Top 50 Quotes About Writing (2023 Update)

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

— Beatrix Potter

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

— Stephen King

3. “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

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

— Louis L'Amour

5. “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

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

— Anton Chekhov

7. “You can make anything by writing.”

— C. S. Lewis

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

— Stephen King

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

— Frank Herbert

10. “You can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will.”

— Stephen King

11. “Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.”

— E. L. Doctorow

12. “Tears are words that need to be written.”

— Paulo Coelho

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

— Anne Frank

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

— Philip José Farmer

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

— Philip Pullman

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

— Ernest Hemingway

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— Aldous Huxley

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19. “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”

— Anaïs Nin

20. “I always start writing with a clean piece of paper and a dirty mind. ”

— Patrick Dennis

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

— Toni Morrison

22. “I write to discover what I know.”

— Flannery O'Connor

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

— Anaïs Nin

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

— Jack London

25. “A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”

— Thomas Mann

26. “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

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

— Lloyd Alexander

28. “The secret to getting ahead is getting started.”

— Mark Twain

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29. “Fiction is the truth inside the lie.”

— Stephen King

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

— Ernest Hemingway

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31. “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

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

— Ernest Hemingway

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

— Robert Frost

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34. “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

35. “The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.”

— Philip Roth

36. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Stephen King

39. “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

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

— Roald Dahl

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

— Saul Bellow

42. “The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.”

— Albert Camus

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Douglas Adams

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

— Neil Gaiman

46. “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

47. “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

48. “The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”

— Stephen King

49. “If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, all of us.”

— William Faulkner

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

— Howard Nemerov