Inspirational Quotes to Inspire Your Passion for Writing

A great novel, rather than discouraging me, simply makes me want to write. Madeleine L'Engle

Whether a character in your novel is full of choler, bile, phlegm, blood or plain old buffalo chips, the fire of life is in there, too, as long as that character lives. James Alexander Thom

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by. Douglas Adams

I was set free because my greatest fear had been realized, and I still had a daughter who I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became a solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life. J.K. Rowling

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

Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards. Robert A. Heinlein

If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that. Stephen King

The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think, but to give you questions to think upon. Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings

All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know. Ernest Hemingway

Why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. J.K. Rowling

If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it. Toni Morrison

The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do. Thomas Jefferson

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

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

Only in a person's imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life. Joseph Conrad

One important key to success is self-confidence. An important key to self-confidence is preparation. Arthur Ashe

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

You have to resign yourself to wasting lots of trees before you write anything really good. That's just how it is. It's like learning an instrument. You've got to be prepared for hitting wrong notes occasionally, or quite a lot. That's just part of the learning process. J.K. Rowling

There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before. Willa Cather

There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are. W. Somerset Maugham

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 Card

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

One thing that helps is to give myself permission to write badly. I tell myself that I'm going to do my five or 10 pages no matter what, and that I can always tear them up the following morning if I want. I'll have lost nothing—writing and tearing up five pages would leave me no further behind than if I took the day off. Lawrence Block

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

Tellers of stories with ink on paper, not that they matter anymore, have been either swoopers or bashers. Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn't work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right just before they go on to the next one. When they're done, they're done. Kurt Vonnegut

I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work. Thomas A. Edison

I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by. Douglas Adams

A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called leaves”) imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. 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

A man who tells secrets or stories must think of who is hearing or reading, for a story has as many versions as it has readers. Everyone takes what he wants or can from it and thus changes it to his measure. Some pick out parts and reject the rest, some strain the story through their mesh of prejudice, some paint it with their own delight. A story must have some points of contact with the reader to make him feel at home in it. Only then can he accept wonders. John Steinbeck

I always wrote. I wrote from when I was 12. That was therapeutic for me in those days. I wrote things to get them out of feeling them, and onto paper. So writing in a way saved me, kept me company. I did the traditional thing with falling in love with words, reading books, and underlining lines I liked and words I didn't know. Carrie Fisher

And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt. Sylvia Plath