20 Quotes About Writing

I collect quotes. I have notebooks filled with them. So I dug through the secret place in my sock drawer where I keep all these quote-filled notebooks and dug up a list of 20 about writing and ficiton. Here they are.

“Write the kind of story you would like to read. People will give you all sorts of advice about writing, but if you are not writing something you like, no one else will like it either.”
~ Meg Cabot

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.”
~ Eleanor Roosevelt

“You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”
~ Jack London

“I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing his talent he would be wise to develop a thick hide.”
~ Harper Lee

“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

“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

“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

“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”
~ Robert Frost

“Keep a small can of WD-40 on your desk~away from any open flames~to remind yourself that if you don’t write daily, you will get rusty.”
~George Singleton

“Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”
~ Oscar Wilde

“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

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
~ Ray Bradbury

“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

“Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.”
~ Virginia Woolf

“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.”
~ Kurt Vonnegut

“Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.”
~ Louis L’Amour

“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. ”
~ Joss Whedon

“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”
~Ernest Hemingway

“If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster.”
~ Isaac Asimov

“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