25 Positive Writing Quotes

“Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river.”

– Lisa See

“Not a wasted word. This has been a main point to my literary thinking all my life.”

– Hunter S. Thompson

“The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.”

– Terry Pratchett

“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”

– Ernest Hemingway

“You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.”

– Jodi Picoult

“It ain’t whatcha write, it’s the way atcha write it.”

– Jack Kerouac, WD

“Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.”

– Louis L’Amour

“The freelance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.”

– Robert Benchley

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”

– Maya Angelou

“If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.”

– Peter Handke

“If the book is true, it will find an audience that is meant to read it.”

– Wally Lamb

“To defend what you’ve written is a sign that you are alive.”

– William Zinsser, WD

“I think all writing is a disease. You can’t stop it.”

– William Carlos Williams

“If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, all of us.”

– William Faulkner

“A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.”

– Richard Bach

“For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.”

– Catherine Drinker Bowen

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”

– Anaïs Nin

“Write. Rewrite. When not writing or rewriting, read. I know of no shortcuts.”

– Larry L. King, WD

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

– Toni Morrison

“Style means the right word. The rest matters little.”

– Jules Renard

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

– Benjamin Franklin

“I do not over-intellectualise the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.”

– Tom Clancy, WD

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

– Anne Frank

“The first sentence can’t be written until the final sentence is written.”

– Joyce Carol Oates, WD