Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.
-William Wordsworth
The artist doesn’t have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don’t have the time to read reviews.
-William Faulkner
If you’re not failing now and again, it’s a sign you’re not doing anything very innovative.
-Woody Allen
Writing is a struggle against silence.
-Carlos Fuentes
Write what should not be forgotten.
-Isabel Allende
You have to finish things — that’s what you learn from, you learn by finishing things.
-Neil Gaiman
It’s by writing.. by stepping back a bit from the real thing to look at it, that we are most present.
-Alison Bechdel
Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.
-Susan Sontag
All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.
-Ernest Hemingway
At the end of the day your ability to connect with your readers comes down to how you make them feel.
-Benjamin J. Carey
Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
-Kurt Vonnegut
Advice? I don’t have advice. Stop aspiring and start writing. If you’re writing, you’re a writer. Write like you’re clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last breath, and you’ve got just one last thing to say.
-Alan Watts
We write to taste life in the moment and in retrospect.
-Anais Nin
If you write what you yourself sincerely think and feel and are interested in, the chances are very high that you will interest other people as well.
-Rachel Carson
In any art you’re allowed to steal anything if you can make it better.
-Ernest Hemingway
Don’t write so that you can be understood, write so that you can’t be misunderstood.
-William Howard Taft
Writing is its own reward.
-Henry Miller
Yes there is a meaning; at least for me, there is one thing that matters – to set a chime of words tinkling in the minds of a few fastidious people.
-Logan Persall Smith
One writes most of all in order to take part in a collective enterprise.
-Italo Calvino
A writer without interest or sympathy for the foibles of his fellow man is not conceivable as a writer.
-Joseph Conrad
A writer is a world trapped in a person.
-Victor Hugo
The only story that seems worth writing is a cry, a shot, a scream. A story should break the reader’s heart.
-Susan Sontag
An absolutely necessary part of a writer’s equipment, almost as necessary as talent, is the ability to stand up under punishment, both the punishment the world hands out and the punishment he inflicts upon himself.
-Irwin Shaw
As a writer, the worst thing you can do is work in an environment of fear of rejection.
-Carol Leifer
Without great solitude no serious work is possible.
-Pablo Picasso
I am not a great artist, but I have always felt impelled to write. So each day I sift the sludge anew, going through the cast-off bits and pieces of observation, of memory, of speculation, trying to make something out of the stuff that didn’t go through the filter and down the drain into the subconscious.
-Stephen King
The work never matches the dream of perfection the artist has to start with.
-William Faulkner
You can only write regularly if you’re willing to write badly… Accept bad writing as a way of priming the pump, a warm-up exercise that allows you to write well.
-Jennifer Egan
Go inside where silence is. Stay there. Let words bubble up.
-Maxime Lagacé
The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.
-Terry Pratchett
Every writer I know has trouble writing.
-Joseph Heller
One of the nicest things about writing for children is that you don’t find them deconstructing novels. Either they like it or they don’t like it.
-J.K. Rowling
Your word is the power that you have to create; it is a gift.
Don Miguel Ruiz
Words have the power to make things happen.
-Frederick Buechner
Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.
-Louis L’Amou
Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.
-E. B. White
Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.
-Stephen King
On first drafts: It is completely raw, the sort of thing I feel free to do with the door shut — it’s the story undressed, standing up in nothing but its socks and undershorts.
-Stephen King
If you want to change the world, pick up your pen and write.
-Martin Luther
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 writer.
-Ray Bradbury
Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.
-James Baldwin
The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.
-Thomas Jefferson
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
One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you’re maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones.
-Stephen King
Not a wasted word. This has been a main point to my literary thinking all my life.
-Hunter S. Thompson
Write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable.
-Francis Bacon