150+ Writing Quotes Every Author Needs to Read Now

Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.

Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?

Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.

You can't blame a writer for what the characters say.

If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.

The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering.

The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness.

Loneliness sometimes gives me a quantity of creativeness - you're drinking another glass of wine and you're feeling even worse. Art doesn't work without pain; art also exists for compensating pain.

Everybody gets told to write about what they know. The trouble with many of us is that at the earlier stages of life we think we know everything- or to put it more usefully, we are often unaware of the scope and structure of our ignorance.

A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.

The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.

What’s writing really about? It’s about trying to take fuller possession of the reality of your life.

Sometimes a book isn't a heartbreaking work of staggering genius.Sometimes it's the only story you knew how to tell.

Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.

And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.

let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences

A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.

We must do our work for its own sake, not for fortune or attention or applause.

The most important thing about art is to work. Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying.

My first feeling was that there was no way to continue. Writing isn't like math;in math, two plus two always equals four no matter what your mood is like. With writing, the way you feel changes everything.

you can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will.

If you wrote something for which someone sent you a check, if you cashed the check and it didn't bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented.

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.