Inspiration, ideas, and a kick-in-the-pants for those of us who write (or want to)
For years I’ve collected quotes on every conceivable topic. Quotes by writers about writing is my favorite. Here’s a collection to help inspire you in your own writing career.
“Focus on the writing. It’s the only thing you have true control over. Keep writing good books until you get lucky. That’s your marketing plan.” — JA Konrath
“Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.” — Mel Brooks
“It’s called a pen. It’s like a printer, hooked straight to my brain.” — Dale Dauten
“The conscious mind is the editor, and the subconscious mind is the writer.” — Steve Martin
“Easy reading is damn hard writing. But if it’s right, it’s easy. It’s the other way round, too. If it’s slovenly written, then it’s hard to read. It doesn’t give the reader what the careful writer can give the reader.” — Maya Angelou
“Writing means sharing. It’s part of the human condition to want to share things — thoughts, ideas, opinions.” — Paulo Coelho
“Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.” — Sylvia Plath
“Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.” — Isaac Asimov
“My mother wanted us to understand that the tragedies of your life one day have the potential to be comic stories the next.” — Nora Ephron
“Don’t be afraid to make a mistake, your readers might like it.” — William Randolph Hearst
“To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald
“Words — so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.” — Nathaniel Hawthorne
“An idea, like a ghost, must be spoken to a little before it will explain itself.” — Charles Dickens
“Writing is one of the few professions in which you can psychoanalyze yourself, get rid of hostilities and frustrations in public, and get paid for it.” — Octavia Butler
“Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.” — Benjamin Franklin
“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
“There is a tradition that sees journalism as the dark side of literature, with book writing at its zenith. I don’t agree. I think that all written work constitutes literature, even graffiti.” — Eduardo Galeano
“Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.” — Boris Pasternak
“An attack upon our ability to tell stories is not just censorship — it is a crime against our nature as human beings.” — Salman Rushdie
“Commas in The New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim.” — E. B. White
“My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald
“I made a decision to write for my readers, not to try to find more readers for my writing.” — Seth Godin
“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
“There are men who can write poetry, and there are men who can read balance sheets. The men who can read balance sheets cannot write.” — Henry R. Luce
“A #2 pencil and a dream can take you anywhere.” — Joyce Meyer
“Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.” — John Updike
“Most truths are so naked that people feel sorry for them and cover them up, at least a little bit.” — Edward R. Murrow
“Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace and wit, reminders of order, calm and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm nor cold, light nor dark.” — Germaine Greer
“If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.” — Juan Ramon Jimenez, poet, Nobel Prize in literature (1881–1958)
What I like in a good author isn’t what he says, but what he whispers.” — Logan Pearsall Smith, Essayist (1865–1946)
“Grasp the subject, the words will follow.” — Cato the Elder, Statesman, soldier, and writer (234–149 BC)
‘From my close observation of writers… they fall into two groups: 1) those who bleed copiously and visibly at any bad review, and 2) those who bleed copiously and secretly at any bad review.’ — Isaac Asimov
“Your writing voice is the deepest possible reflection of who you are. The job of your voice is not to seduce or flatter or make well-shaped sentences. In your voice, your readers should be able to hear the contents of your mind, your heart, your soul.” — Meg Rosoff
“In this time of the Internet and nonfiction, to be on an actual bookshelf in an actual bookstore is exciting in itself.” — Chris Abani
“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” — Ernest Hemingway
“If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead, either write something worth reading or do things worth writing.” — Benjamin Franklin
“Follow the path of the unsafe, independent thinker. Expose your ideas to the danger of controversy. Speak your mind and fear less the label of ‘crackpot’ than the stigma of conformity.” — Thomas J. Watson
“Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.” — Isaac Asimov
“When someone is mean to me, I just make them a victim in my next book.”― Mary Higgins Clark
“You may tell a tale that takes up residence in someone’s soul, becomes their blood and self and purpose. That tale will move them and drive them and who knows that they might do because of it, because of your words. That is your role, your gift.”― Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus
“All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.”― Leo Tolstoy
“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 End of the Affair
“Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river.”― Lisa See, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
“I have always held the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of work of fiction should be to tell a story.”― Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White
“Things worth telling — take time”― Nicholas Denmon
“If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor.” — Edgar Rice Burroughs
“Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.” — James Joyce
“It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.” — Robert Benchley
“I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
“The art of newspaper paragraphing is to stroke a platitude until it purrs like an epigram.” — Don Marquis
This list only scratches the surface. Let me and us know your favorite writing quotes.
But more importantly, keep writing!
How can you accelerate your passion, purpose, and talents? That’s the focus.
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Ken West is the author of Get What You Want, later republished as Achieve Your Purpose.
