150+ Writing Quotes Every Author Needs to Read Now

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.

I see things, that's all. Write enough stories and every shadow on the floor looks like a footprint; every line in the dirt like a secret message.

Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.

Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up.

If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.

Reading at meals is considered rude in polite society, but if you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects.

It is the tale, not he who tells it.

Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.

If you're just starting out as a writer, you could do worse than strip your television's electric plug-wire, wrap a spike around it, and then stick it back into the wall. See what blows, and how far. Just an idea.

I like to get ten pages a day, which amounts to 2,000 words. That’s 180,000 words over a three-month span, a goodish length for a book — something in which the reader can get happily lost, if the tale is done well and stays fresh.

The scariest moment is always just before you start.

In many cases when a reader puts a story aside because it 'got boring,' the boredom arose because the writer grew enchanted with his powers of description and lost sight of his priority, which is to keep the ball rolling.

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.

You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.

A short story is a different thing altogether – a short story is like a quick kiss in the dark from a stranger.

Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.

The road to hell is paved with adverbs.

Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.

The trick is to teach yourself to read in small sips as well as long swallows.

A little talent is a good thing to have if you want to be a writer. But the only real requirement is the ability to remember every scar.

I have spent a good many years since

A novel is a mirror walking along a main road.

If a man comes to the door of poetry untouched by the madness of the Muses, believing that technique alone will make him a good poet, he and his sane compositions never reach perfection, but are utterly eclipsed by the performances of the inspired madman.

A blank piece of paper is God's way of telling us how hard it is to be God.