We know there are hundreds of posts out there about inspirational quotes behind writing. But in the quarantined writing environment that is 2021, we want to share some of our own in order to get inspired! From simple, clear quotes about brevity, to flowery, lovely sentences about emotions, these are the quotes about writing we’re loving now.
“If you don’t see the book you want on the shelf, write it.” —Beverly Cleary
“Not a wasted word. This has been a main point to my literary thinking all my life.” —Hunter S. Thompson
“You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.” — Annie Proulx
“When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.” —George Orwell
“Making people believe the unbelievable is no trick; it’s work. … Belief and reader absorption come in the details: An overturned tricycle in the gutter of an abandoned neighborhood can stand for everything.” —Stephen King
“Write hard and clear about what hurts.”—Earnest Hemingway
“A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.” —Richard Bach
“Very few writers really know what they’re doing until they’ve actually done it.” —Anne Lamotte
“I’m out there to clean the plate. Once they’ve read what I’ve written on a subject, I want them to think, ‘That’s it!’ I think the highest aspiration people in our trade can have is that once they’ve written a story, nobody will ever try it again.” —Richard Ben Cramer
“If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word.” —Margaret Atwood
“The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.” —Terry Prachett
“When in doubt, make trouble for you character. . . . Protagonists need to screw up, act impulsively, have enemies, get into trouble.”—Jane Fitch
“When your story is ready for rewrite, cut it to the bone. Get rid of every ounce of excess fat. This is going to hurt; revising a story down to the bare essentials is always a little like murdering children, but it must be done.” —Stephen King
“Genius gives birth, talent delivers. What Rembrandt or Van Gogh saw in the night can never be seen again. Born writers of the future are amazed already at what they’re seeing now, what we’ll all see in time for the first time, and then see imitated many times by made writers.” –Jack Kerouac
“Long patience and application saturated with your heart’s blood—you will either write or you will not—and the only way to find out whether you will or not is to try.” —Jim Tully
“A book is a dream that you hold in your hands.” —Neil Gaman
“Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it’s the answer to everything. … It’s the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it’s a cactus.” —Enid Bagnold
“Cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can’t fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.” —William S. Burroughs
“All readers come to fiction as willing accomplices to your lies. Such is the basic goodwill contract made the moment we pick up a work of fiction.” —Steve Almond
“Let the world burn through you. Throw the prism light, white hot, on paper.” —Ray Bradbury
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