150+ Writing Quotes Every Author Needs to Read Now

Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.

Put your soul in the palm of my hand for me to look at, like a crystal jewel. I'll sketch it in words...

Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.

The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words.

Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it's the only way you can do anything good.

If a story is in you, it has to come out.

In writing, you must kill all your darlings.

Always carry a notebook. And I mean always. The short-term memory only retains information for three minutes; unless it is committed to paper you can lose an idea for ever.

You know, everybody's ignorant, just on different subjects.

You're miserable, edgy and tired. You're in the perfect mood for journalism.

The job of the writer is to take a close and uncomfortable look at the world they inhabit, the world we all inhabit, and the job of the novel is to make the corpse stink.

Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.

Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.

There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.

Only a mediocre person is always at his best.

The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.

The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible

Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.

The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

For it would seem - her case proved it - that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.

So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.