when seeking advice on your craft?

It’s long, but I really like this one:

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.” -Ira Glass

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AI can make you more creative—but it has limits

Although it can boost individuals’ creativity, it seems to homogenize and flatten our collective output.

• Rhiannon Williams archive page

Generative AI models have made it simpler and quicker to produce everything from text passages and images to video clips and audio tracks. Texts and media that might have taken years for humans to create can now be generated in seconds .

But while AI’s output can certainly seem creative , do these models actually boost human creativity?  

That’s what two researchers set out to explore in new research published today in Science Advances , studying how people used OpenAI’s large language model GPT-4 to write short stories.

The model was helpful—but only to an extent. They found that while AI improved the output of less creative writers, it made little difference to the quality of the stories produced by writers who were already creative. The stories in which AI had played a part were also more similar to each other than those dreamed up entirely by humans. 

The research adds to the growing body of work investigating how generative AI affects human creativity , suggesting that although access to AI can offer a creative boost to an individual, it reduces creativity in the aggregate. 

To understand generative AI’s effect on humans’ creativity, we first need to determine how creativity is measured. This study used two metrics: novelty and usefulness. Novelty refers to a story’s originality, while usefulness in this context reflects the possibility that each resulting short story could be developed into a book or other publishable work. 

First, the authors recruited 293 people through the research platform Prolific to complete a task designed to measure their inherent creativity. Participants were instructed to provide 10 words that were as different from each other as possible.

Next, the participants were asked to write an eight-sentence story for young adults on one of three topics: an adventure in the jungle, on open seas, or on a different planet. First, though, they were randomly sorted into three groups. The first group had to rely solely on their own ideas, while the second group was given the option to receive a single story idea from GPT-4. The third group could elect to receive up to five story ideas from the AI model.

Of the participants with the option of AI assistance, the vast majority—88.4%—took advantage of it. They were then asked to evaluate how creative they thought their stories were, before a separate group of 600 recruits reviewed their efforts. Each reviewer was shown six stories and asked to give feedback on the stylistic characteristics, novelty, and usefulness of the story. The researchers found that the writers with the greatest level of access to the AI model were evaluated as showing the most creativity. Of these, the writers who had scored as less creative on the first test benefited the most. 

However, the stories produced by writers who were already creative didn’t get the same boost. “We see this leveling effect where the least creative writers get the biggest benefit,” says Anil Doshi, an assistant professor at the UCL School of Management in the UK, who coauthored the paper. “But we don’t see any kind of respective benefit to be gained from the people who are already inherently creative.”

The findings make sense, given that people who are already creative don’t really need to use AI to be creative, says Tuhin Chakrabarty, a computer science researcher at Columbia University, who specializes in AI and creativity but wasn’t involved in the study. 

There are some potential drawbacks to taking advantage of the model’s help, too. AI-generated stories across the board are similar in terms of semantics and content, Chakrabarty says, and AI-generated writing is full of telltale giveaways, such as very long, exposition-heavy sentences that contain lots of stereotypes.   

“These kinds of idiosyncrasies probably also reduce the overall creativity,” he says. “Good writing is all about showing, not telling. AI is always telling.”

Because stories generated by AI models can only draw from the data that those models have been trained on, those produced in the study were less distinctive than the ideas the human participants came up with entirely on their own. If the publishing industry were to embrace generative AI, the books we read could become more homogenous, because they would all be produced by models trained on the same corpus.

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• Writing Center

Annotated Bibliography Handout

Click here to download a .pdf copy of our Annotated Bibliography Handout !

Last updated : July 18, 2024

Consider keeping a printed copy to have when writing and revising your resume!  If you have any additional questions, make an appointment or email us at [email protected] !

Writing an Annotated Bibliography

An annotated bibliography is a collection of citations (a bibliography), like a References or Works Cited page, with written annotations for each entry that summarizes and then critically evaluates the source. Annotated bibliographies are a process tool, particularly useful for larger projects, that allow you to break down a source into its main parts and tie it back to your paper. Annotations make you read more critically instead of just collecting information. Most annotations are 1 paragraph in length, about 150-200 words, including (1) the citation, (2) a summary of the main findings, and (3) an evaluation of the article’s application to your paper. Sample annotations for APA and MLA are provided in the next section. Boise State professors frequently use a 3 paragraph format, which is detailed in the final part of this guide. Basic annotations, however, will be comprised of three parts:

Provide the citation as it would appear in your bibliography page.

What is the primary argument, and what main points support the argument? What is the point of this book or article? What topics are covered? If someone asked what the source is about, what would you say?

Evaluation:

Why is it a useful source? How does it compare with other sources in your bibliography? Is the information reliable? If so, what demonstrates its reliability? If not, what undermines the source’s credibility? What is the goal of this source? How can you use this source in your paper?

Sample Annotations for APA and MLA

Indent by 0.5″ margin, similar to a block quote. Do not indent the first line of the annotation. For multiple paragraphs, indent the first line of any paragraph after the first. Title as “Annotated Bibliography” (or simply “References”).

Indent the whole annotation by 1″ margin. Do not indent the first line. If there are multiple paragraphs, indent each one, but do not add an extra space between them. Title the list as “Annotated Bibliography” or “Annotated List of Works Cited.”

Quick Guide to Annotations

1. use specific quotes from the article..

• Including quotes in your annotation lets you point to where the author(s) identify the main argument. Quotes also let you evaluate specific parts of the text and put your interpretation in conversation with the work itself. Moreover, these quotes can be helpful when you go to write your paper!
• In general, you won’t need to use in-text citations within the annotation itself, as the origin of information is clear in context (for both APA and MLA). However, you’ll want to include page numbers for direct quotes, and cite any (other) sources referenced in the annotation.

2. Put the article in conversation with your work.

• Annotated bibliographies allow you to see what has been written in the literature and where your own research or scholarship can fit. Writing an annotated bibliography is a way to develop your own point of view: How does the source change or challenge your perspective?
• When evaluating an article, ask yourself: What does it add to your topic? What are some key pieces to include in your own project? Compare and contrast your annotations with each other, too: What patterns do you see? How do ideas in one source build on ideas in another? How do they build on your topic?

3. Identify the appropriate annotation length.

• Common length is 1 paragraph (about 150-200) words. Sometimes, the summary and evaluation will be split between 2 paragraphs (and may be closer to 200-300 words).
• Professors will usually set specific requirements for the amount, length, and scope of annotations. English classes (like ENGL 102) at Boise State regularly use 3 paragraph annotations, partitioned into three paragraphs wherein you: (1) summarize the topic and main argument[s], (2) assess the authors and context, and (3) reflect on how the source adds to your project.

4. Researching articles for your bibliography.

• Quotation marks can be used in databases like Academic Search Premier or Google Scholar to limit search results to those containing specific keywords or phrases, like “writing center” or “transfer theory.”
• Academic journals (or “periodicals”) are an excellent way to find peer reviewed or scholarly articles. An easy way to see if a source is from an academic journal is to see if it has a volume or issue number. Many databases have options to filter for peer reviewed articles and will identify source types for you!
• If you’d like to learn more about researching, check out our Beginner’s Guide to Research !

The Writing Center

Writing Creatively to Make Sense of the Times We Live In

Journalist katrin schumann talks about why she writes fiction..

Updated July 12, 2024 | Reviewed by Davia Sills

• Studies show that the act of all kinds of writing hones our reflective abilities.
• Creative writing stretches our imagination, increases emotional resilience, and alleviates stress.
• Writers of nonfiction examine complex issues that are relevant to our times.
• Novelists examine the issues using characters as a vehicle for empathy.

Studies show that the act of writing hones our reflective abilities, stretches our imagination , increases emotional resilience , and alleviates stress . In my conversation with journalist-turned-novelist Katrin Schumann, we discuss how creative writing, in particular, is a worthy pursuit to understand the issues of our time. Schumann is the author of the nonfiction books Mothers Need Time Outs Too and The Secret Life of Middle Children, as well as the novels The Forgotten Hours and This Terrible Beauty .

You’re a trained journalist and the author of nonfiction books. Why, in the last few years, have you focused on writing fiction?

Writing nonfiction has been a way for me to examine complex issues that are relevant to our times, including psychological ones, but I’ve found that in recent years, I’ve been drawn to fiction because it allows me to get closer to the subject. In exploring thorny issues like loyalty and trust or co-dependency , I’m able to do more of a deep dive in fiction. The form allows me to sit with the complexities, to live in the gray areas with my characters.

I can’t always do this with nonfiction, where I’m approaching the topic from a specific angle, seeking solutions. In fiction, I have space to explore nuances that fascinate and confuse me and try to make sense of the inevitable contradictions. It’s messier and more delicate than nonfiction. For me, this feels more true to the human experience.

All writing involves deep reflection. Do you find the act of writing fiction to be a different kind of therapy?

Yes. Spending years creating characters and situations that grapple with serious, real-world problems lets me explore my own difficult experiences. For instance, I’d been wrestling with the aftermath of dealing with a narcissist when I started writing my first novel. By fictionalizing those challenges, I was able to find the courage to linger in the dark areas, examining them from all angles in order to find where the light might get in.

I discovered greater empathy and resilience in myself while also being able to acknowledge the trauma I’d been through. It’s using my imagination, combined with researching some very real and current psychological challenges, that ultimately feels most powerful to me and an effective way to reach readers.

How does fictionalizing the story give you more latitude or depth in exploring topics? You write about things like self-reliance and depression, and I’m wondering why not just write articles about it.

I write to figure out my own issues and to learn, but also to share. For me, fiction writing makes me work harder and go deeper. I’m trying to change people’s minds and hearts in subtler ways. I’m reflecting on experiences I’ve had, wrestling with what they mean, and how we can all learn from them and come out the better for it.

Yet, I don’t want to be prescriptive; I want people to draw their own conclusions. I research deeply about whatever topic I’m tackling.

To write my last novel, I studied the history of neuropsychology, dissecting studies on substance abuse . I conducted interviews. For all my books, I gather and study facts and figures, but with novels, I take that a step further. I put those facts and figures into play with my imagined characters to explore what happens. I imbue the impersonal with empathy and allow readers to try to figure out how they feel about how the characters contend with the issue. This approach leads me to meaningful personal discoveries while also taking the reader along on the emotional journey.

How do you decide whether to approach a topic in a nonfiction book or in a novel?

The more I’m personally involved with the topic, the more I want to explore it in fictional form. Ironically, for fiction, I feel like I should have an even better understanding of some of these psychological challenges than if I were covering them through straight nonfiction reportage. I first have to understand the topic and its history so my story is not only realistic but feels authentic.

I want readers to trust me, which means I have to be thorough. It’s my aim to take them on a ride that’s compelling as well as informative. And I love learning something new when I’m immersed in researching and writing fiction.

If writing fiction is about wrestling with your own demons, why not simply journal?

Journaling is, without question, a beneficial reflective activity. Yet what differentiates this kind of work from journaling about our problems or writing blog posts is that novelists are committing more time and energy to the deep dive on a specific topic. My last novel took almost three years to write, and during that time, I was reading everything I could get my hands on about the topic in order to distill it so that readers might find it relevant to their own lives.

At that stage, it’s not really about me anymore; it’s about the human condition. And in the end, that’s what readers relate to, I think. It’s what makes them call their friends and say, “I just finished this great book. You’ve got to read it.”

More about Katrin Schumann 's work

Lynne Griffin, R.N., M.Ed. , researches family life and is a novelist.

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Research shows AI can boost creativity for some, but at a cost

Geoff Brumfiel

Researchers found that AI could increase the creativity of individual writers, but it also led to many similar stories. Moor Studio/Getty Images hide caption

Can an AI chatbot make a person more creative?

Supporters of artificial intelligence say it can serve as a muse, but critics doubt it — they say that it does little more than remix existing work.

Now, new research suggests that elements of both arguments are right. AI might be able to help a person become more creative, but it risks decreasing creativity in society overall.

'New' ideas

Questions have swirled around the use of AI in art since large language models (also known as LLMs) burst on the scene almost two years ago. Companies such as OpenAI have touted their products as tools that artists could use to increase their output. While some writers say they’ve embraced AI as a tool in their creative process , many other artists and creators have expressed skepticism. Some have even sued , alleging that the tools use copyrighted work for training purposes.

Oliver Hauser, an economist at the University of Exeter in the UK who studies artificial intelligence, wanted to try and answer the basic question of whether AI could increase creativity.

“It does have a sort of incredible ability to sort of come up with content at the click of a button,” he says. On the other hand, AI can often produce stories that are similar in nature.

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“It could be that it’s not as creative as you might think, and it doesn’t help you be more creative,” he says.

To try and get some hard data on this squishy question of creativity, Hauser teamed up with Anil Doshi at the University College London School of Management. They recruited nearly 300 people, who Doshi says did not identify as professional writers. “We asked them to write a short, eight-sentence story,” he says.

Around one-third of the writers had to come up with ideas on their own, while others were given starter ideas generated by the chatbot ChatGPT 4.0. Those that got help were divided into two subgroups: one that got a single AI-generated idea, and one that got to choose from up to five.

Crucially, Doshi says, both the human-only and AI-assisted groups had to write the stories themselves.

“Our intention was to focus on whether AI can help human creativity,” Doshi says. “This was not a horse race between AI versus humans.”

The results were judged by a group of 600 evaluators. They were asked to grade each story on its “novelty” and “usefulness.” Novelty was a proxy for the story’s originality, while usefulness was a measure of whether the story was high enough quality to be published.

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The results, published today in the journal Science Advances, found that stories written with AI help were deemed both more novel and useful. Writers who had access to one AI idea did better, but those who had access to five ideas saw the biggest boost — they wrote stories seen as around 8% more novel than humans on their own, and 9% more useful. 

What’s more, Doshi says, the worst writers benefited the most.

“Those that were the least inherently creative, experienced the largest improvement in their creativity,” he says.

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So AI really does appear to make people more creative. But there’s a plot twist: When Hauser and Doshi looked at all the stories, they found a different effect.

“Collectively speaking, there was a smaller diversity of novelty in the group that had AI,” Hauser says.

The social dilemma

In other words, the chatbot made each individual more creative, but it made the group that had AI help less creative.

Hauser describes the divergent result as a “classic social dilemma” — a situation where people benefit individually, but the group suffers.

“We do worry that, at large scale, if many people are using this… overall the diversity and creativity in the population will go down,” he says

Annalee Newitz, a science fiction author and journalist , questions the findings. Trying to quantify whether a person is more creative is tricky: “I think that part of creativity is that it can’t really be measured in percentages like that,” Newitz says.

Nevertheless, when Newitz tried reproducing some of the AI story ideas themselves using the paper’s methods, they clearly saw how using AI would generate similar stories.

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For example, when asked to produce story ideas for an “adventure on the open seas,” they found AI would often incorporate the clichéd idea of finding treasure into the story. And it seemed to latch onto the phrase “the real treasure was…” — which is a common internet meme . Because AI is trained on a huge number of texts, Newitz says, it seems reasonable that it would draw from those frequently-used clichés first.

Newitz also says the social dilemma warned about in the study has already hit the sci-fi community. Last year the sci-fi magazine Clarkesworld had to close online submissions because “they were flooded with AI-written stories.”

In the end, Newitz says that they wouldn’t blame anyone who wanted to try using AI to write a story. But ultimately, they think these tools miss the point of writing.

Creative writing is “humans communicating with other humans,” Newitz says. “Even if something is badly written — even if it’s not very creative — if it’s written by a human, then it’s fulfilling its purpose.”

• artificial intelligence