Inspiring Writing Quotes

Ignore all hatred and criticism. Live for what you create, and die protecting it.

The grandest seduction of all is the myth that DOING EVERYTHING BETTER gets us where we want to be. It gets us somewhere, certainly, but not anywhere worth being

The thing with Superman is that he's completely emotionally open to the reader. Meaning what he tells you is what he's feeling; there's a transparency there. And what he tells other characters is usually as transparent as can be. What he says he believes in. So there's an honesty that is both really inspiring writing the character. One thing I love about Clark Kent is that there is a badassery that you don't see a lot. Even as Superman, he's always kind of restraining himself. When you challenge him, I think there's nobody that has a stronger spine than Superman.

Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure. Emotion is easily transferred from the writer to the reader.

Writers don't retire. I will always be a writer.

Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone.

The only power that exists is inside ourselves.

I write to be the characters that I am not.

Being a writer means taking the leap from listening to saying 'Listen to me'.

Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.

The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.

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.

Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on

You fail only if you stop writing.

I try to leave out the parts readers skip.

Read, read read. Read everything.

I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.

The artist doesn't have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don't have the time to read reviews.

I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works.

What I do believe is that there is always a relationship between writing and reading, a constant interplay between the writer on the one hand and the reader on the other

If critics say your work stinks it's because they want it to stink and they can make it stink by scaring you into conformity with their comfortable little standards. Standards so low that they can no longer be considered "dangerous" but set in place in their compartmental understandings.

Reduce your plan to writing. The moment you complete this, you will have definitely given concrete form to the intangible desire.

If you show someone something you've written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, ‘When you’re ready’.

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.

You can't outwit fate by standing on the sidelines placing little sidebets about the outcome of life. either you wade in and risk everything you have to play the game or you don't play at all. and if u don't play u can't win.

If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time or the tools to write.

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.

A man will turn over half a library to make one book.

A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.

Let others determine your worth and you're already lost, because no one wants people worth more than themselves.

[P]eople need to use their intelligence to evaluate what they find to be true and untrue in the Bible. This is how we need to live life generally. Everything we hear and see we need to evaluate—whether the inspiring writings of the Bible or the inspiring writings of Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, or George Eliot, of Ghandi, Desmond Tutu, or the Dalai Lama.

What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy.

So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads.

One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

Don't pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches.

You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.

Some critics will write 'Maya Angelou is a natural writer' - which is right after being a natural heart surgeon.

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.

You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It's their mistake, not my failing.

To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe.

I don't wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that. Your mind must know it has got to get down to work.

Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.

Some who have read the book, or at any rate have reviewed it, have found it boring, absurd, or contemptible, and I have no cause to complain, since I have similar opinions of their works, or of the kinds of writing that they evidently prefer.