Writing for me is thinking, and it’s also a way to position myself in the world, particularly when I don’t like what’s going on.
Toni Morrison
I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.
Joan Didion
If you write what you yourself sincerely think and feel and are interested in, you will interest other people.
Rachel Carson
Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions.
Carl Sagan
Write the kind of story you would like to read. People will give you all sorts of advice about writing, but if you are not writing something you like, no one else will like it either.
Meg Cabot
We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.
Ernest Hemingway
It’s by writing—by stepping back a bit from the real thing to look at it—that we are most present.
Alison Bechdel
Don’t loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club.
Jack London
A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.
Susan Sontag
I write to discover what I know.
Flannery O’Connor
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
The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.
Gustave Flaubert
I write primarily to think through my obsessions.
Jeannie Vanasco
Good writing can be defined as having something to say and saying it well.
Edward Abbey
The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.
Bernard Malamud
Talent is helpful in writing, but guts are absolutely necessary.
Jessamyn West
If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.
Stephen King
No one else sees the world the way you do, so no one else can tell the stories that you have to tell.
Charles de Lint
Forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not.
Octavia Butler
The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.
Maya Angelou
Instead of telling us a thing was “terrible,” describe it so that we’ll be terrified. Don’t say it was “delightful”; make us say “delightful” when we’ve read the description.
C.S. Lewis
Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.
Zora Neale Hurston
If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.
Toni Morrison
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
How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
Henry David Thoreau
When you write, try to leave out all the parts readers skip.
Elmore Leonard
Nothing’s a better cure for writer’s block than to eat ice cream right out of the carton.
Don Roff
If you are not afraid of the voices inside you, you will not fear the critics outside you.
Natalie Goldberg
You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.
Maya Angelou
Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish.
John Steinbeck
Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it’s the only way you can do anything really good.
William Faulkner
The first sentence can’t be written until the final sentence is written.
Joyce Carol Oates
There is no greater power on this earth than story.
Libba Bray
Easy reading is damn hard writing.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
I do not over-intellectualise the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.
Tom Clancy
The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.
Terry Pratchett
If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word.
Margaret Atwood
A word after a word after a word is power.
Margaret Atwood
My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.
Ernest Hemingway
The scariest moment is always just before you start.
Stephen King
It ain’t whatcha write, it’s the way atcha write it.
Jack Kerouac
I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.
Blaise Pascal
Truth that is naked is the most beautiful, and the simpler its expression the deeper is the impression it makes.
Arthur Schopenhauer
No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.
Robert Frost
To write is human; to edit is divine.
Stephen King
A problem with a piece of writing often clarifies itself if you go for a long walk.
Helen Dunmore
With writing, we have second chances.
Jonathan Safran Foer
The first draft of anything is shit.
Ernest Hemingway
There is a great deal that either has to be given up or be taken away from you if you are going to succeed in writing a body of work.
Susan Sontag
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
I’m writing a first draft and reminding myself that I’m simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.
Shannon Hale
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
A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.
Joan Didion
Examine every word you put on paper. You’ll find a surprising number that don’t serve any purpose.
William Zinsser
One writes out of one thing only—one’s own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give.
James Baldwin