Writing is an enjoyable endeavor to express one’s thoughts and sincerely convey them to others. But there may be times when, as writers, we come across that infamous block that hinders us from accomplishing anything.
Even writers we look up to have experienced that same feeling of being stuck more than once.
Despite that, we need to keep going as the world is waiting to hear what we have to say, and we can look to our favorite authors for inspiration on how to keep motivated to write.
60 Motivational Quotes About Writing
When you are just starting out with writing, it can be daunting. Remember that you can free your thoughts by expressing them through words. Here are motivational quotes about writing:
- Perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupery
- But when people say, did you always want to be a writer? I have to say no! I always was a writer.” Ursula K. Le Guin
- When all else fails, write what your heart tells you. You can’t depend on your eyes, when your imagination is out of focus.” Mark Twain
- A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. Thomas Mann
- Remember: Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations.”- Ray Bradbury
- Writing is like a ‘lust,’ or like ‘scratching when you itch.’ Writing comes as a result of a very strong impulse, and when it does come, I, for one, must get it out. – C.S. Lewis
- 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
- You should write stories because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page.” – Annie Proulx
- The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words. – William H. Gass
- That’s what you’re looking for as a writer when you’re working. You’re looking for your own freedom. Philip Roth
- Successful writing is one part inspiration and two parts sheer stubbornness.” – Gillian Flynn
- To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. – Herman Melville
- Half my life is an act of revision. – John Irving
- Any writer worth his salt writes to please himself… it’s a self-exploratory operation that is endless.” – Harper Lee
- “Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.” – Isaac Asimov
- “One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.” – Jack Kerouac
- Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else. – Gloria Steinem
- Let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences. -Sylvia Plath
- The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.” – Gustav Flaubert
- Fiction can be more real to the reader than reality itself because fiction is the essence of life. – James N. Frey
- When I’m writing I know I’m doing the thing I was born to do. – Anne Sexton
- Words are a lens to focus one’s mind. – Ayn Rand
- We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect. Anaïs Nin
- 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
- “Words are our most inexhaustible source of magic.” – J. K. Rowling
- A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche
- Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.”- Norman Mailer
- You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say. – F. Scott Fitzgerald
- “Tears are words that need to be written.” – Paulo Coelho
- Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen. -John Steinbeck
- Tell the readers a story! Because without a story, you are merely using words to prove you can string them together in logical sentences. Anne McCaffrey”
- The writer is an explorer. Every step is an advance into a new land.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “It unfolds as you write it. That’s something I never believed before I wrote a book, but it does.” Joan Didion
- Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works.” Virginia Woolf
- I write to give myself strength. I write to be the characters that I am not. I write to explore all the things I’m afraid of.
- “To survive, you must tell stories.” Umberto Eco
- I start with a question. Then try to answer it.” – Mary Lee Settle
- Writing is its own reward.” –Henry Miller
- There are significant moments in everyone’s day that can make literature. That’s what you ought to write about.” – Raymond Carver
- If the book is true, it will find an audience that is meant to read it. Wally Lamb
- They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream by night. Edgar Allan Poe
- 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
- Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart. William Wadsworth
- I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and look at it, until it shines. Emily Dickinson
- I’m not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn’t make us better, then what on earth is it for.” Alice Walker
- If you are having difficulties with a book, try the element of surprise: attack it at an hour when it isn’t expecting it.” – H.G. Wells
- I’m 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
- Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.” George Bernard Shaw
- I write to discover what I know. – Flannery O’Connor
- “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” Maya Angelou
- Write something that’s worth fighting over. Because that’s how you change things. That’s how you create art.” – Jeff Goins
- Just know that everyone’s writing is terrible. Until it’s not. No one’s stuff is right immediately. You gotta work it. Refine it. Shape it. Spend time with it. It’s a relationship. Between you and what comes from you. Not easy. Gonna be terrible Ava DuVernay
- “Writers don’t choose their craft; they need to write in order to face the world.” Alice Hoffman
- “The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.” –Thomas Jefferson
- Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in a human situation. – Graham Greene
- Writers live twice.” Natalie Goldberg
- Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river. – Lisa See
- I have fallen in love with the imagination. And if you fall in love with the imagination, you understand that it is a free spirit. It will go anywhere and it can do anything.” – Alice Walker
- No one else sees the world the way you do, so no one else can tell the stories that you have to tell.” – Charles de Lint
- The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.” – Toni Morrison
60 Quotes To Keep Going
There may be times that you get frustrated trying to break through the writer’s block. Here are quotes to help you keep going:
- Doing it all the time, whether or not we are in the mood, gives us ownership of our writing ability. It takes it out of the realm of conjuring where we stand on the rock of isolation, begging the winds for inspiration, and it makes it something as do-able as picking up a hammer and pounding a nail. Writing may be an art, but it is certainly a craft. It is a simple and workable thing that can be as steady and reliable as a chore. – Julia Cameron
- “When you’re stuck, go back to your characters’ motivations.” – David Mamet”
- Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it’s the only way you can do anything really good. – William Faulkner
- You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.” Maya Angelou
- You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write. – Saul Bellow
- A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit. – Richard Bach
- Great is the art of beginning, but greater is the art of ending. – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
- The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order to write. A man will turn over half a library to make a book. – Samuel Johnson
- I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn. – Anne Frank
- If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery–isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you’ll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you’re going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It’s the only good fight there is. – Charles Bukowski
- We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master. – Ernest Hemingway
- 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
- Stop trying to write sentences and start trying to write stories. – James Patterson
- Inspiration may sometimes fail to show up for work in the morning, but determination never does.” K.M. Weiland
- Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It’s the one and only thing you have to offer. – Barbara Kingsolver
- Love the writing, love the writing, love the writing… the rest will follow. – Jane Yolen
- You can make anything by writing. – C.S. Lewis
- It’s none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think you were born that way. – Ernest Hemingway
- If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn’t matter a damn how you write.- Somerset Maugham
- Write. Just do it. Then again. Then some more. And more. Do not wait for inspiration; if you do enough of it often enough, inspiration will eventually come. – Nancy Kress
- “Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with.” – Henry David Thoreau”
- The secret of it all is to write… without waiting for a fit time or place.” – Walt Whitman
- 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
- Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. – Anne Lamott
- Description begins in the writer’s imagination but should finish in the reader’s. – Stephen King
- Life can’t defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer’s lover until death. – Edna Ferber
- 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
- If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it. – Toni Morrison
- All glory comes from daring to begin. – Ruskin Bond
- When asked, ‘How do you write?’ I invariably answer, ‘one word at a time.’ – Stephen King
- There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are. – W. Somerset Maugham
- You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we’re doing it. – Neil Gaiman
- You don’t start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it’s good stuff, and then gradually, you get better at it. – Octavia E. Butler
- I do not over-intellectualize the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story. – Tom Clancy
- Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open. – Natalie Goldberg
- Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up.” – Jane Yolen
- A word after a word after a word is power. – Margaret Atwood
- Read like a butterfly, write like a bee. – Philip Pullman
- You learn to write by writing. – William Zinsser
- I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by. Douglas Adams
- Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on. – Louis L’Amour
- Writing a novel is like building a wall brick by brick; only amateurs believe in inspiration. – Frank Yerby
- I went for years not finishing anything. Because, of course, when you finish something you can be judged. –Erica Jong
- You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.” ― Jodi Picoult
- The first draft is just you telling yourself the story. – Terry Pratchett
- If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. – Stephen King
- Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you. – Zadie Smith
- If you do not hear music in your words, you have put too much thought into your writing and not enough heart.” – Terry Brooks
- If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put foundations under them.” – Henry David Thoreau
- Write a page a day. Only 300 words and in a year you have written a novel.” – Stephen King
- Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. – E. L. Doctorow
- The most important thing in writing is to have written. I can always fix a bad page. I can’t fix a blank one. – Nora Roberts
- Probably the most important thing I’ve learned is that if I don’t make the time to do the writing, the writing won’t get done. – Judy Reeves
- First, find out what your hero wants, then just follow him!” – Ray Bradbury
- No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader. – Robert Frost
- I don’t wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that. Your mind must know it has got to get down to work. – Pearl S. Buck
- It seems to me that what writers are supposed to do is use their imaginations. Imagination is one of the most important things we have. – Susanna Clarke
- Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure. Emotion is easily transferred from the writer to the reader. – Joseph Joubert
- “Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It’s the one and only thing you have to offer. – Barbara Kingsolver
- Some days I’m lucky to squeeze out a page of copy that pleases me, but I get as many as six or seven pages on a very good day; the average is probably three pages.” Dean Koontz
Conclusion
We write because we love it, but as with anything else, sometimes we don’t have the motivation or the energy to compose words.
Still, it’s comforting to know that even the best writers have gone through the same obstacle yet produced some of the best works.
We hope you’ve found a motivational quote that genuinely resonated with you and that you can get back to writing quickly.
