Writing Quotes
(75+ quotes)

Writing quotes are for writers who feel compelled to write. See yourself as an author of popular books?  Get started by writing 10,000 words or more!  Practice, practice, practice makes perfect.

Writing is also a wonderful form of self-expression and a highly effective tool for healing and personal growth.  Do you have a favorite style of writing? If you could take a year off (fully paid) what sort of book would you write? Consider writing for the joy of it. Set aside 30 minutes a day to play with words and hone your skills. Walk like a writer, talk like a writer, and write daily. Have fun with it! For tips on starting journaling, contact: Marta@JoyofQuotes.com

Your personal joy, inspiration and creativity coach,





Like Writing Quotes?
Try Self-Expression, Creativity, or Story Quotes

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.
Isaac Asimov

Writing is like weeping. It’s a beautiful emotional release of something inside that needs set free.
Kellie Elmore

Some things are hard to write about. After something happens to you, you go to write it down, and either you over dramatize it, or underplay it, exaggerate the wrong parts or ignore the important ones. At any rate, you never write it quite the way you want to.
Sylvia Plath

I am the universe writing about myself.
Peter Merry

Start early and work hard. A writer’s apprenticeship usually involves writing a million words (which are then discarded) before he’s almost ready to begin. That takes a while.
David Eddings

If you would not be forgotten, as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth the writing.
Benjamin Franklin

There is no excuse. If you want to write, write. This is your life. You are responsible for it. You will not live forever. Don’t wait. Make the time now, even if it is ten minutes once a week.
Natalie Goldberg

Forget all the rules. Forget about being published. Write for yourself and celebrate writing.
Melinda Haynes

A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them. That is, he does not draw on a reservoir; instead, he engages in an activity that brings to him a whole succession of unforeseen stories, poems, essays, plays, laws, philosophies, religions.
William Stafford

I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being conscious of living.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh

My congratulations to you, sir. Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.
Samuel Johnson

Like every writer, I am asked where my work orginates, and if I knew I would go there more often to find more.
Arthur Miller

Goals in writing are dreams with deadlines.
Brian Tracy

If you can't annoy somebody with what you write, I think there's little point in writing.
Kingsley Amis

Nobody asks you to do this. The world out there is not panting after another novelist. We choose it.
Paul Auster

Write even when you don't want to, don't much like what you're writing, and aren't writing particularly well.
Agatha Christie

Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents and everyone is writing a book.
Cicero

I simply don't know how anyone can write at great speed, and only for the money's sake.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Happy are they who don't doubt themselves and whose pens fly across the page. I myself hesitate, I falter, I become angry and fearful, my drive diminishes as my taste improves, and I brood more over an ill-suited word than I rejoice over a well-proportioned paragraph.
Gustave Flaubert

It's none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think you were born that way.
Ernest Hemingway

Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure only death can stop it
Ernest Hemingway

The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.
Samuel Johnson

One writes to make a home for oneself, on paper, in time and in other's minds.
Alfred Kazin

There's a word for a writer who never gives up: published.
Joe Konrath

If you wait for inspiration, you're not a writer, but a waiter.
Louis L'Amour

All books are either dreams or swords. You can cut, or you can drug, with words.
Amy Lowell

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.
Iris Murdoch

The author must keep his mouth shut when his work starts to speak.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Write as often as possible, not with the idea at once of getting into print, but as if you were learning an instrument.
J. B. Priestley

No matter what you do, somebody always imputes meaning into your books.
Dr. Seuss

A writer's duty is to register what it is like for him or her to be in the world.
Zadie Smith

Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.
William Saroyan

The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.
John Steinbeck

It is worth mentioning, for future reference, that the creative power which bubbles so pleasantly in beginning a new book quiets down after a time, and one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in. Then one becomes resigned. Determination not to give in, and the sense of an impending shape keep one at it more than anything.
Virginia Woolf

To grow as a writer, you grow as a person. There's no way to work on one without the other.
Heather Sellers

Be yourself. Above all. Let who you are, what you are, what you believe, shine through every sentence you write, every piece you finish.
John Jakes

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

The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean.
Robert Louis Stevenson

When you use words, you're able to keep your mind alive. Writing is my way of reaffirming my own existence.
Gao Xingjian

You never have to change anything you get up in the middle of the night to write.
Saul Bellow

Talent is helpful in writing, but guts are absolutely necessary.
Jessamyn West

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. That's why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.
Octavia Butler

Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.
Virginia Woolf

It's never too late - in fiction or in life - to revise.
Nancy Thayer

Every writer I know has trouble writing.
Joseph Heller

The writer, when he is also an artist, is someone who admits what others don’t dare reveal.
Elia Kazan

A writer is someone for whom writing is harder than for other people.
Thomas Mann

Sit down, and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.
Colette

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

Writing became such a process of discovery that I couldn't wait to get to work in the morning: I wanted to know what I was going to say.
Sharon O'Brien

Everything in life is writable if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise.
Sylvia Plath

You write to communicate to the hearts and minds of others what's burning inside you. And we edit to let the fire show through the smoke.
Arthur Polotnik

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

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.
Rainer Maria Rilke

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop.
Vita Sackville-West

The wastebasket is a writer's best friend.
Isaac Bashevis Singer

What things there are to write, if one could only write them! My mind is full of gleaming thought; gay moods and mysterious, moth-like meditations hover in my imagination, fanning their painted wings. But always the rarest, those streaked with azure and the deepest crimson, flutter away beyond my reach.
Logan Pearsall Smith

There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.
Walter Wellesley "Red" Smith

Don't look at the world with your hands in your pockets. To write about it you have to reach out and touch it.
Mark Twain

I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.
Mark Twain

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

The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is you really want to say.
Mark Twain

Write what you know.
Mark Twain

I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head.
John Updike

Writing is both mask and unveiling.
E. B. White

To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the music the words make.
Truman Capote

When I face the desolate impossibility of writing 500 pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I write one page and then another. One day’s work is all that I can permit myself to contemplate.
John Steinbeck

There are two kinds of writers: those that make you think, and those that make you wonder.
Brian Aldiss

Write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable.
Francis Bacon

Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.
Jorge Luis Borges

Put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.
Colette

I went for years not finishing anything. Because, of course, when you finish something you can be judged...I had poems which were re-written so many times I suspect it was just a way of avoiding sending them out.
Erica Jong

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

I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter.
James Michener

If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.
Toni Morrison

Every time you write, something valuable will occur.
SARK

When we commit ourselves to writing for some part of each day we are happier, more enlightened, alive, lighthearted and generous to everyone else. Even our health improves.
Brenda Veland

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.
William Wordsworth

Asking a writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp post how it feels about dogs.
Ann Landers

This is our goal as writers, I think: to help others have this sense of wonder, of seeing things anew, things that catch us off-guard, that break in our small bordered worlds. When this happens everything feels more spacious.
Anne Lamott

I am in a beautiful prison from which I can only escape by writing.
Anaïs Nin



Like Writing Quotes?
Try Self-Expression, Creativity, or Story Quotes



Follow Me on Pinterest
Copyright © 2022 JoyofQuotes.com. All rights reserved.




Search Joy of Quotes: