Whether your goal is to become one of the famous authors or just improve your vocabulary, keep track of your dreams, and keep a journal of all the goings-on in your world, writing daily can bring about some amazing effects in your life. Inspirational writing quotes will bring out the writer in you and give you some motivation to write more!
If you’re searching for top quotes from the World’s greatest writers that perfectly capture what you’d like to say or just want to feel inspired yourself, browse through an amazing collection of inspirational quotes by poets on poetry, acting quotes, inspiring reading quotes, and school quotes.
Beautiful Writing Quotes
The road to hell is paved with adverbs. Stephen King
Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of 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.
Write quickly and you will never write well; write well, and you will soon write quickly. Marcus Fabius Quintilianus
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.
Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass. Anton Chekhov
I was set free because my greatest fear had been realized, and I still had a daughter who I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became a solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.
Sooner or later every writer evolves his own definition of a story. Mine is: A reflection of life plus beginning and end life seems not to have either and a meaning.
If you’re holding out for universal popularity, I’m afraid you will be in this cabin for a very long time.
Comparisons deplete the actuality of the things compared William S. Wilson
Why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me.
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
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.
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
I’ve always believed in writing without a collaborator, because where two people are writing the same book, each believes he gets all the worry and only half the royalties.
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 days I’m lucky to squeeze out a page of copy that pleases me, but I get as many as six or seven pages on a very good day; the average is probably three pages.
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 terrible 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
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.
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
I try to create sympathy for my characters, then turn the monsters loose.
Story is metaphor for life and life is lived in time. Robert McKee
Making people believe the unbelievable is no trick; it’s work Belief and reader absorption come in the details: An overturned tricycle in the gutter of an abandoned neighborhood can stand for everything.
Good writing is like a windowpane. George Orwell
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.
In good writing, words become one with things. Ralph Waldo Emerson Remember: Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations.
All good writing leaves something unexpressed. Christian Nestell Bovee
You fail only if you stop writing.
I believe that writing is derivative. I think good writing comes from good reading. Charles Kuralt
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.
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
It’s none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think you were born that way.
The problems of the human heart in conflict with itself alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. William Faulkner
As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand.
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
Write something that’s worth fighting over. Because that’s how you change things. That’s how you create art.
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
This is how you do it: You sit down at the keyboard and and you put one word after another until it’s done. It’s that easy, and that hard.
By the time I am nearing the end of a story, the first part will have been reread and altered and corrected at least one hundred and fifty times. I am suspicious of both facility and speed. Good writing is essentially rewriting. I am positive of this Roald Dahl
I can shake off everything as I write. My sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.
You don’t write about the horrors of war. No. You write about a kid’s burnt socks lying in the road. Richard Price
I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing his talent, he would be wise to develop a thick hyde.
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author. G.K. Chesterton
There are some people who live in a dream world, and there are some who face reality; and then there are those who turn one into the other.
The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do. Thomas Jefferson
You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.
Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way. Ray Bradbury
Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it’s the only way you can do anything really good.
Easy reading is damn hard writing. Nathaniel Hawthorne
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.
The secret of being a bore is to tell everything. Voltaire
A word after a word after a word is power.
It’s not wise to violate the rules until you know how to observe them. T.S. Eliot
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.
If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time or the tools to write. Simple as that. Stephen King
If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.
Write what will stop your breath if you don’t write. Grace Paley
I write to discover what I know.
What is the essence of the art of writing? Part One: Have something to say. Part Two: Say it well. Edward Abbey
Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.
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
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.
The one common thread in all of the books that are falling apart on my shelf? Characters flawed ones with desires and needs who spend most of the story tripping over their weaknesses in an effort to get what they want. Becca Puglisi
I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don’t know what I did before that. Just loafed, I suppose.
You take people, you put them on a journey, you give them peril, you find out who they really are. Joss Whedon
To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.
Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations. Ray Bradbury
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.
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
A blank piece of paper is God’s way of telling us how hard it is to be God.
In displaying the psychology of your characters, minute particulars are essential. God save us from vague generalizations! Anton Chekhov
I went for years not finishing anything. Because, of course, when you finish something you can be judged.
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. Kurt Vonnegut
To gain your own voice, you have to forget about having it heard.
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
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.
Everyone here seems to have some weird secret or other. Iris Murdoch
Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of 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.
When I am writing, I’m very much on the ground, on the same ground my characters are treading. Graham Swift
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.
When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away. Kurt Vonnegut
I’m not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn’t make us better, then what on earth is it for.
Action, reaction, motivation, emotion, all have to come from the characters. Writing a love scene requires the same elements from the writer as any other. Nora Roberts
I don’t care if a reader hates one of my stories, just as long as he finishes the book.
The real story is not the plot, but how the characters unfold by it. Vanna Bonta
Writing is sweat and drudgery most of the time. And you have to love it in order to endure the solitude and the discipline.
My only conclusion about structure is that nothing works if you don’t have interesting characters and a good story to tell. Harold Ramis
Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works.
Almost all great writers have as their motif, more or less disguised, the passage from childhood to maturity, the clash between the thrill of expectation and the disillusioning knowledge of truth. ‘Lost Illusion’ is the undisclosed title of every novel. Andre Maurois
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.
