- All stories have to at least try to explain some small portion of the meaning of life. Unknown
- Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don't see any. Orson Scott
- 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
- Focus more on your desire than on your doubt, and the dream will take care of itself. Mark Twain
- I went for years not finishing anything. Because, of course, when you finish something you can be judged. Erica Jong
- It always seems impossible until it's done. Nelson Mandela
- We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.
- Examine every word you put on paper. You'll find a surprising number that don't serve any purpose. William Zinsser, On Writing Well: The Audio Collection
- Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do…Try to be better than yourself. John Steinbeck
- The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn't require any. Russell Baker
- A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit. Richard Bach
- It's hard to beat a person who never gives up. Babe Ruth
- I've written because it fulfilled me. Maybe it paid off the mortgage on the house and got the kids through college, but those things were on the side — I did it for the buzz. I did it for the pure joy of the thing. And if you can do it for joy, you can do it forever. Stephen King
- I wake up in the morning and my mind starts making sentences, and I have to get rid of them fast — talk them or write them down. Ernest Hemingway
- Rejection slips, or form letters, however tactfully phrased, are lacerations of the soul, if not quite inventions of the devil—but there is no way around them. Isaac Asimov
- It is perfectly okay to write garbage—as long as you edit brilliantly. C. J. Cherryh
- The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you're allowed to do whatever you like. Neil Gaiman
- Know your literary tradition, savor it, steal from it, but when you sit down to write, forget about worshiping greatness and fetishizing masterpieces. Allegra Goodman
- I know what I liked as a child, and I don't do any book that I, as a child, wouldn't have liked. H. A. Rey
- There are reasons people seek escape in books, and one of those reasons is that the boundary of what can happen is beyond what we do or would want to see in real life. James Patterson
- Description begins in the writer's imagination, but should finish in the reader's. Stephen King
- 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
- 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
- Half my life is an act of revision. John Irving
- Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. Annie Dillard
- Let the world burn through you. Throw the prism light, white hot, on paper. Ray Bradbury
- 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
- The hard part about writing a novel is finishing it. Ernest Hemingway
- It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous. Robert Benchley
- We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. Aristotle
- Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time proof that humans can work magic. Carl Sagan
- People who think that grammar is just a collection of rules and restrictions are wrong. If you get to like it, grammar reveals the hidden meaning of history, hides disorder and abandonment, links things, and brings opposites together. Grammar is a wonderful way of organizing the world how you'd like it to be. Delphine de Vigan
- Don't say you don't have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo Da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein. H. Jackson Brown Jr.
- Don't take anyone's writing advice too seriously. Lev Grossman
- If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it. Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can't allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative. Elmore Leonard
- I almost always urge people to write in the first person. Writing is an act of ego and you might as well admit it. William Zinsser
- In my later years, I have looked in the mirror each day and found a happy person staring back. Occasionally I wonder why I can be so happy. The answer is that every day of my life I've worked only for myself and for the joy that comes from writing and creating. The image in my mirror is not optimistic, but the result of optimal behavior. Ray Bradbury
- Let children read whatever they want and then talk about it with them. If parents and kids can talk together, we won't have as much censorship because we won't have as much fear. Judy Blume
- There are some people who live in a dream world, and there are some who face reality; and then there are those who turn one into the other. Desiderius Eramus
- I don't think of literature as an end in itself. It's just a way of communicating something. Isabel Allende
40 Motivational Quotes On Writing for Aspiring Authors
Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time proof that humans can work magic. Carl Sagan
