Inspiring author quotes on the topic of the craft of writing

  • "A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit." Richard Bach
  • "The road to hell is paved with adverbs." Stephen King
  • "Collaborative workshops and writers' peer groups hadn't been invented when I was young. They're a wonderful invention. They put the writer into a community of people all working at the same art, the kind of group musicians and painters and dancers have always had." Ursula K. Le Guin
  • Start by writing 1 word. Start by writing 1 sentence. Start by writing 1 paragraph. Start by writing 1 page. Start today. Repeat tomorrow.
  • "There is no such thing as good writing, only good rewriting." Robert Graves
  • "You only fail if you stop writing." Ray Bradbury
  • "Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be." Mark Twain
  • "This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until it's done. It's that easy, and that hard." Neil Gaiman
  • "If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word." Margaret Atwood
  • "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." Octavia E. Butler
  • "I believe myself that a good writer doesn't really need to be told anything except to keep at it." Chinua Achebe
  • "Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river." Lisa See
  • "Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly." Franz Kafka
  • "Writing is like everything else: the more you do it, the better you get. Don't try to perfect as you go along, just get to the end of the damn thing. If you try to polish every sentence, there's a chance you'll never get past the first chapter." Iain Banks
  • "Writing a novel is like driving a car at night: you can see only as far as your headlights but you can make the whole trip that way." E.L. Doctorow
  • "To gain your own voice, you have to forget about having it heard." Allen Ginsberg
  • "Tell the readers a story! Because without a story, you are merely using words to prove you can string them together in logical sentences." Anne McCaffrey
  • "You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club."
  • "You can always edit a bad page. You can't edit a blank page."
  • "10 Steps to Becoming a Better Writer: Write. Write more. Write even more. Write even more than that. Write when you don't want to. Write when you do. Write when you have something to say. Write when you don't. Write every day. Keep writing." Brian Clark
  • "Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be." Mark Twain
  • "Dont take anyone's writing advice too seriously." Lev Grossman
  • "If you want to be a writer you must do two things above all others: read a lot, and write a lot.
  • "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." Shannon Hale
  • "Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working." Pablo Picasso
  • "There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are." W. Somerset Maugham
  • "Get through a draft as quickly as possible. Hard to know the shape of the thing until you have a draft. Literally, when I wrote the last page of my first draft of Lincoln's Melancholy I thought, Oh, shit, now I get the shape of this. But I had wasted years, literally years, writing and re-writing the first third to first half. The old writer's rule applies: Have the courage to write badly." Joshua Wolf Shenk