Inspiring Quotes

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

~Ernest Hemingway

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 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

Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.

~E.L. Doctorow

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.

~William Wordsworth

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

~Anaïs Nin

I try to leave out the parts that people skip.

~Elmore Leonard

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

~Mark Twain

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

You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.
~Jack London

If I do not write to empty my mind, I go mad.
~George Gordon Byron

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."
~Neil Gaiman

Nothing's a better cure for writer's block than to eat ice cream right out of the carton.
~Don Roff

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

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

People always ask me if I’m into sports, and I say, “Well, isn’t writing a sport? If you’re doing it right, and you have a deadline, you should be sweating.”
~Jarod Kintz

I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don't know what I did before that. Just loafed, I suppose.
~P.G. Wodehouse

Don't say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream.
~Mark Twain

A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.
~Richard Bach

You can't blame a writer for what the characters say.

~Truman Capote

The thing all writers do best is find ways to avoid writing.

~Alan Dean Foster

Tell the story that's been growing in your heart, the characters you can't keep out of your head, the tale story that speaks to you, that pops into your head during your daily commute, that wakes you up in the morning.

~Jennifer Weiner

If a writer stops observing he is finished. Experience is communicated by small details intimately observed.

~Ernest Hemingway

I'm always waiting for things to be over so I can get home and commit them to paper.

~Erica Jong

A lie was something you told because you were mean or a coward. A story was something you made up out of something that might have happened. Only you didn't tell it like it was, you told it like you thought it should have been.

~Betty Smith

But this I know; the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master--something that at times strangely wills and works for itself. He may lay down rules and devise principles, and to rules and principles it will perhaps for years lie in subjection; and then, haply without any warning of revolt, there comes a time when it will no longer consent.

~Charlotte Brontë

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.
~Ernest Hemingway

When you write a story, you're telling yourself the story. When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.

~Stephen King

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

~Louis L'Amour

A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

~Thomas Mann

It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters in the end.

~Ursula K. LeGuin

He who uses his words loosely or unsteadily will either be not minded or not understood."

~John Locke

Writing is the sort of skill that must be taught by practice chiefly, and by study additionally. You can read volumes on the history and build of a gun, but until you get out in the firing range and wield the thing you will not know how to use it.

~Jennifer Freitag