1. “You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.”
–Maya Angelou
2. “Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.”
-Arthur Ashe
3. “You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.”
–Saul Bellow
4. “One day you will wake up and there won’t be any more time to do the things you’ve always wanted. Do it now.”
-Paulo Coelho
5. “The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”
-Stephen King
6. “Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it’s the answer to everything. … It’s the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it’s a cactus.”
–Enid Bagnold
7. “Cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can’t fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.”
–William S. Burroughs
8. “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.”
-Steve Almonds
9. “It ain’t whatcha write, it’s the way atcha write it.”
-Jack Kerouac
10. “Not a wasted word. This has been a main point to my literary thinking all my life.”
–Hunter Thomson
11. “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.”
-George Orwell
12. “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.”
-Stephen King
13. “If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.”
-Peter Handke
14. “To defend what you’ve written is a sign that you are alive.”
-William Zinsser
15. “If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, all of us.”
-William Faulkner
16. “For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.”
-Catherine Bower
17. “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.”
-Gore Vidal
18. “We’re past the age of heroes and hero kings. … Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it’s up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting.”
-John Updike
19. “The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book.”
–Samuel Johnson
20. “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it. Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can’t allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative.”
–Elmore Leonard
21. “Write. Rewrite. When not writing or rewriting, read. I know of no shortcuts.”
-Larry L. King
22. “Know your literary tradition, savor it, steal from it, but when you sit down to write, forget about worshipping greatness and fetishizing masterpieces.”
–Allegra Goodman
23. “I’m out there to clean the plate. Once they’ve read what I’ve written on a subject, I want them to think, ‘That’s it!’ I think the highest aspiration people in our trade can have is that once they’ve written a story, nobody will ever try it again.”
–Richard Crammer
24. “There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.”
-Dorris Lessing
25. “Style means the right word. The rest matters little.”
-Jules Renard
26. “I do not over-intellectualise the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.”
–Tom Clancy
27. “The writing of a novel is taking life as it already exists, not to report it but to make an object, toward the end that the finished work might contain this life inside it and offer it to the reader. The essence will not be, of course, the same thing as the raw material; it is not even of the same family of things. The novel is something that never was before and will not be again.”
–Eudora Weldy
28. “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.”
–Lawrence Block
29. “Don’t expect the puppets of your mind to become the people of your story. If they are not realities in your own mind, there is no mysterious alchemy in ink and paper that will turn wooden figures into flesh and blood.”
-Leslie Bernard
30. “If you tell the reader that Bull Beezley is a brutal-faced, loose-lipped bully, with snake’s blood in his veins, the reader’s reaction may be, ‘Oh, yeah!’ But if you show the reader Bull Beezley raking the bloodied flanks of his weary, sweat-encrusted pony, and flogging the tottering, red-eyed animal with a quirt, or have him booting in the protruding ribs of a starved mongrel and, boy, the reader believes!”
-Fred East
31. “Plot is people. Human emotions and desires founded on the realities of life, working at cross purposes, getting hotter and fiercer as they strike against each other until finally there’s an explosion—that’s Plot.”
-Leigh Brackett
32. “The first sentence can’t be written until the final sentence is written.”
–Joyce Carol Oates
33. “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.”
–Stephen King
34. “Long patience and application saturated with your heart’s blood—you will either write or you will not—and the only way to find out whether you will or not is to try.”
-Jim Tully
35. “I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing his talent he would be wise to develop a thick hide.”
–Harper Lee
36. “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.”
–RL Stine
37. “I don’t need an alarm clock. My ideas wake me.”
–Ray Bradbury
38. “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.”
–Ray Bradbury
39. “Let the world burn through you. Throw the prism light, white hot, on paper.”
–Ray Bradbury
40. “It’s none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think you were born that way.”
–Ernest Hemingway
41. “Writers are always selling somebody out.”
-Joan Didion
42. “Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.”
-Robert Heinlein
43. “Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at 15 to write several novels.”
–May Sarton
44. “I think all writing is a disease. You can’t stop it.”
–William Carlos Williams
45. “The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes.”
-Andre Gide
Here were some of the best-selected Writing Quotes that are for awesome writers like you. Put these on WhatsApp status or Some cool Facebook Caption. Here’s the best list that compiles all of the awesome Quotes on Writing. For more such awesome quotes, try out our Compilation of Best Game of Thrones Quotes.
