Need a Punch of Writing Motivation?
I have a confession: I'm a quote addict,
especially writing, success, and motivational quotes. From reading books
and articles to listening to audio like lectures and music, I record
lines that have struck me like lightning so that I may remember them,
reference them, and share them.
And I know I'm not the only one. Dozens upon dozens of repins daily from Pinterest board " Writing Quotes and Inspiration" tell me we all have an insatiable need to be moved by these sage words or humorous anecdotes.
You may be thinking, "Really? What's up with
this crazy infatuation with quotes?" It's pretty simple: We find
inspiration in other people's words and take comfort in what they have
experienced, felt, believed, accepted, hoped, and even imagined. It may
be a simple turn of phrase, proverbs passed on by family, answers to our
most pressing questions, or the advice we need (but often don't
necessarily want to admit we need). Quotes are often a shared truth -
your truth, my truth, our truth.
If you're in a writing funk or looking for a
little motivation to jump into the writing saddle, then check out this
collection of the 50 most popular writing quotes curated on our Pinterest page!
Motivational Writing Quotes
- "Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a
letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry.
Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the
muscles seize up." -- Jane Yolen
- "Writing is the painting of the voice." -- Voltaire
- "All writing problems are psychological problems. Blocks usually
stem from the fear of being judged. If you imagine the world listening,
you'll never write a line. That's why privacy is so important. You
should write first drafts as if they will never be shown to anyone." --
Erica Jong
- "Don't be a writer; be writing." -- William Faulkner
- "Always carry a notebook. And I mean always. The short-term memory
only retains information for three minutes; unless it is committed to
paper you can lose an idea for ever." -- Will Self
- "If you can quit, then quit. If you can't quit, you're a writer." -- R.A. Salvatore
- "Rejected pieces aren't failures; unwritten pieces are." -- Greg Daugherty
- "Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away
from it, even the people who are most important to you." -- Zadie Smith
- "This is how you do it; you sit down at the keyboard and put one
word after another until its done. It's that easy and that hard." --
Neil Gaiman
- "The desire to write grows with writing." -- Erasmus
- "Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as
painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not,
learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself." -- Truman Capote
- "When asked, 'How do you write?' I invariably answer, 'One word at a
time,' and the answer is invariably dismissed. But that is all it is.
It sounds too simple to be true, but consider the Great Wall of China,
if you will: one stone at a time, man. That's all. One stone at a time.
But I've read you can see [it] from space without a telescope." --
Stephen King
- "A writer never has a vacation. For a writer life consists of either writing or thinking about writing." -- Eugene Ionesco
- "The faster I write, the better my output. If I'm going slow, I'm in
trouble. It means I'm pushing the words instead of being pulled by
them." -- Raymond Chandler
- "The scariest moment is always just before you start." -- Stephen King
- "Talking is a hydrant in the yard and writing is a faucet upstairs
in the house. Opening the first takes pressure off the second." --
Robert Frost
- "Write even when the world is chaotic. You don't need a cigarette,
silence, music, a comfortable chair, or inner peace to write. You just
need ten minutes and a writing implement." -- Cory Doctorow
- "It is by sitting down to write every morning that one becomes a writer." -- Gerald Brenan
- "You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you." -- Ray Bradbury
- "Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work." -- Stephen King
- "Quantity produces quality. If you only write a few things, you're doomed." -- Ray Bradbury
- "You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club." -- Jack London
- "Prose is architecture, not interior decoration." -- Ernest Hemingway
- "Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the
recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole
with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience." -- Henry David
Thoreau
- "If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that." -- Stephen King
- "Simple English is no one's mother tongue. It has to be worked for." -- Jacques Barzun
- "You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write." -- Saul Bellow
- "Schools don't really allow failure and yet it's part of any endeavour, not just writing." -- Roddy Doyle
- "Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad,
and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an
apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write.
If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window."
-- William Faulkner
Writing, Editing, and Grammar Quotes
- "You write to communicate to the hearts and minds of others
what's burning inside you, and we edit to let the fire show through the
smoke." -- Arthur Plotnik
- "When a thought takes one's breath away, a grammar lesson seems an impertinence." -- Thomas W. Higginson
- "So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads." -- Dr. Seuss
- "Ignorant people think it's the noise which fighting cats make that
is so aggravating, but it ain’t so; it's the sickening grammar they
use." -- Mark Twain
- "Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open." -- Stephen King
- "The main thing I try to do is write as clearly as I can. I rewrite a good deal to make it clear." -- E.B. White
- "An exclamation point is like laughing at your own jokes." -- F. Scott Fitzgerald
- "The greater part of the worlds' troubles are due to questions of grammar." -- Michel de Montaigne
- "Grammar to a writer is to a mountaineer a good pair of hiking boots
or, more precisely, to a deep-sea diver an oxygen tank." -- A.A.
Patawaran
- "I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter." -- James Michener
- "I'm all for the scissors. I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil." -- Truman Capote
Funny Writing Quotes
- "If you wait for inspiration to write you're not a writer, you're a waiter." -- Dan Poynter
- "The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it
right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon." -- Robert Cormier
- "I think I did pretty well, considering I started out with nothing but a bunch of blank paper." -- Steve Martin
- "Writing is the most fun you can have by yourself." -- Terry Pratchett
- "If I waited till I felt like writing, I'd never write at all." -- Anne Tyler
- "Easy reading is damn hard writing." -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
- "I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork." -- Peter De Vries
- "I'm writing a book. I've got the page numbers done." -- Steven Wright
- "When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth." -- Kurt Vonnegut
- "Keep a small can of WD-40 on your desk -- away from any open flames
-- to remind yourself if you don't write daily, you will get rusty." --
George Singleton
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