Inspirational Writing Quotes from Famous Authors

Here are a few favorite quotes about writing to help inspire writers everywhere. Whether you’re a fiction writer, nonfiction writer, or poet, these inspirational quotes on writing will put the pen back in your hand with renewed passion. So stop for a moment, step away from the keyboard, and soak in these eclectic author quotes on writing.

• And as imagination bodies forth
  The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
  Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
  A local habitation and a name. – William Shakespeare (from A Midsummer Night’s Dream)

 

• I knew nothing about writing and have merely tried to tell an interesting story entertainingly. I have been successful probably because I have always realized that . – Edgar Rice Burroughs

 

• Prose is architecture, not interior decoration. – Ernest Hemingway

 

• Why one writes is a question I can answer easily, having so often asked it of myself. I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live. I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me — the world of my parents, the world of war, the world of politics. I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself when destroyed by living. That, I believe, is the reason for every work of art – Ansais Nin

 

• A blank piece of paper is God’s way of telling us how hard it is to be God. – Sidney Sheldon

 

• Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old-fashioned virtues of hard, constant labor, he’ll eventually make some kind of career for himself as writer. – Ray Bradbury

 

• Evil is always possible. Goodness is a difficulty – Anne Rice

 

• If you have other things in your life—family, friends, good productive day work—these can interact with your writing and the sum will be all the richer. – David Brin

 

• I try to create sympathy for my characters, then turn the monsters loose. – Stephen King

 

• Words are a lens to focus one’s mind. – Ayn Rand

 

• Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short. – Henry David Thoreau

 

• A writer without interest or sympathy for the foibles of his fellow man is not conceivable as a writer. – Joseph Conrad

 

• Half my life is an act of revision. – John Irving

 

• Poetry creates the myth, the prose writer draws its portrait. – Jean-Paul Sartre

 

• It is the writer who might catch the imagination of young people, and plant a seed that will flower and come to fruition. – Isaac Asimov

 

• The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story. – Ursula K. Le Guin

 

• Only in men’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

 

• There’s no such thing as writer’s block. That was invented by people in California who couldn’t write. – Terry Pratchett

 

• 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

 

• If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor.
  – Edgar Rice Burroughs

Heard any inspirational or funny quotes by your favorite authors?  Please leave me a comment!

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