Every writer knows that inspiration sometimes feels like a rare, fleeting moment. But the right words from those who’ve walked the path before us can spark creativity and reignite our passion for storytelling.
Whether you’re working on your first draft, struggling with writer’s block, or polishing the final pages, these 80 motivational quotes are here to fuel your journey and remind you why you fell in love with writing in the first place.
Let these words of wisdom inspire your inner author and help you put pen to paper with renewed purpose.
Let’s Get Started
1. “You don’t start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it’s good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it.” – Octavia E. Butler
2. “Start before you’re ready.” – Steven Pressfield
3. “Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.” – Ray Bradbury
4. “The scariest moment is always just before you start.” – Stephen King
5. “I don’t wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that. Your mind must know it has got to get down to work.” – Pearl S. Buck
6. “Writing is the painting of the voice.” – Voltaire
7. “You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.” – Annie Proulx
8. “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., A Man Without a Country
9. “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
10. “Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.” – Benjamin Franklin
11. “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” – Toni Morrison
12. “If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.” – Stephen King
13. “My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.” – Ernest Hemingway
14. “Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.” – Louis L’Amour
15. “I get a lot of letters from people. They say, ‘I want to be a writer. What should I do?’ I tell them to stop writing to me and get on with it.” – Ruth Rendell
16. “You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page” – Jodi Picoult
17. “Write your first draft with your heart. Rewrite with your head.” – Mike Rich
18. “Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure. Emotion is easily transferred from the writer to the reader.” – Joseph Joubert
19. “Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It’s the one and only thing you have to offer.” – Barbara Kingsolver
20. “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.” – Stephen King
21. “If a story is in you, it has to come out.” – William Faulkner
22. “So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads.” – Dr. Seuss
23. “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 a book.” – Samuel Johnson
24. “You can make anything by writing.” – C.S. Lewis
25. “I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.” – Robert Louis Stevenson
26. “If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn’t matter a damn how you write.” – Somerset Maugham
27. “If the book is true, it will find an audience that is meant to read it.” – Wally Lamb
28. “If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word.” – Margaret Atwood
29. “Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.” – William Wordsworth
30. “When I write, I give people access to their own emotions.” – Gord Downie
31. “There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know where they’ll take you.” – Beatrix Potter
32. “Writing is a calling, not a choice.” – Isabel Allende
33. “For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.” – Catherine Drinker Bowen
Getting Stuck with a Writers Block?
34. “Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” – E. L. Doctorow
35. “If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.” – Isaac Asimov
36. “There’s no such thing as writer’s block. That was invented by people in California who couldn’t write.” – Terry Pratchett
37. “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
38. “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
39. “A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
40. “The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.” – Thomas Jefferson
41. “You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.” – Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing
42. “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
43 . “You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.” – Saul Bellow
44. “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” – Anaïs Nin
45. “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
46. “I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.” – Robert Frost
47. “Words are our most inexhaustible source of magic.” – J. K. Rowling
48. “Tell the readers a story! Because without a story, you are merely using words to prove you can string them together in logical sentences.” – Anne McCaffrey
49. “The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.” – Terry Pratchett
50. “Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it’s the only way you can do anything really good.” – William Faulkner
51. “It is perfectly okay to write garbage as long as you edit brilliantly.” – C. J. Cherryh
52. “Give me books, fruit, French wine, fine weather and a little music.” – John Keats
53. “You write to communicate to the hearts and minds of others what’s burning inside you, and we edit to let the fire show through the smoke.” – Arthur Plotnik
54. “When you make music or write or create, it’s really your job to have mind-blowing, irresponsible, c**domless s** with whatever idea it is you’re writing about at the time.” – Lady Gaga
55. “I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.” – Douglas Adams
56. “Words are a lens to focus one’s mind.” – Ayn Rand
57. “Believe in yourself! Have faith in your abilities! Without a humble but reasonable confidence in your own powers, you cannot be successful or happy.” – Norman Vincent Peale
58. “I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being conscious of living.” – Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Need More Motivation?
59. “And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.” – John Steinbeck
60. “That’s the thing about books, they let you travel without moving your feet.” – Jhumpa Lahiri
61. “Ignore all hatred and criticism. Live for what you create, and die protecting it.” – Lady Gaga
62. “Difficulties mastered are opportunities won.” – Winston Churchill
63. “If you have no critics, you’ll likely have no success.” – Malcolm X
64. “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
65. “You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.” – Jack London
66. “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
67. “I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.” – James Michener
68. “Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.” – Albert Einstein
69. “The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.” – Albert Camus
70. “A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.” – Susan Sontag
Ready to Finalize Your Book?
71. “When your story is ready for rewrite, 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
72. “My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.” – Anton Chekhov
73. “When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you’re done, you have to step back and look at the forest.” – Stephen King
74. “Anyone and everyone taking a writing class knows that the secret of good writing is to cut it back, pare it down, winnow, chop, hack, prune, and trim, remove every superfluous word, compress, compress, compress…” – Nick Hornby
75. “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it. Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can’t allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative.” – Elmore Leonard
76. “Writing without revising is the literary equivalent of waltzing gaily out of the house in your underwear.” – Patricia Fuller
77. “As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand.” – Ernest Hemingway
78. “To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.” – Herman Melville
79. “Almost anyone can be an author; the business is to collect money and fame from this state of being.” – A. A. Milne
80. “Writing is like s**. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.” – Virginia Woolf
