Top 100 Quotes About Writing (2024 Update)
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51. “Writing fiction, especially a long work of fiction, can be a difficult, lonely job; it’s like crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a bathtub. There’s plenty of opportunity for self-doubt.”

— Stephen King

52. “If I stop writing I am dead. And that’s the only way I’ll stop: dead.”

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Neil Gaiman

54. “There’s a secret that real writers know that wannabe writers don’t, and the secret is this: It’s not the writing part that’s hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write. What keeps us from sitting down is Resistance.”

— Steven Pressfield

55. “Every first draft is perfect, because all a first draft has to do is exist.”

— Jane Smiley

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

— Philip Roth

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

— Ray Bradbury

58. “Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul.”

— Anne Lamott

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

— Jack Kerouac

60. “If you write a hundred short stories and they’re all bad, that doesn’t mean you’ve failed. You fail only if you stop writing.”

— Ray Bradbury

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

— Stephen King

62. “Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.”

— Mark Twain

63. “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

64. “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”

— Maya Angelou

65. “Write hard and clear about what hurts. ”

— Ernest Hemingway

66. “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

67. “Write without pay until somebody offers to pay.”

— Mark Twain

68. “In order to write about life first you must live it.”

— Ernest Hemingway

69. “Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.”

— Isaac Asimov

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

— Roald Dahl

71. “The hard part about writing a novel is finishing it.”

— Ernest Hemingway

72. “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”

— Mark Twain

73. “Writers are desperate people and when they stop being desperate they stop being writers.”

— Charles Bukowski

74. “If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.”

— George Orwell

75. “You fail only if you stop writing.”

— Ray Bradbury

76. “The only kind of writing is rewriting.”

— Ernest Hemingway

77. “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”

— Anne Lamott

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

— Saul Bellow

79. “It’s the writing that teaches you.”

— Isaac Asimov

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

— Albert Camus

81. “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. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.”

— Henry David Thoreau

82. “Write as well as you can and finish what you start.”

— Ernest Hemingway

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Neil Gaiman

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

— Douglas Adams

86. “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

87. “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

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

— Stephen King

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

— William Faulkner

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

— Howard Nemerov

91. “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

92. “All readers come to fiction as willing accomplices to your lies. Such is the basic goodwill contract made the moment we pick up a work of fiction.”

— Steve Almond

93. “A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author’s soul.”

— Aldous Huxley

94. “I’m writing a book. I’ve got the page numbers done.”

— Steven Wright

95. “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

96. “To write is human, to edit is divine.”

— Stephen King

97. “Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”

— Stephen King

98. “Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That’s why it’s so hard.”

— David McCullough

99. “You lose your grip, and then you slip into the Masterpiece.”

— Leonard Cohen

100. “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness.”

— Oscar Wilde