The craft of writing sits at the heart of the human experience, captivating and confounding countless storytellers. It has, in turn, inspired a rich body of practical wisdom and illuminating advice.
Below are just a few of our favorite reflections on the craft. The following quotes about writing — from celebrated authors, talented artists, and others — capture the timeless appeal and profound reward of putting pen to paper to better understand who we are.
1 – “What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.” — Samuel Johnson
2 – “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” — Robert Frost, “The Figure a Poem Makes”
3 – “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” — Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
4 – “From now onwards the all-important fact for the creative writer is going to be that this is not a writer’s world.”— George Orwell, “The Proletarian Writer”
5 – “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” — Toni Morrison
6 – “We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.” — Ernest Hemingway
7 – “Each book has to teach you how to write it.”— Salman Rushdie
8 – “One of my former husbands remarked that when I had a good day writing, I looked like a Catholic who had seen the pope.”— Louise Glück
9 – “Craft is too grand and foreign a word to describe what gets done most days in your pajamas.” — Zadie Smith
10 – “First, forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won’t. Habit is persistence in practice.” — Octavia Butler, “Furor Scribendi,” Bloodchild and Other Stories
11 – “Writing is a job, a talent, but it’s also the place to go in your head. It is the imaginary friend you drink your tea with in the afternoon.” — Ann Patchett, Truth & Beauty
12 – “It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.” — Friedrich Nietzsche
13 – “There’s no such thing as perfect writing, just like there’s no such thing as perfect despair.” — Haruki Murakami, Hear the Wind Sing
14 – “When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.” — Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon
15 – “I try to create sympathy for my characters, then turn the monsters loose.” — Stephen King
16 – “There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.” — Doris Lessing
17 – “The things you do badly are as much part of your style as the things you do well.” — Martin Scorsese
18 – “A word after a word after a word is power.” — Margaret Atwood
19 – “No black woman writer in this culture can write ‘too much.’ Indeed, no woman writer can write ‘too much.’…No woman has ever written enough.” — bell hooks, Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work
20 – “My bursting heart must find vent at my pen.” — Abigail Adams
21 – “Writing is the only thing that when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.” — Gloria Steinem
22 – “Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.” — Khaled Hosseini
23 – “I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.” — Flannery O’Connor
24 – “A good would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit.” — David Sedaris
25 – “Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that’s the whole art and joy of words.” — C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces
26 – “Wasn’t writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?” — Ian McEwan, Atonement
27 – “The desire to write grows with writing.” — Erasmus
28 – “The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always.” — Arthur Miller
29 – “Writing is a delicious agony.” — Gwendolyn Brooks
30 – “Keep typing until it turns into writing.” — David Carr
31 – “I write to understand as much as to be understood.” — Elie Wiesel
32 – “A writer is a world trapped in a person.” — Victor Hugo
33 – “Maybe the hardest thing in writing is simply to tell the truth about things as we see them.” — John Steinbeck
34 – “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is…the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.” —Mark Twain
35 – “There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error.” — William Faulkner
36 – “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, The Writing Life
37 – “That’s what fiction is for. It’s for getting at the truth when the truth isn’t sufficient for the truth.” — Tim O’Brien
38 – “Fiction that adds up, that suggests a ‘logical consistency,’ or an explanation of some kind, is surely second-rate fiction; for the truth of life is its mystery.” — Joyce Carol Oates, The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates: 1973–1982
39 – “Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald
40 – “Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.” — Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
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41 – “A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea, this by no means signifies that he respects her opinions, admires her understanding, or will refuse, though the rapier is denied him, to run through the body with his pen.” — Virginia Woolf, Orlando
42 – “Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.” — Anne Rice
43 – “Writing is essentially donkey work, manual labor of the mind. What makes it bearable are those moments (which sometimes can last for weeks, months) when the book takes over, takes on a life of its own, goes off in unexpected directions.” — John Gregory Dunne, The Studio
44 – “Cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can’t fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.” — William S. Burroughs
45 – “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 one book.” — Samuel Johnson
46 – “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
47 – “I do not over-intellectualize the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.” — Tom Clancy
48 – “I think all writing is a disease. You can’t stop it.” — William Carlos Williams
49 – “Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.” — Virginia Woolf
50 – “All I need is a sheet of paper and something to write with, and then I can turn the world upside down.” — Friedrich Nietzsche
51 – “My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.” — Ernest Hemingway
52 – “Some things are hard to write about. After something happens to you, you go to write it down, and either you over dramatize it, or underplay it, exaggerate the wrong parts or ignore the important ones. At any rate, you never write it quite the way you want to.” — Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
53 – “Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.” — Leonard Cohen
54 – “Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.” — Winston Churchill
55 – “Writers are the exorcists of their own demons.” — Mario Vargas-Llosa
56 – “I never asked Tolstoy to write for me, a little colored girl in Lorain, Ohio. I never asked Joyce not to mention Catholicism or the world of Dublin. Never. And I don’t know why I should be asked to explain your life to you. We have splendid writers to do that, but I am not one of them. It is that business of being universal, a word hopelessly stripped of meaning for me. Faulkner wrote what I suppose could be called regional literature and had it published all over the world. That’s what I wish to do. If I tried to write a universal novel, it would be water. Behind this question is the suggestion that to write for black people is somehow to diminish the writing. From my perspective there are only black people. When I say ‘people,’ that’s what I mean.” — Toni Morrison
57 – “A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it.” — Mark Twain
58 – “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. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.” — Henry David Thoreau
59 – “You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you’re working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success — but only if you persist.” — Isaac Asimov
60 – “Any writer worth his salt writes to please himself. …It’s a self-exploratory operation that is endless. An exorcism of not necessarily his demon, but of his divine discontent.” — Harper Lee
61 – “Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast. By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream.” — Virginia Woolf, “A Room of One’s Own”
62 – “When all the details fit in perfectly, something is probably wrong with the story.” — Charles Baxter, Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction
63 – “Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up.” — Stephen King
64 – “The good writer seems to be writing about himself, but has his eye always on that thread of the universe, which runs through himself and all things.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson
65 – “Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That’s why it’s so hard.” — David McCullough
66 – “Appearance blinds, whereas words reveal.” — Oscar Wilde
67 – “If you are in difficulties with a book, try the element of surprise: attack it at an hour when it isn’t expecting it.” — H.G. Wells
68 – “It’s hell writing and it’s hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.” — Robert Hass
69 – “Making a decision to write was a lot like deciding to jump into a frozen lake.” — Maya Angelou
70 – “A person who publishes a book willfully appears before the populace with his pants down. If it is a good book nothing can hurt him. If it is a bad book nothing can help him.” — Edna St. Vincent Millay
71 – “What cannot be said above all must not be silenced but written.” — Jacques Derrida
72 – “If it’s fiction, then it better be true.” — Sherman Alexie, The Toughest Indian in the World
73 – “A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled.” — Raymond Chandler
74 – “Write. Rewrite. When not writing or rewriting, read. I know of no shortcuts.” — Larry L. King
75 – “To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.” — George Orwell
76 – “Writing is really a way of thinking — not just feeling but thinking about things that are disparate, unresolved, mysterious, problematic, or just sweet.” — Toni Morrison
77 – “There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it’s like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.” — Ernest Hemingway
78 – “But this I know; the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master — something that at times strangely wills and works for itself. He may lay down rules and devise principles, and to rules and principles it will perhaps for years lie in subjection; and then, haply without any warning of revolt, there comes a time when it will no longer consent.” — Charlotte Brontë
79 – “You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald
80 – “If you wish to be a writer, write.” — Epictetus
