At times, every young writer needs encouragement. So, why not take inspiration from some of the best in the business? Our collection of 114 profound quotes about writing was penned by some of the most successful authors in history. They share advice about overcoming writer’s block, the art of revision, and the power that honest writing has to transform the world. Share these quotes with your students and watch their creativity blossom!
1. “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” – Maya Angelou
2. “The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.” – Terry Pratchett
3. “I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.” – Anne Frank
4. “Words are, in my not-so-humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic.” – J.K. Rowling
5. “The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.” – Albert Camus
6. “The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words.” – William H. Gass
7. “Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.” – E. L. Doctorow
8. “A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.” – Richard Bach
9. “Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.” – Louis L’Amour
10. “You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.” – Saul Bellow
11. “I write to discover what I know.” – Flannery O’Connor
12. “To write well, express yourself like the common people, but think like a wise man.” – Aristotle
13. “The first sentence can’t be written until the final sentence is written.” – Joyce Carol Oates
14. “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” – Anaïs Nin
15. “Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.” – Benjamin Franklin
16. “Writing is the painting of the voice.” – Voltaire
17. “Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.” – E.L. Doctorow
18. “A word after a word after a word is power.” – Margaret Atwood
19. “Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.” – Gloria Steinem
20. “Write hard and clear about what hurts.” – Ernest Hemingway
21. “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.” – Robert Frost
22. “One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.” – Jack Kerouac
23. “Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly — they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.” – Aldous Huxley
24. “Writing is its own reward.” – Henry Miller
25. “A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.” – Susan Sontag
26. “I write for the same reason I breathe – because if I didn’t, I would die.” – Isaac Asimov
27. “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” – Ernest Hemingway
28. “The desire to write grows with writing.” – Desiderius Erasmus
29. “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
30. “You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.” – Jodi Picoult
31. “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” – Toni Morrison
32. “Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” – Anton Chekhov
33. “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
34. “A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” – Thomas Mann
35. “If you wish to be a writer, write.” – Epictetus
36. “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
37. “The best time for planning a book is while you’re doing the dishes.” – Agatha Christie
38. “I don’t know about lying for novelists. I look at some of the great novelists, and I think the reason they are great is that they’re telling the truth.” – Maya Angelou
39. “Every writer I know has trouble writing.” – Joseph Heller
40. “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
41. “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
42. “To gain your own voice, you have to forget about having it heard.” – Allen Ginsberg
43. “Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.” – Graham Greene
44. “Writing is really just a matter of writing a lot, writing consistently and having faith that you’ll continue to get better and better. Sometimes, people think that if they don’t display great talent and have some success right away, they won’t be able to succeed. But writing is about struggling through and learning and finding out what it is about writing itself that you really love.” – Laura Kasischke
45. “You simply sit down at the typewriter, open your veins, and bleed.” – Walter Wellesley “Red” Smith
46. “I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.” – James Michener
47. “I’m not a very good writer, but I’m an excellent rewriter.” – James Michener
48. “Ink and paper are sometimes passionate lovers, oftentimes brother and sister, and occasionally mortal enemies.” – Terri Guillemets
49. “I try to leave out the parts that people skip.” – Elmore Leonard
50. “A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity.” – Franz Kafka
51. “A writer never has a vacation. For a writer, life consists of either writing or thinking about writing.” – Eugene Ionesco
52. “I am a part of everything that I have read.” – Theodore Roosevelt
53. “Prose is architecture, not interior decoration.” – Ernest Hemingway
54. “If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write.” – Stephen King
55. “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” – Ernest Hemingway
56. “Half my life is an act of revision.” – John Irving
57. “Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it’s the only way you can do anything really good.” – William Faulkner
58. “The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day … you will never be stuck.” – Ernest Hemingway
59. “We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.” – Ernest Hemingway
60. “I hate writing, I love having written.” – Dorothy Parker
61. “Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.” – Bernard Malamud
62. “Words are the most powerful drug used by mankind.” – Rudyard Kipling
63. “My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.” – Ernest Hemingway
64. “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.” – Elmore Leonard
65. “The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.” – Thomas Jefferson
66. “A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it.” – Mark Twain
67. “I write to discover what I think.” – Joan Didion
68. “The hardest part about writing is thinking, not writing.” – Joy Williams
69. “Writing is like sewing together what I call these ‘buttons,’ these bits and pieces.” – Sandra Cisneros
70. “Every writer is a frustrated actor who recites his lines in the hidden auditorium of his skull.” – Rod Serling
71. “Words are the currency of communication. A successful writer uses words to build scenes from nothing, to create characters that exist only in their minds, and to move plots forward. They create realities out of thin air and, with only their words as tools, convince others to believe in them.” – Unknown
72. “Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say.” – Barbara Kingsolver
73. “Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterward.” – Robert A. Heinlein
74. “To write is human, to edit is divine.” – Stephen King
75. “The Six Golden Rules of Writing: Read, read, read, and write, write, write.” – Ernest Gaines
76. “Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.” – E.B. White
77. “A word is dead when it is said, some say. I say it just begins to live that day.” – Emily Dickinson
78. “Writing is thinking on paper.” – William Zinsser
79. “Writers live twice.” – Natalie Goldberg
80. “Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader – not the fact that it’s raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.” – E.L. Doctorow
81. “Writing is not life, but I think that sometimes it can be a way back to life.” – Stephen King
82. “The best time to plan a book is while you’re doing the dishes.” – Agatha Christie
83. “Writing is a job, a talent, but it’s also the place to go in your head. It is the imaginary friend you drink your tea with in the afternoon.” – Ann Patchett
84. “The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.” – Gustave Flaubert
85. “The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.” – Anaïs Nin
86. “You can make anything by writing.” – C.S. Lewis
87. “Writing is an escape from a world that crowds me. I like being alone in a room. It’s almost a form of meditation.” – Neil Simon
88. “Writing is a sweet, wonderful reward.” – Franz Kafka
89. “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
90. “Writing is a struggle against silence.” – Carlos Fuentes
91. “No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader’s intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing.” – E.B. White
92. “Writing is an act of faith. I believe it’s also an act of hope, the hope that things can get better than they are.” – Margaret Atwood
93. “Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted.” – Jules Renard
94. “I think all writing is a disease. You can’t stop it.” – William Carlos Williams
95. “Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book, your composition of yourself is at stake.” – E.L. Doctorow
96. “A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity.” – Franz Kafka
97. “All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald
98. “Words are a lens to focus one’s mind.” – Ayn Rand
99. “Writing is both mask and unveiling.” – E.B. White
100. “Writing gives you the illusion of control, and then you realize it’s just an illusion, that people are going to bring their own stuff into it.” – David Sedaris
101. “Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money.” – Jules Renard
102. “If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.” – Peter Handke
103. “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
104. “A book is simply the container of an idea—like a bottle; what is inside the book is what matters.” – Angela Carter
105. “Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.” – Stephen King
106. “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
107. “Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up.” – Stephen King
108. “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.” – Douglas Adams
109. “Writing is not a serious business. It’s a joy and a celebration. You should be having fun with it.” – Ray Bradbury
110. “Writers see the world differently. Every voice we hear, every face we see, every hand we touch could become story fabric.” – Buffy Andrews
111. “Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.” – Isaac Asimov
112. “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.” – John Green
113. “I can always edit a bad page. I can’t edit a blank page.” – Jodi Picoult
114. “To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.” – Herman Melville
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