150+ Writing Quotes Every Author Needs to Read Now

We can destroy what we have written, but we cannot unwrite it.

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.

Because this business of becoming conscious, of being a writer, is ultimately about asking yourself, How alive am I willing to be?

Try looking at your mind as a wayward puppy that you are trying to paper train. You don't drop-kick a puppy into the neighbor's yard every time it piddles on the floor. You just keep bringing it back to the newspaper.

I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.

Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.

Writing is a job, a talent, but it's also the place to go in your head. It is the imaginary friend you drink your tea with in the afternoon.

Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by reason.

I can elect something I love and absorb myself in it.

I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, from which I can only escape by writing.

If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.

The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.

We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.

This diary is my kief, hashish and opium pipe. This is my drug and my vice.

A story isn't a charcoal sketch, where every stroke lies on the surface to be seen. It's an oil painting, filled with layers that the author must uncover so carefully to show its beauty.

We are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter

Concentrate on what you want to say to yourself and your friends. Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness. You say what you want to say when you don't care who's listening.

Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for.

What is drama but life with the dull bits cut out.

I have always had more dread of a pen, a bottle of ink, and a sheet of paper than of a sword or pistol.

No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake....

Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.

The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.

The thing all writers do best is find ways to avoid writing.