150+ Writing Quotes Every Author Needs to Read Now

I was a late bloomer. But anyone who blooms at all, ever, is very lucky.

I'm writing a first draft and reminding myself that I'm simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.

You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.

I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works.

A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it.

I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.

Realism can break a writer's heart.

In the planning stage of a book, don't plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it.

The story is always better than your ability to write it.

It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.

A poem begins with a lump in the throat; a homesickness or a love sickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.

The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon.

Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.

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

Writers will happen in the best of families.

You don't write about the horrors of war. No. You write about a kid's burnt socks lying in the road.

A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.

Throw up into your typewriter every morning. Clean up every noon.

That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.

Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together.

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.

The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.