100 Quotes About Writing, By Great Novelists

Author quotes about writing are some of the most profound.

If you have never tried writing a novel you would have no idea of how hard it is, or how to begin. Even the most famous novelists sometimes despair at how hard it is. With the below quotes they also offer sound advice on what to expect if you decide to write a novel, how to begin, how to proceed, and perhaps most important, the importance of fiction in human culture.

These authors also tell you why they write and what the rewards are. For a collection of such individual thinkers they are in a surprising degree of agreement!

Here are a hundred author quotes about writing, offering comments on all aspects of the creative writing process, mixed to give a general impression of what a novel is and what writing one entails:

“The task of a writer consists of being able to make something out of an idea.” — Thomas Mann

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

“A writer is a world trapped in a person.” — Victor Hugo

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

“It is by sitting down to write every morning that one becomes a writer.” — Gerald Brenan

 “Write what should not be forgotten.” — Isabel Allende

“When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.” — George Orwell

“Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of 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

“Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.” — Stephen King

“Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.” — Natalie Goldberg

“Cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can’t fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.” — William S. Burroughs

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

“A blank piece of paper is God’s way of telling us how hard it is to be God.” — Sidney Sheldon

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at the typewriter and bleed.” — Ernest Hemingway

. “Be willing to write really badly.” — Jennifer Egan

“Anyone who says writing is easy isn’t doing it right.” — Amy Joy

“Get through a draft as quickly as possible.” — Joshua Wolf Shenk

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

 “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

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

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

“A writer never has a vacation. For a writer life consists of either writing or thinking about writing.” — Eugene Ionesco

. “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” — Anais Nin

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

“The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.” — Zadie Smith

“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

. “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

“The story must strike a nerve in me. My heart should start pounding when I hear the first line in my head. I start trembling at the risk.” — Susan Sontag

I’m very lucky in that I don’t understand the world yet. If I understood the world, it would be harder for me to write these books.” — Mo Willems

“It is only by writing, not dreaming about it, that we develop our own style.” — P.D. James

. “Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.” — Virginia Woolf

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

“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

“Everywhere I go, I’m asked if the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them.” — Flannery O’Connor

“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 draft is just you telling yourself the story.” — Terry Pratchett

“I do not over-intellectualise the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.” — Tom Clancy

“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

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

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

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

 “There are some books that refuse to be written. They stand their ground year after year and will not be persuaded. It isn’t because the book is not there and worth being written — it is only because the right form of the story does not present itself. There is only one right form for a story and, if you fail to find that form, the story will not tell itself.” — Mark Twain

“The Six Golden Rules of Writing: Read, read, read, and write, write, write.” — Ernest Gaines

“One sure window into a person’s soul is his reading list.” — Mary B. W. Tabor

“Sometimes the ideas just come to me. Other times I have to sweat and almost bleed to make ideas come. It’s a mysterious process, but I hope I never find out exactly how it works. I like a mystery, as you may have noticed.” — J.K. Rowling

“Ideas are cheap. It’s the execution that is all important.” — George R.R. Martin

“First, find out what your hero wants, then just follow him.” — Ray Bradbury

“Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.” — John Steinbeck

“I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.” — Douglas Adams

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

“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” — Ernest Hemingway

“You can fix anything but a blank page.” — Nora Roberts

“There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story.” — Frank Herbert

. “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 a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.” — Peter Handke

“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

 “If you wait for inspiration to write you’re not a writer, you’re a waiter.” — Dan Poynter

“I don’t want just words. If that’s all you have for me, you’d better go.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald

“If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word.” — Margaret Atwood

“I would advise any beginning writer to write the first drafts as if no one else will ever read them — without a thought about publication — and only in the last draft to consider how the work will look from the outside.” — Anne Tyler

. “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

“Your writing voice is the deepest possible reflection of who you are. The job of your voice is not to seduce or flatter or make well-shaped sentences. In your voice, your readers should be able to hear the contents of your mind, your heart, your soul.” — Meg Rosoff

 “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

“I just give myself permission to suck. I delete about 90 percent of my first drafts, so it doesn’t really matter much if on a particular day I write beautiful and brilliant prose that will stick in the minds of my readers forever, because there’s a 90 percent chance I’m just going to delete whatever I write anyway. I find this hugely liberating.” — John Green

“Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don’t see any.” — Orson Scott

“I believe myself that a good writer doesn’t really need to be told anything except to keep at it.” — Chinua Achebe

“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. That’s why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.” ― Octavia E. Butler

“You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.” ― Jodi Picoult

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

“You just have to go on when it is worst and most helpless — there is only one thing to do with a novel and that is go straight on through to the end of the damn thing.” — Ernest Hemingway

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

“When your story is ready for a 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

“The main thing I try to do is write as clearly as I can. I rewrite a good deal to make it clear.” — E.B. White

“So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads.” ― Dr. Seuss

“Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now.” — Annie Dillard

“It doesn’t matter how many book ideas you have if you can’t finish writing your book.” — Joe Bunting

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

 “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 labour, he’ll eventually make some kind of career for himself as a writer.” — Ray Bradbury

“Editing might be a bloody trade, but knives aren’t the exclusive property of butchers. Surgeons use them too.” — Blake Morrison

“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

“Half my life is an act of revision.” — John Irving

“I would write a book, or a short story, at least three times — once to understand it, the second time to improve the prose, and a third to compel it to say what it still must say. Somewhere I put it this way: first drafts are for learning what one’s fiction wants him to say. Revision works with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to reform it. Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.” — Bernard Malamud

 “I am not at all in a humour for writing; I must write on until I am.” — Jane Austen

“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

“I’ve been writing since I was six. It is a compulsion, so I can’t really say where the desire came from; I’ve always had it. My breakthrough with the first book came through persistence, because a lot of publishers turned it down.” — J.K. Rowling

“I’m all for the scissors. I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.” — Truman Capote

“Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.” — Henry David Thoreau

 “Focus more on your desire than on your doubt, and the dream will take care of itself.” — Mark Twain

“It is perfectly okay to write garbage — as long as you edit brilliantly.” — C. J. Cherryh

“I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.” — Gustave Flaubert

“As for ‘Write what you know,’ I was regularly told this as a beginner. I think it’s a very good rule and have always obeyed it. I write about imaginary countries, alien societies on other planets, dragons, wizards, the Napa Valley in 22002. I know these things. I know them better than anybody else possibly could, so it’s my duty to testify about them.” — Ursula K. Le Guin

“One thing that helps is to give myself permission to write badly. I tell myself that I’m going to do my five or 10 pages no matter what, and that I can always tear them up the following morning if I want. I’ll have lost nothing — writing and tearing up five pages would leave me no further behind than if I took the day off.” — Lawrence Block

“Just write every day of your life. Read intensely. Then see what happens. Most of my friends who are put on that diet have very pleasant careers.” — Ray Bradbury

“A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.” — Richard Bach

“The best advice on writing was given to me by my first editor, Michael Korda, of Simon and Schuster, while writing my first book. ‘Finish your first draft and then we’ll talk,’ he said. It took me a long time to realize how good the advice was. Even if you write it wrong, write and finish your first draft. Only then, when you have a flawed whole, do you know what you have to fix.” — Dominick Dunne

“I go out to my little office, where I’ve got a manuscript, and the last page I was happy with is on top. I read that, and it’s like getting on a taxiway. I’m able to go through and revise it and put myself — click — back into that world.” — Stephen King

“I think all writing is a disease. You can’t stop it.” — William Carlos Williams

“A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it.” — Roald Dahl

“I’ve found the best way to revise your own work is to pretend that somebody else wrote it and then to rip the living shit out of it.” ― Don Roff

“People say, ‘What advice do you have for people who want to be writers?’ I say, they don’t really need advice, they know they want to be writers, and they’re gonna do it. Those people who know that they really want to do this and are cut out for it, they know it.” — R.L. Stine

 “Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.” — Gloria Steinem

author quotes about writing
Writing a quote about writing… kinda meta!

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *