Many students say the hardest part of school is writing. That’s one of the reasons inspiring students to write can be a challenge. As you look through this list of quotes about writing, you’ll discover many of the great authors actually feel the same way. If you’re looking for a way to encourage your class to put pen to paper, check out this list of 100 relatable quotes about writing from authors, poets, and other influential figures.
Quotes About Writing by Historical Figures
“Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.” – Benjamin Franklin
“I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.” – Anne Frank
“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.” – Henry David Thoreau
“History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.” – Winston S. Churchill
“If you want to change the world, pick up your pen and write.” – Martin Luther
“The best way to become acquainted with a subject is to write about it.” – Benjamin Disraeli
Quotes About Writing by Authors
“I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.” – Robert Louis Stevenson
“You can make anything by writing.” – C.S. Lewis
“To survive, you must tell stories.” – Umberto Eco, The Island of the Day Before
“As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand.” – Ernest Hemingway
“Writers live twice.” – Natalie Goldberg
“Words are a lens to focus one’s mind.” – Ayn Rand
“If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.” – Peter Handke
“Write. Rewrite. When not writing or rewriting, read. I know of no shortcuts.” – Larry L. King
“The first sentence can’t be written until the final sentence is written.” – Joyce Carol Oates
“A book is simply the container of an idea—like a bottle; what is inside the book is what matters.” – Angela Carter
“There is no greater power on this earth than story.” – Libba Bray, The Diviners
“Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader—not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.” – E.L. Doctorow
“In good writing, words become one with things.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.” – Ray Bradbury
“The real story is not the plot but how the characters unfold by it.” – Vanna Bonta
“What I’ve learned about writing is that sometimes less is more, while often more is grander. And both are true.” – Richelle E. Goodrich
“Character is plot, plot is character.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald
“You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.” – Jodi Picoult
“If there’s a book that you want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” – Toni Morrison
“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
“I get a lot of letters from people. They say, ‘I want to be a writer. What should I do?’ I tell them to stop writing to me and get on with it.” – Ruth Rendell
“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
“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 want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.” – Stephen King
“If the book is true, it will find an audience that is meant to read it.” – Wally Lamb
“Words are our most inexhaustible source of magic.” – J.K. Rowling
“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” – Anais Nin
“Read, read, read. Read everything—trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it’s good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out of the window.” – William Faulkner
“You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.” – Saul Bellow
“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. ’Tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.” – Mark Twain
“Fiction is the truth inside the lie.” – Stephen King
“The scariest moment is always just before you start.” – Stephen King
“There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story.” – Frank Herbert
“Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.” – Louis L’Amour
“After nourishment, shelter, and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.” – Philip Pullman
“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” – Ernest Hemingway
“There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know where they’ll take you.” – Beatrix Potter
“You can make anything by writing.” – C.S. Lewis
“This is how you do it: You sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until it’s done. It’s that easy, and that hard.” – Neil Gaiman
“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
“A well-composed book is a magic carpet on which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter in any other way.” – Caroline Gordon
“Imagination is like a muscle. I found out that the more I wrote, the bigger it got.” – Philip José Farmer
“The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.” – Anais Nin
“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
“Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.” – Stephen King
“Closed in a room, my imagination becomes the universe, and the rest of the world is missing out.” – Criss Jami
“A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.” – G.K. Chesterton
“There comes a time in your life when you have to choose to turn the page, write another book or simply close it.” – Shannon L. Alder
“My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.” – Ernest Hemingway
“Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted.” – Jules Renard
“So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.” – Virginia Woolf
“All that I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say, is that I love the world.” – E.B. White
“You can fix anything but a blank page.” – Nora Roberts
“The hard part about writing a novel is finishing it.” – Ernest Hemingway
“Talent is helpful in writing, but guts are absolutely essential.” – Jessamyn West
“Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.” – Natalie Goldberg
“It’s none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.” – Ernest Hemingway
“There is creative reading as well as creative writing.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Ideas aren’t magical; the only tricky part is holding on to one long enough to get it written down.” – Lynn Abbey
“Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river.” – Lisa See
“Write about the emotions you fear the most.” – Laurie Halse Anderson
“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
“If you want to be a writer, stop talking about it and sit down and write!” – Jackie Collins
“A story has no beginning or end: Arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.” – Graham Greene
“A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.” – Richard Bach
“With writing, we have second chances.” – Jonathan Safran Foer
“Written words can also sing.” – Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
“You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.” – Stephen King
“A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth.” – Diane Setterfield
“A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it.” – Mark Twain
“We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.” – Franz Kafka
“The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.” – Terry Pratchett
“You can’t blame a writer for what the characters say.” – Truman Capote
“Personally I think that grammar is a way to attain beauty.” – Muriel Barbery
“Don’t classify me, read me. I’m a writer, not a genre.” – Carlos Fuentes
“Writing is the only thing that when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.” – Gloria Steinem
Quotes About Writing by Poets
“I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.” – Robert Frost
“A synonym is a word you use when you can’t spell the other one.” – Baltasar Gracián
“If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word.” – Margaret Atwood
“Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.” – William Wordsworth
“A word after a word after a word is power.” – Margaret Atwood
“I hate writing, I love having written.” – Dorothy Parker
“Some moments are nice, some are nicer, some are even worth writing about.” – Charles Bukowski
Quotes About Writing by Philosophers
“The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.” – Albert Camus
“A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
“All I need is a sheet of paper and something to write with, and then I can turn the world upside down.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
“To write well, express yourself like the common people, but think like a wise man.” – Aristotle
“It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
More Quotes About Writing
“Write your first draft with your heart. Rewrite with your head.” – Mike Rich
“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
“Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.” – Pablo Picasso
“Everybody is talented because everybody who is human has something to express.” – Brenda Ueland
“You are what you write.” – Helvy Tiana Rosa
Did you like these 100 quotes about writing? Check out our 80+ Motivational Quotes for Students of All Ages to further inspire your students!
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