150+ Writing Quotes Every Author Needs to Read Now

You grow ravenous. You run fevers. You know exhilarations. You can't sleep at night, because your beast-creature ideas want out and turn you in your bed. It is a grand way to live.

A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.

Sometimes writing is running downhill, your fingers jerking behind you on the keyboard the way your legs do when they can’t quite keep up with gravity.

When I’m writing my own stuff, it’s like swimming upstream. Or … falling down a cliff and grabbing at branches, trying to invent the branches as I fall.

If you can quit, then quit. If you can't quit, you're a writer.

Writing is the geometry of the soul.

A good book isn't written, it's rewritten.

I don't profess any religion; I don't think it’s possible that there is a God; I have the greatest difficulty in understanding what is meant by the words ‘spiritual’ or ‘spirituality.'[Interview, The New Yorker, Dec. 26, 2005]

After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.

Imagination is like a muscle. I found out that the more I wrote, the bigger it got.

A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.

I don't wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that. Your mind must know it has got to get down to work.

Poems are never finished - just abandoned

I want to see thirstIn the syllables,Tough fireIn the sound;Feel through the darkFor the scream.

She looked away. Her attitude seemed to suggest that she had finished with him, and would be obliged if somebody would come and sweep him up.

I just sit at my typewriter and curse a bit.

In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody.

Appearance blinds, whereas words reveal.

You know how writers are... they create themselves as they create their work. Or perhaps they create their work in order to create themselves.

First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you're inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won't. Habit is persistence in practice.

You don't start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it's good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That's why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.

I just knew there were stories I wanted to tell.