Quotes for Writers

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” — Maya Angelou

“You can make anything by writing.” — C.S. Lewis

“The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.” — Albert Camus

“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” — Thomas Mann

“If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” — Toni Morrison

“There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.” — Doris Lessing

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

“A word after a word after a word is power.” — Margaret Atwood

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

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” — Anaïs Nin

“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.” — Robert Frost

“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 fear which is inherent in a human condition.” — Graham Greene

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.” — Ray Bradbury

“The scariest moment is always just before you start.” — Stephen King

“Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.” — Louis L’Amour

“The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.” — Anaïs Nin

“One day I will find the right words, and they all will be simple.” — Jack Kerouac

“Writing is its own reward.” — Henry Miller

“Writers live twice.” — Natalie Goldberg

“To survive, you must tell stories.” — Umberto Eco

“I write to discover what I know.” — Flannery O’Connor

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.” — Stephen King

“The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date.” — Margaret Atwood

“Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted.” — Jules Renard

“Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.” — Stephen King

“The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.” — John Steinbeck

“A blank piece of paper is God’s way of telling us how hard it is to be God.” — Sidney Sheldon

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” — Ernest Hemingway

“The first draft of anything is shit.” — Ernest Hemingway

“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is … the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.” — Mark Twain

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

“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” — Anton Chekhov

“I write to give myself strength. I write to be the characters that I am not. I write to explore all the things I’m afraid of.” — Joss Whedon

“Easy reading is damn hard writing.” — Nathaniel Hawthorne

“You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don’t see any.” — Orson Scott Card

“Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.” — E.L. Doctorow

“What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.” — Logan Pearsall Smith

“To write is human, to edit is divine.” — Stephen King

“I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.” — Robert Louis Stevenson

“Write what should not be forgotten.” — Isabel Allende

“A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

“If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.” — Isaac Asimov

“You must write every single day of your life.” — Ray Bradbury

“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.” — Franz Kafka

“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.” — Henry David Thoreau

“The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” — Sylvia Plath

“Tears are words that need to be written.” — Paulo Coelho

“There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story.” — Frank Herbert

“It’s none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.” — Ernest Hemingway

“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly — they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.” — Aldous Huxley

“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.” — Ernest Hemingway

“Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old-fashioned virtues of hard, constant labor, he’ll eventually make some kind of career for himself as a writer.” — Ray Bradbury

“A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.” — Richard Bach

“If you want to change the world, pick up your pen and write.” — Martin Luther

“Writing is the painting of the voice.” — Voltaire

“Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.” — E.L. Doctorow

“The best time for planning a book is while you’re doing the dishes.” — Agatha Christie

“Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.” — Norman Mailer

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.” — Stephen King

“Write drunk, edit sober.” — Ernest Hemingway

“It is perfectly okay to write garbage — as long as you edit brilliantly.” — C.J. Cherryh

“The writer is an explorer. Every step is an advance into a new land.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

“I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.” — Robert Frost

“To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.” — Herman Melville

“Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.” — Natalie Goldberg

“The duty and the task of a writer are those of an interpreter.” — Marcel Proust

“An idea, like a ghost, must be spoken to a little before it will explain itself.” — Charles Dickens

“Writers aren’t exactly people. They’re a whole bunch of people trying to be one person.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald

“What would there be in a story of happiness? Only what prepares it, only what destroys it can be told.” — André Gide

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

“Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” — David Foster Wallace

“A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.” — G.K. Chesterton

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

“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.” — Anaïs Nin

“The task of a writer consists of being able to make something out of an idea.” — Thomas Mann

“A writer is someone who has taught his mind to misbehave.” — Oscar Wilde

“Close the door. Write with no one looking over your

There are three rules for writing, unfortunately, no one knows what they are. — unknown

What’s written between the lines is more important than what’s read. — unknown

Thanks for reading :)