Credit for these quotes goes to Inc.com and Writer’s Digest and my own quote collection, most of which were shared a while ago by a young lady in the writing community I am a part of (thanks girl!) 🙂
“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
“We’re past the age of heroes and hero kings. … Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it’s up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting.”—John Updike, WD
“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
“The writing of a novel is taking life as it already exists, not to report it but to make an object, toward the end that the finished work might contain this life inside it and offer it to the reader. The essence will not be, of course, the same thing as the raw material; it is not even of the same family of things. The novel is something that never was before and will not be again.”—Eudora Welty, WD
“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, WD
“Don’t expect the puppets of your mind to become the people of your story. If they are not realities in your own mind, there is no mysterious alchemy in ink and paper that will turn wooden figures into flesh and blood.”—Leslie Gordon Barnard, WD
“People say, ‘What advice do you have for people who want to be writers?’ I say, they don’t really need advice, they know they want to be writers, and they’re gonna do it. Those people who know that they really want to do this and are cut out for it, they know it.”—R.L. Stine, WD
“Just write every day of your life. Read intensely. Then see what happens. Most of my friends who are put on that diet have very pleasant careers.”—Ray Bradbury, WD
“There is only one plot–things are not as they seem.”—Jim Thompson
“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”—Anaïs Nin
“Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.”—Benjamin Franklin
“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”—Thomas Mann, Essays of Three Decades
“Let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences.”—Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“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
“Writers live twice.”—Natalie Goldberg
“To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.”—Herman Melville
“A blank piece of paper is God’s way of telling us how hard it is to be God.”—Sidney Sheldon
“I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”—Douglas Adams
“Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it’s the only way you can do anything really good.”—William Faulkner
Your adventure, your dream, your life. You’ll have to work for it! But you know what? I think it will be worth it. When people across the country, or even the world, have your words in their hands. When those people laugh and cry while meeting your characters. When they feel hope, or understood. Or are maybe even lead to the Savior! All because you swam. —Emmaine Hart
“Be weird. Be random. Be who you are. Because you never know who would love the person you hide.” —C.S Lewis
“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
“Forget about the rules. Forget about getting published. Write for yourself and celebrate writing.”—Melinda Haynes
“If you wait for inspiration to write, you’re not a writer, you’re a waiter.”—Dan Poynter
“Don’t forget— no one else sees the world the way you do, so no one else can tell the stories you have to tell.”—Charles de Lint
Be inspired, my friend, and never give up on yourself or your writing.
