Inspirational Writing Quotes

Modern Writing Quotes

"I am always chilled and astonished by the would-be writers who ask me for advice and admit, quite blithely, that they 'don't have time to read.' This is like a guy starting up Mount Everest saying that he didn't have time to buy any rope."
- Stephen King

"I find reading very healing, but for me writing is more so. I can disappear."
- Alice Hoffman

"Today is a dawdly day. They seem to alternate. I do a whole of a day's work and then the next day, flushed with triumph, I dawdle. That's today. The crazy thing is that I get about the same number of words down either way."
- John Steinbeck

"People think it's sort of funny that I went to graduate school as a biologist and then became a novelist, but the process is so similar. What I learned is how to formulate or identify a new question that hasn't been asked before, and then to set about solving it, to do original research to find the way to an answer."
- Barbara Kingsolver

"We all have days of near despair, but we are compensated for them by the days when each scene sings on."
- P. D. James

"...writing is something you can never do as well as it can be done. It is a perpetual challenge and it is more difficult than anything else that I have ever done - so I do it. And it makes me happy when I do it well."
- Ernest Hemingway

"Evan Connell said once that he knew he was finished with a short story when he found himself going through it and taking out commas and then going through the story again and putting commas back in the same places. I like that way of working on something. I respect that kind of care for what is being done."
- Raymond Carver

"I suppose I'm proudest of my novels for what's imagined in them. I think the world of my imagination is a richer and more interesting place than my personal biography."
- John Irving

"It's true that it's a solitary occupation, but you would be surprised at how much companionship a group of imaginary characters can offer once you get to know them."
- Anne Tyler

"Studying English was useless, completely useless. It took me years to recover from that."
- Nick Hornby

Nineteenth Century Writing Quotations

"The business of the poet and novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things, and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things."
- Thomas Hardy

"If I can't make anything out just now, if everything I write is empty and flat, this is because I am not shaken with the emotions of my chief characters."
- Gustave Flaubert

"I am not at all in a humour for writing; I must write on till I am."
- Jane Austen

"I always write in the morning. I was pleased to hear lately that Rousseau too, after he got up in the morning, went for a short walk and sat down to work. In the morning one's head is particularly fresh."
- Leo Tolstoy

"I have from the first felt sure that the writer, when he sits down to commence his novel, should do so, not because he has to tell a story, but because he has a story to tell."
- Anthony Trollope