30 Inspiring Quotes for Writers from Writers

“Half my life is an act of revision.”

– John Irving

“Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.”

– Benjamin Franklin

“I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”

– Douglas Adams

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

– Sidney Sheldon

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

– Saul Bellow

“Writers live twice.”

– Natalie Goldberg

“Words are a lens to focus one’s mind.”

– Ayn Rand

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

– Thomas Jefferson

“Writing is its own reward.”

– Henry Miller

“To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.”

– Herman Melville

“Tears are words that need to be written.”

– Paulo Coelho

“I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.”

– Robert Louis Stevenson

“A word after a word after a word is power.”

– Margaret Atwood

“Let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences.”

– Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.”

– Isaac Asimov

“You can make anything by writing.”

– C.S. Lewis

“Always be a poet, even in prose.”

– Charles Baudelaire

“Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.”

– Virginia Woolf

“As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand.”

– Ernest Hemingway

“To survive, you must tell stories.”

– Umberto Eco, The Island of the Day Before

“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.”

– Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

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

– Anne Frank

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

– Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

“I write to discover what I know.”

– Flannery O’Connor

“Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.”

– Norman Mailer

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

– Albert Camus

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

– Thomas Mann, Essays of Three Decades

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”

– Henry David Thoreau

“A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.”

– Friedrich Nietzsche