37 Author Quotes I Like
Here’s your bout of daily reading and writing inspiration. [From the Archive.]
1. "You can always edit a bad page. You can't edit a blank page." - Jodi Picoult.
2. "If you cannot write well, you cannot think well; if you cannot think well, others will do your thinking for you." - Oscar Wilde
3. "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
4. “I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see, and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” – Joan Didion
5. "Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up." - Jane Yolen
6. “We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.” - Toni Morrison
7. "Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can't remember who we are or why we're here." -Sue Monk Kidd
8. "If you want to change the world, pick up your pen and write." - Martin Luther
9. "There's an epigram tacked to my office bulletin board, pinched from a magazine -- 'Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté.'" - Margaret Atwood
10. "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
11. "A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper." - E.B. White
12. "There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you." - Maya Angelou
13. "I think the job of writing and literature is to encourage each one of us to believe that we're living in a story." - Naomi Shihab Nye
14. "If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it." -Toni Morrison
15. "There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed." - Ernest Hemingway
16. "If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that." - Stephen King
17. "No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader." - Robert Frost
18. "Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass."- Anton Chekhov
19. "Virginia Woolf said that writing a novel is like walking through a dark room, holding a lantern which lights up what is already in the room anyway." - Margaret Atwood
20. "The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on." - Louis L'Amour
21. "If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy." -Dorothy Parker
22. "The first draft is just you telling yourself the story." -Terry Pratchett
23. "Successful writing is one part inspiration and two parts sheer stubbornness." - Gillian Flynn
24. "You don't start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it's good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That's why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence." - Octavia E. Butler
25. "The secret of it all is to write… without waiting for a fit time or place." - Walt Whitman
26. "I suppose one develops a number of personas and hides them away, then they pop up during writing. The exertion of control comes later." - Louise Erdrich
27. "I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day." - Ernest Hemingway
28. "The secret to editing your work is simple: You need to become its reader instead of its writer." - Zadie Smith
29. "The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe." - Gustav Flaubert
30. "A writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway." - Junot Diaz
31. "I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and look at it, until it shines." – Emily Dickinson
32. "No one else sees the world the way you do, so no one else can tell the stories that you have to tell." - Charles de Lint
33. "That’s what you’re looking for as a writer when you’re working. You’re looking for your own freedom." - Philip Roth
34. "Writing is the painting of the voice." - Voltaire
35. "Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand." -George Orwell
36. "Write a page a day. Only 300 words and in a year you have written a novel." -Stephen King
37. "But when people say, did you always want to be a writer? I have to say no! I always was a writer." - Ursula K. Le Guin
What quote would you add to this list?
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