55 Most Inspirational Writing Quotes By Famous Authors

1.  “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”-Maya Angelou

2. “What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though.”-J.D. Salinger

3. “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.-Toni Morrison

4. “You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.”-Madeleine L’Engle

5. “If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”-Stephen King

6. “Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”-Virginia Woolf

7. 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

8. “One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.”-Jack Kerouac

9. “Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It’s a way of understanding it.”-Lloyd Alexander

10. “And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”-Sylvia Plath

11. “Ordinary life is pretty complex stuff.”-Harvey Pekar

12. “You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.”-Saul Bellow

13. “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”-Robert Frost

14. “Read, read, read. Read everything — trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it’s good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out of the window.”-William Faulkner

15. “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter.  This is the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”-Mark Twain.“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”-Ray Bradbury

16. “The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”-Stephen King

17. “Fiction is the truth inside the lie.”-Stephen King

18. “Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.”-Louis L’Amour

19.“The scariest moment is always just before you start.”-Stephen King

20. “After nourishment, shelter, and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.”-Philip Pullman

21. “History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.”-Winston S. Churchill

22. “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”-Henry David Thoreau

23. “Stories may well be lies, but they are good lies that say true things, and which can sometimes pay the rent.”-Neil Gaiman

24. “We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.”-Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

25. “There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”-W. Somerset Maugham

26. “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”-Stephen King

27. “A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”-Thomas Mann

28. “You can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will.”-Stephen King

29. “Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.”-Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

30. “Let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences”-Sylvia Plath

35. “Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.”-William Wordsworth

31. “Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters.”-Neil Gaiman

32.“I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.”-Robert Louis Stevenson

33. “Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it’s always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.”-Neil Gaiman

34. “A word after a word after a word is power.”-Margaret Atwood

35. “Tears are words that need to be written.”-Paulo Coelho

36. “You must write every single day of your life… You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads… may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.”-Ray Bradbury

37. “I write to give myself strength. I write to be the characters that I am not. I write to explore all the things I’m afraid of. ”-Joss Whedon

38. “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

39. “Imagination is like a muscle. I found out that the more I wrote, the bigger it got.”-Philip Jose Farmer

40. “This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until it’s done. It’s that easy, and that hard.”-Neil Gaiman

41. “To survive, you must tell stories.”-Umberto Eco

42. “You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”-Jack London

43. “A short story is a different thing altogether “ a short story is like a quick kiss in the dark from a stranger.”-Stephen King

44. “If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.”-Isaac Asimov

45. “That’s what fiction is for. It’s for getting at the truth when the truth isn’t sufficient for the truth.”-Tim O’Brien

46. “If you’re holding out for universal popularity, I’m afraid you will be in this cabin for a very long time.” — J.K. Rowling

47. “I try to create sympathy for my characters, then turn the monsters loose.” — Stephen King

48. “You fail only if you stop writing.”— Ray Bradbury

49. “It’s none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think you were born that way.”— Ernest Hemingway

50. “As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand.”― Ernest Hemingway

51. “I can shake off everything as I write. My sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.”— Anne Frank

52. “Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it’s the only way you can do anything really good.” — William Faulkner

53. “I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don’t know what I did before that. Just loafed, I suppose.”— P.G. Wodehouse

54. “To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.” — Herman Melville

55. “To gain your own voice, you have to forget about having it heard.” — Allen Ginsberg, WD