The 100+ Most Famous Writing Quotes of All Time

Renowned authors and imaginative minds have long been a fountain of encouragement and wisdom for those of us undertaking creative pursuits. When we’re craving a spark of motivation or a nugget of wisdom, a compelling quote can often light the way.

The masters of the written word have a unique way of distilling their vast experiences and profound insights into succinct, impactful statements. So, we've curated a collection of quotes that encapsulate the essence of inspiration, creativity, and the art of writing itself.

Whether you're in search of the perfect quote to share with a fellow writer or seeking inspirational words to boost your own creative journey, this collection is designed to ignite your passion for storytelling and spark your imagination.

Quotes about writing

• Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers — Isaac Asimov
• Home is the cats, my books, and my work never done — Patti Smith
• There is nothing at all to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed — Ernest Hemingway
• The only way to write is to write — John Steinbeck
• 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
• It’s terribly dangerous for an artist to fulfil other people’s expectations — David Bowie
• The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance — Aristotle
• Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand — George Orwell

Quotes on being a writer

• If you're writing, you're a writer — Neil Gaiman
• The terrible thing about being a writer is that you don’t decide to become one, you discover that you are one — James Baldwin
• The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself — Albert Camus
• I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear — Joan Didion
• The role of a writer is not to say all we can say, but what we are unable to say — Anaïs Nin
• The writer's job is to tell the truth — Ernest Hemingway
• One role of the writer today is to sound the alarm. The environment is disintegrating, the hour is late, and not much is being done — E.B White
• To name something truly is to lay bare what may be brutal or corrupt (or important or possible) and key to the work of changing the world is changing the story — Rebecca Solnit
• You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say — F. Scott Fitzgerald
• A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people — Thomas Mann
• Writers have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live really. The second one is romantic, it is separate from themselves, it is not real but it is really there — Gertrude Stein
• Writers do not merely reflect and interpret life, they inform and shape life — E.B. White
• A writer is someone who has taught his mind to misbehave — Oscar Wilde

Famous quotes about creativity

• Creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes and having fun — Mary Lou Cook
• Creativity is intelligence having fun — Albert Einstein
• Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work — Gustave Flaubert
• The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenalin but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity — Glenn Gould
• Creativity is the combination of discipline and a childlike spirit — Robert Greene
• An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail — Dr Edwin Land
• Creativity takes courage — Henri Matisse
• I tell you: one must have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star — From Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
• The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt — Sylvia Plath

Famous quotes on writing a book

• There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you — Maya Angelou
• There is something compelling about the blank page that beckons you in to write something on it. It must be filled — Margaret Atwood
• You’ve got to be able to look at your thoughts on paper and discover what a fool you were — Ray Bradbury
• 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
• The best time for planning a book is while you're doing the dishes — Agatha Christie
• Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go — E.L. Doctorow
• What you cannot fix is the perfection of a blank page. What you cannot fix is that pristine, unsullied whiteness of a screen or a page with nothing on it, because there's nothing there to fix — Neil Gaiman
• You are ready. Start making stuff — Austin Kleon
• The scariest moment is always just before you start — Stephen King
• A blank page is also a door — it contains infinity, like a night sky with a supermoon really close to the Earth, with all the stars and the galaxies, where you can see very, very clearly… — David Mitchell
• Start with a phrase, a line, a quote. Questions are very helpful. Begin with a few you’re carrying right now — Naomi Shihab Nye
• I always in writing start with a name. Give me a name and it produces a story, not the other way about normally — JRR Tolkien

Inspirational writing quotes

• I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by — Douglas Adams
• Be not afraid of going slowly, be afraid of standing still — Chinese Proverb
• Don't be a writer; be writing — William Faulkner
• Writing is easy: All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead — Gene Fowler
• People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are — Steve Jobs
• It always seems impossible, until it's done — Nelson Mandela
• The depths are obscured in us when we try to force feelings; we clarify them by giving them adequate time and space and letting them come — Stephen Nachmanovich
• The first draft is just you telling yourself the story — Terry Pratchett
• Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar — E.B. White
• We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection — Anaïs Nin
• Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but that's the only way you can do anything really good — William Faulkner

Quotes about editing and revising a novel

• The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon — Robert Cormier
• Perfection is not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away — Antoine de Saint-Exupery
• In writing, you must kill all your darlings — William Faulkner
• Write drunk; edit sober — Ernest Hemmingway
• The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do — Thomas Jefferson
• The road to hell is paved with adverbs — Stephen King
• I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter — James Michener
• The most important thing in writing is to have written. I can always fix a bad page. I can't fix a blank one — Nora Roberts
• The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightening and a lightening bug — Mark Twain
• There's no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written — Oscar Wilde
• Usually I compose only with great difficulty and endless rewriting — JRR Tolkien
• There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are - W Somerset Maugham

Quotes about using emotion in your writing

• Learning the craft, understanding what language can do, gaining control of the language, enables one to make people weep, make them laugh… — Maya Angelou
• No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader — Robert Frost
• All romance books are about one theme: love conquers all... That journey from hole-hearted to whole-hearted is the romance arc for each character — Gwen Hayes
• Any fool with steady hands and a working set of lungs can build up a house of cards and then blow it down, but it takes a genius to make people laugh — Stephen King
• Novels ought to have hope; at least, American novels ought to have hope. French novels don't need to — Anne Lamott
• Our sense of enchantment is not triggered only by grand things... The awe-inspiring, the numinous, is all around us, all the time. It becomes valuable when we value it — Katherine May
• A work responds to the reader’s, not the author’s, questions. Once written, the work has a life of its own distinct from that of its author, a life granted by its successive readers — Octavio Paz
• The best stories don't come from ‘good vs bad’, but from ‘good vs good’ — Leo Tolstoy
• Maybe we can’t draw flesh from reverie nor retrieve a dusty spur, but we can gather the dream itself and bring it back uniquely whole — Patti Smith
• Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works — Virginia Woolf

Quotes about mastering the writing craft

• A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit — Richard Bach
• My responsibility as a writer is to be as good as I can be at my craft — Maya Angelou
• Don't tell me the moon is shining: show me the glint of light on broken glass — Anton Chekhov
• A good writer is always a people watcher — Patricia Highsmith
• The only way to do great work is to love what you do — Steve Jobs
• If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write — Stephen King
• If you want to be a writer, you have to write. Everyday. No excuses — Walter Mosley
• In the exposition we put a pot of water on the stove; getting the action to rise is making the water boil — George Saunders
• A scene without conflict is a scene without tension... which is to say, a scene that gives us no reason to read it — Chuck Wendig
• 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
• It is a writer's greatest pleasure to hear that someone was kept up until the unholy hours of the morning reading one of his books. It goes back to authors being terrible people who delight in the suffering of others — Brandon Sanderson

Writing motivation quotes

• Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it — Maya Angelou
• I can't give you a sure fire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure: try to please everybody all the time — Herbert Bayard Swope
• The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do — Steve Jobs
• If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete — Jack Kornfield
• The best way to predict your future is to create it — Abraham Lincoln
• Care about what other people think and you will always be their prisoner — Lao Tzu
• Do one thing everyday that scares you — Eleanor Roosevelt
• And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is’ — Kurt Vonnegut

Quotes about getting ideas

• Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats — Howard Aiken
• I don't need an alarm clock. My ideas wake me — Ray Bradbury
• Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to split open — Natalie Goldberg
• Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like — Paul Graham
• If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it — Toni Morrison
• A writer should concern himself with whatever absorbs his fancy, stirs his heart, and unlimbers his typewriter — E.B. White
• Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly — Franz Kafka

Learning from the greats

For us, quotes from famous writers are like beacons guiding us through the writing process. Ernest Hemingway tells us to pour our feelings out. Antoine de Saint-Exupery teaches us to keep our stories simple, taking away anything that's not needed. Stephen King warns us to use our words carefully to make our writing strong. These tips show us how to become better writers. They tell us to trust our own way of writing and to keep learning and getting better. If these writers did it, so can you!

Writing philosophy in practice

When you read a lot of advice from different writers, you'll notice they don't all agree. Hemingway's idea of writing being tough doesn't quite match Stephen King's idea of it being an adventure. Flaubert liked things orderly, but Kerouac loved just letting ideas flow freely. That's okay, though. Writing is about finding what works for you.

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