First Published: April 27, 2016; Last Updated: Wednesday, July 18, 2018.
I love inspirational quotes. I really do. Over the past several years, I have published many lists of my favorite quotes collection — on life, success, innovation, perfection, and entrepreneurship.
I have been saving quotes that I found on writing for a while now, and I do feel that there is enough to make it into a list. It’s very focused and is targeting writers (including bloggers ;) ).
Words (especially in quotes) are powerful, in fact so powerful that it can give you goosebumps. So here I’m listing some of the famous quotes on writing — for you and for me — I really hope it helps you stay focused and stay inspired all the time.
Wait, do remember one thing:
“Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.” — Thomas Alva Edison
I truly believe these quote will inspire you to perspire to write more, even more, and even more than that.
#Start
- “A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.” — Richard Bach
- “Don’t worry about what you’re writing or whether it’s good or even whether it makes sense.” — Lauren Oliver
- “Start before you’re ready.” — Steven Pressfield
- “The first draft of anything is shit.” — Ernest Hemingway
- “It is perfectly okay to write garbage — as long as you edit brilliantly.” — C. J. Cherryh
- “Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.” — Anne Lamott
- “If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor.” — Edgar Rice Burroughs
- “You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.” — Jodi Picoult
- “Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.” — Stephen King
- “Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.” — Stephen King
- “Write your first draft with your heart. Rewrite with your head.” — Mike Rich
- “Everything begins with an idea.” — Earl Nightengale
- “Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.” — Arthur Ashe
- “I think I did pretty well, considering I started out with nothing but a bunch of blank paper.” — Steve Martin
- “It’s none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think you were born that way.” — Ernest Hemingway
- “Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it’s the only way you can do anything really good.” — William Faulkner
- “Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you’re doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.” — E. L. Doctorow
- “The only way to learn to write is to write.” — Peggy Teeters
- “Done is better than perfect.” — Sheryl Sandberg
#Writer’sBlock
- “Write drunk; edit sober.” — Peter De Vries
- “I find it hard to start writing in the morning; but the dejection lasts only 30 minutes, and once I start I forget all about it.” — Virginia Woolf
- “There’s no such thing as writer’s block. That was invented by people in California who couldn’t write.” — Terry Pratchett
- “You can’t think yourself out of a writing block; you have to write yourself out of a thinking block.” — John Rogers
- “Writing about a writer’s block is better than not writing at all.” — Charles Bukowski
- “Don’t waste time waiting for inspiration. Begin, and inspiration will find you.” — H. Jackson Brown Jr.
- “I haven’t had trouble with writer’s block. I think it’s because my process involves writing very badly.” — Jennifer Egan
- “Find the most important things you MUST do. Do those things first. Do other things later or not at all.” — Darren Rowse
- “Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” — Ernest Hemingway
- “Don’t get it right, just get it written.” — James Thurber
#Reading
- “Every book I’ve read appears in my writing.” — Rob Bignell
- “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 you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. Reading is the creative center of a writer’s life. You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.” — Stephen King
- “It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.” — Oscar Wilde
- “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
#Writing
- “Write about what makes you different.” — Sandra Cisneros
- “You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald
- “The desire to write grows with writing.” — Desiderius Erasmus
- “Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.” — Louise L’Amour
- “The story I am writing exists, written in absolutely perfect fashion, some place, in the air. All I must do is find it, and copy it.” — Jules Renard
- “Write without pay until somebody offers to pay.” — Mark Twain
- “Write what you know. Write what you want to know more about. Write what you’re afraid to write about.” — Cec Murphy
- “Easy reading is damn hard writing.” — Nathaniel Hawthorne
- “A word after a word after a word is power.” — Margaret Atwood
- “Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing about.” — Benjamin Franklin
- “If you can’t explain something simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” — Albert Einstein
- “Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.” — William Wordsworth
- “Writing is talking, except you get the chance to edit what you just said.” — Bangambiki Habyarimana
- “Write what should not be forgotten.” — Isabel Allende
- “Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it’s about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It’s about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy.” — Stephen King
- “Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.” — Gloria Steinem
- “It’s no secret that the best place to write, in my opinion, is in a café. You don’t have to make your own coffee, you don’t have to feel like you’re in solitary confinement and if you have writers block, you can get up and walk to the next café while giving your batteries time to recharge and brain time to think.” — J. K. Rowling
- “Write the kind of story you would like to read. People will give you all sorts of advice about writing, but if you are not writing something you like, no one else will like it either.” — Meg Cabot
- “Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.” — Natalie Goldberg
- “Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It’s the one and only thing you have to offer.” — Barbara Kingsolver
#Creativity
- “Whether you’re keeping a journal or writing as a meditation, it’s the same thing. What’s important is you’re having a relationship with your mind.” — Natalie Goldberg
- “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
- “Few things are impossible to diligence and skill. Great works are performed not by strength, but perseverance.” — Samuel Johnson
- “Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.” — Stephen King
- “I think… the most brilliant thing about being a writer is that if you don’t like the way the world is, you can create your own.” — Maegan Cook
- “I am a writer because I write, an author because I create, a poet because the words are in my soul.” — Wesley D. Gray
Perfection
- “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” — Aristotle
- “If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word.” — Margaret Atwood
- “Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft.” — Anne Lamott
- “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
- “I’m a perfectionist. Sometimes I have to remind myself that it’s okay if there are flaws here and there.” — Tyra Banks
#Success
- “Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.” — E. L. Doctorow
- “Writers live twice.” — Natalie Goldberg
- “Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.” — Isaac Asimov
- “Good writing is clear thinking made visible.” — William Wheeler
- “As long you are still living, you can achieve far more than you could ever imagined.” — Benjamin Suulola
- “I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.” — Flannery O’Connor
- “Writing is its own reward.” — Henry Miller
- “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
- “Eighty percent of success is just showing up.” — Woody Allen
- “The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.” — Ellen Parr
- “Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time.” — Leonard Bernstein
- “Be wiser than other people, if you can; but do not tell them so.” — Philip Dormer Stanhope
- “You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we’re doing it.” — Neil Gaiman
- “It is amazing how much you can accomplish when it doesn’t matter who gets the credit.” — Harry S. Truman
- “True authors don’t write for fame or to make a name or money, they write to make impact.” — Bernard Kelvin Clive
- “I have been successful probably because I have always realized that I knew nothing about writing and have merely tried to tell an interesting story entertainingly.” — Edgar Rice Burroughs
- “If it’s still in your mind, it is worth taking the risk.” — Paulo Coelho
- “To live a creative life we must first lose the fear of being wrong.” — Joseph Chilton Pearce
- “Failure? I never encountered it. All I met were temporary setbacks.” — Dottie Walters
- “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” — Jim Rohn
#Pro
- “Writers don’t forget the past; they turn it into raw material.” — Joyce Rachelle
- “Words are the most powerful drug used by mankind.” — Rudyard Kipling
- “Good habits are worth being fanatical about.” — John Irving
- “If writing seems hard, it’s because it is hard. It’s one of the hardest things people do.” — William Zinsser
- “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
- “A writer will always be a writer. It’s not a choice, it’s a destiny.” — Stephanie Lennox
- “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” — Anais Nin
- “One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.” — Jack Kerouac
- “Pay no attention to what critics say; no statue has ever been erected to a critic.” — Jean Sibelius
- “Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.” — John Anster
- “I made a startling discovery. Time spent writing = output of work. Amazing.” — Ann Pachett
- “I can shake off everything if I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.” — Anne Frank
- “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” — Joan Didion
- “There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.” — Ernest Hemingway
- “Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.” — Ernst F. Schumacher
- “I’m a slow writer: five, six hundred words is a good day. That’s the reason it took me 20 years to write those million and a half words of the Civil War.” — Shelby Foote
So, which are your favorite quotes on writing? If it’s missing here then let me know as a comment below and I will be happy to add it to the list (as it might just inspire other writers as well).
Stay focused, stay inspired! And write more, even more, and even more than that. :)
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