Quotes About Writing: 150+ Words from Famous Authors

The best writing advice doesn’t come from textbooks. It comes from writers who fought through blank pages, bad drafts, and years of rejection — then sat down and told the truth about it.

These 150+ quotes about writing span centuries and styles. Some will make you nod. Some will make you laugh. A few might be the exact sentence you need to hear before you start writing your book.

On the Writing Process

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” — Ernest Hemingway
“Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.” — E.L. Doctorow
“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.” — Joan Didion
“The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.” — Terry Pratchett
“You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.” — Jodi Picoult
“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
“I don’t know what I think until I write it down.” — Joan Didion
“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.” — Barbara Kingsolver
“The scariest moment is always just before you start.” — Stephen King
“Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” — E.L. Doctorow
“I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.” — Ernest Hemingway
“A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” — Thomas Mann
“All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald
“Writing is its own reward.” — Henry Miller
“You don’t start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it’s good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it.” — Octavia E. Butler
“I went for years not finishing anything. Because, of course, when you finish something you can be judged.” — Erica Jong
“The act of writing is the act of discovering what you believe.” — David Hare
“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” — Anais Nin
“To write is human, to edit is divine.” — Stephen King
“Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That’s why it’s so hard.” — David McCullough
“Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.” — Anne Lamott

On Getting Started

“Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.” — Louis L’Amour
“You might not write well every day, but you can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.” — Jodi Picoult
“Begin anywhere.” — John Cage
“The secret of getting ahead is getting started.” — Mark Twain
“If you wait for inspiration to write you’re not a writer, you’re a waiter.” — Dan Poynter
“Don’t waste time waiting for inspiration. Begin, and inspiration will find you.” — H. Jackson Brown Jr.
“You can’t think yourself out of a writing block; you have to write yourself out of a thinking block.” — John Rogers
“How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” — E.M. Forster
“The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.” — Walt Disney
“Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.” — Stephen King
“Just write every day of your life. Read intensely. Then see what happens.” — Ray Bradbury
“Writing about a writer’s block is better than not writing at all.” — Charles Bukowski
“Don’t get it right, get it written.” — Lee Child
“Start by doing what’s necessary; then do what’s possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible.” — Francis of Assisi
“The hardest part of writing is the sitting down to do it. The rest is easy.” — Julia Cameron
“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” — Lao Tzu

If you’re staring at a blank page right now, you’re not alone. Every writer fights that battle. Here are some ideas to get you started.

On Rewriting and Editing

“The first draft of anything is shit.” — Ernest Hemingway
“Books aren’t written — they’re rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn’t quite done it.” — Michael Crichton
“Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.” — Stephen King
“I’m not a very good writer, but I’m an excellent rewriter.” — James Michener
“Put it before them briefly so they will read it, clearly so they will appreciate it, picturesquely so they will remember it and, above all, accurately so they will be guided by its light.” — Joseph Pulitzer
“I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.” — Blaise Pascal
“So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads.” — Dr. Seuss
“I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.” — Truman Capote
“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
“Writing without revising is the literary equivalent of waltzing giddily out of the house in your underwear.” — Patricia Fuller
“The main thing I try to do is write as clearly as I can.” — E.B. White
“I can’t write five words but that I change seven.” — Dorothy Parker
“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.” — Vladimir Nabokov
“When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you’re done, you have to step back and look at the forest.” — Stephen King
“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
“Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald

On Finding Your Voice

“If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.” — Virginia Woolf
“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” — Maya Angelou
“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.” — Jack Kerouac
“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.” — Ernest Hemingway
“A word after a word after a word is power.” — Margaret Atwood
“If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” — Toni Morrison
“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
“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.” — Robert Frost
“I do not over-intellectualize the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.” — Tom Clancy
“Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.” — Natalie Goldberg
“Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.” — Ray Bradbury
“The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.” — Anais Nin
“We don’t have to write about flowers and sunshine. We write about what we know.” — Roxane Gay
“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.” — Ray Bradbury
“Becoming a writer means being creative enough to find the time and the place in your life for writing.” — Heather Sellers
“Style means the right word. The rest matters little.” — Jules Renard

On Discipline and Routine

“I only write when I am inspired. Fortunately I am inspired at 9 o’clock every morning.” — William Faulkner
“A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.” — Richard Bach
“You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.” — Jack London
“I write 2,000 words a day when I write. It sometimes takes three hours, it sometimes takes five.” — Stephen King
“Read, read, read. Read everything — trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it.” — William Faulkner
“Discipline allows magic. To be a writer is to be the very best of assassins. You do not sit down and write every morning. You sit down and kill.” — Kate Atkinson
“I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.” — Anne Frank
“Plumbers don’t get plumber’s block, and doctors don’t get doctor’s block; why should writers be the only profession that gives a special name to the difficulty of working, and then expects sympathy for it?” — Philip Pullman
“Quantity produces quality. If you only write a few things, you’re doomed.” — Ray Bradbury
“It is perfectly okay to write garbage — as long as you edit brilliantly.” — C.J. Cherryh
“The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.” — Vladimir Nabokov
“Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up.” — Jane Yolen
“I set myself 600 words a day when I write a novel, and I do it come rain, hail or shine.” — J.G. Ballard
“People on the outside think there’s something magical about writing, that you go up in the attic at midnight and cast the bones and come down in the morning with a story, but it isn’t like that. You sit in back of the typewriter and you work, and that’s all there is to it.” — Harlan Ellison
“Habit is a great deadener — but also a great enabler.” — Samuel Beckett
“The desire to write grows with writing.” — Erasmus

On Storytelling

“The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think, but to give you questions to think upon.” — Brandon Sanderson
“Stories may well be lies, but they are good lies that say true things.” — Neil Gaiman
“The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them.” — Stephen King
“Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.” — Albert Camus
“Stories are a communal currency of humanity.” — Tahir Shah
“After nourishment, shelter, and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.” — Philip Pullman
“A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.” — Graham Greene
“The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.” — Muriel Rukeyser
“It’s none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think you were born that way.” — Ernest Hemingway
“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
“People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it’s the other way around.” — Terry Pratchett
“The first sentence can’t be written until the final sentence is written.” — Joyce Carol Oates
“All human beings have an innate need to hear and tell stories and to have a story to live by.” — Harvey Cox
“Great stories happen to those who can tell them.” — Ira Glass
“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” — Anton Chekhov

Learning to tell better stories is one of the most valuable skills a writer can develop. If you’re ready to take the leap, here’s how to write a book from start to finish.

On Failure and Rejection

“You fail only if you stop writing.” — Ray Bradbury
“If you’re not failing every now and again, it’s a sign you’re not doing anything very innovative.” — Woody Allen
“I love my rejection slips. They show me I try.” — Sylvia Plath
“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
“This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until it’s done. It’s that easy, and that hard.” — Neil Gaiman
“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” — Samuel Beckett
“Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.” — Neil Gaiman
“I was the worst writer in my writing class. But I just kept at it.” — Ta-Nehisi Coates
“Rejection slips, or form letters, however tactfully phrased, are lacerations of the soul, if not quite inventions of the devil — but there is no way around them.” — Isaac Asimov
“The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.” — Emile Zola
“If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word.” — Margaret Atwood
“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” — Winston Churchill
“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” — Thomas Edison
“To survive, you must tell stories.” — Umberto Eco
“You are going to be bad at writing for a long time. And that’s fine.” — Roxane Gay

On Reading

“If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time — or the tools — to write. Simple as that.” — Stephen King
“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.” — George R.R. Martin
“Reading is the creative center of a writer’s life.” — Stephen King
“Think before you speak. Read before you think.” — Fran Lebowitz
“I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.” — Robert Louis Stevenson
“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.” — Dr. Seuss
“You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page.” — Annie Proulx
“Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river.” — Lisa See
“Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.” — John Locke
“A book is a dream that you hold in your hand.” — Neil Gaiman
“In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.” — Mortimer J. Adler

On Creativity and Inspiration

“Creativity is intelligence having fun.” — Albert Einstein
“You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.” — Maya Angelou
“Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine, and at last, you create what you will.” — George Bernard Shaw
“The desire to create is one of the deepest yearnings of the human soul.” — Dieter F. Uchtdorf
“Creativity takes courage.” — Henri Matisse
“An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.” — Oscar Wilde
“Everything you can imagine is real.” — Pablo Picasso
“I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.” — Ernest Hemingway
“Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.” — Pablo Picasso
“The creative adult is the child who survived.” — Ursula K. Le Guin
“There is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.” — Vincent van Gogh
“Curiosity about life in all of its aspects, I think, is still the secret of great creative people.” — Leo Burnett
“To be an artist means never to avert one’s eyes.” — Akira Kurosawa
“The chief enemy of creativity is good sense.” — Pablo Picasso
“Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.” — Edgar Degas
“You can never be wise and be in love at the same time, but you can always write about both.” — Oscar Wilde

Funny Quotes About Writing

“There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.” — Red Smith
“Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a 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
“I’m writing a book. I’ve got the page numbers done.” — Steven Wright
“Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.” — Mark Twain
“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.” — W. Somerset Maugham
“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.” — Douglas Adams
“Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money.” — Jules Renard
“An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.” — Gustave Flaubert
“I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.” — A.J. Liebling
“A synonym is a word you use when you can’t spell the other one.” — Baltasar Gracian
“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.” — Stephen King
“If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.” — Isaac Asimov
“People say, ‘What advice do you have for people who want to be writers?’ I say, they don’t really need advice, they know they want to be writers, and they’re gonna do it. Those people who know that they really want to do this and are cut out for it, they know it.” — R.L. Stine
“I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.” — Oscar Wilde

Keep Writing

The best thing about quotes is they remind you that every great writer started exactly where you are — staring at a blank page, wondering if they had anything worth saying.

They did. And so do you.

Pick one quote from this list. Write it on a sticky note. Put it where you’ll see it tomorrow morning. Then sit down and write.