We are quote collectors and since we started our writing careers, we have found more and more really neat people who have said some amazing, funny, or inspirational things about writing which we have collected here! If you like the looks of our quotes and want something particular made into a picture quote, please let us know. OR if we have missed your favorite quote about writing, leave a comment below!
Please note, these are all particularly non fiction writing quotes. While we saw some really cool ones that were more fiction or novel related, they just don’t match up well with our site!
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“Do you suffer when you write? I don’t at all. Suffer like a bastard when don’t write, or just before, and feel empty and fucked out afterwards. But never feel as good as while writing.”
Ernest Hemingway
“Don’t get it right – get it WRITTEN!”
Lee Child
Vladimir Nabokov
“To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it’s about, but the music the words make.”
Truman Capote
“Write only if you cannot live without writing. Write only what you alone can write.”
Elie Wiesel
“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”
Anaïs Nin
“In writing, you must kill all your darlings.”
William Faulkner
“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”
Henry David Thoreau
“All words are pegs to hang ideas on.”
Henry Ward Beecher
“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.”
Kurt Vonnegut
“The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”
Mark Twain, The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain
“You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”
Jack London
“This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It’s that easy, and that hard.”
Neil Gaiman
“If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”
Toni Morrison
“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
Ernest Hemingway
“You can make anything by writing.”
C.S. Lewis
“Don’t give people what they want, give them what they need.”
Joss Whedon
“A word after a word after a word is power.”
Margaret Atwood
Funny Writing Quotes
“Writers fish for the right words like fishermen fish for, um, whatever those aquatic creatures with fins and gills are called.
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Jarod Kintz
“Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.”
E.L. Doctorow
“Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money.”
Jules Renard
“History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.”
Winston Churchill
“There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.”
Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist
“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
“I love being a writer. What I can’t stand is the paperwork.”
Peter De Vries
“Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.”
John Steinbeck
“Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get excited, the adrenaline gets going and the next thing I know I’m borrowing energy from the ideas themselves.”
Ray Bradbury
“Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted.”
Jules Renard
“Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t “try” to do things. You simply “must” do things.”
Ray Bradbury
“Writing is something you do alone. Its a profession for introverts who want to tell you a story but don’t want to make eye contact while doing it.”
John Green
“The funny thing about writing is that whether you’re doing well or doing it poorly, it looks the exact same. That’s actually one of the main ways that writing is different from ballet dancing.”
John Green
“Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that’s where it should stay.”
Christopher Hitchens
“Writer’s block is a fancy term made up by whiners so they can have an excuse to drink alcohol.”
Steve Martin
Grammer and Editing
“Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
“Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.”
Stephen King
“Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.”
Mark Twain
“The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”
Mark Twain, The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain
“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”
Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
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