Motivational Writing Quotes: Become a Better Writer!

Reading quotes is great habit, and would be even greater if one applies it, in their life. And if you are a writer or want to become one, then these motivational writing quotes by established authors can let you walk on the right path of writing career. Well, you will be overwhelmed with the entire list, as there are several quotes on writing.

I know most of the author start their career as a freelance writers, and uses their whole experience and became an author.

1. “Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river.” ― Lisa See
2. “The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.” ― Terry Pratchett
3. “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
4. “You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.” ― Jodi Picoult
5. “Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.” — Louis L’Amour
6. “Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works.” — Virginia Woolf
7. “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
8. “Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” ― Anton Chekhov
9. “When your story is ready for rewrite, cut it to the bone. Get rid of every ounce of excess fat. This is going to hurt; revising a story down to the bare essentials is always a little like murdering children, but it must be done.” — Stephen King
10. Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don’t see any.-Orson Scott
11. “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” ― Maya Angelou
12. “Don’t bend, don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.” — Franz Kafka
13. “If the book is true, it will find an audience that is meant to read it.” — Wally Lamb
14. I think all writing is a disease. You can’t stop it.” — William Carlos Williams
15. “I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.” — Anne Frank
16. A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.” — Richard Bach
17. “People say, ‘What advice do you have for people who want to be writers?’ I say, they don’t really need advice, they know they want to be writers, and they’re gonna do it. Those people who know that they really want to do this and are cut out for it, they know it.” — R.L. Stine
18. “I believe myself that a good writer doesn’t really need to be told anything except to keep at it.” — Chinua Achebe
19. “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.” ― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
20. I try to create sympathy for my characters, then turn the monsters loose. – Stephen King
21. Prose is architecture, not interior decoration. – Ernest Hemingway
22. It’s none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think you were born that way. – Ernest Hemingway
23. Most writers regard the truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are most economical in its use. – Mark Twain
24. And as imagination bodies forth, The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen, Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing, A local habitation and a name. – William Shakespeare (from A Midsummer Night’s Dream)
25. If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn’t matter a damn how you write. – Somerset Maugham
26. To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. – Herman Melville
27. It is perfectly okay to write garbage—as long as you edit brilliantly. – C. J. Cherryh
28. It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous. – Robert Benchley
29. Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old-fashioned virtues of hard, constant labor, he’ll eventually make some kind of career for himself as writer. – Ray Bradbury
30. A blank piece of paper is God’s way of telling us how hard it to be God. – Sidney Sheldon
31. Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short. – Henry David Thoreau
32. If you have other things in your life, family, friends, good productive day work—these can interact with your writing and the sum will be all the richer. – David Brin
33. My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying. – Anton Chekhov
34. I have been successful probably because I have always realized that I knew nothing about writing and have merely tried to tell an interesting story entertainingly. – Edgar Rice Burroughs
35. First, find out what your hero wants, then just follow him! – Ray Bradbury
36. Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen. – Willa Cather
37. I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by. – Douglas Adams
38. Words are a lens to focus one’s mind. – Ayn Rand
39. Poetry creates the myth, the prose writer draws its portrait. – Jean-Paul Sartre
40. A writer without interest or sympathy for the foibles of his fellow man is not conceivable as a writer. – Joseph Conrad
41. Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. – Philip K. Dick
42. The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn’t require any. – Russell Baker
43. Half my life is an act of revision. – John Irving
44. People on the outside think there’s something magical about writing, that you go up in the attic at midnight and cast the bones and come down in the morning with a story, but it isn’t like that. You sit in back of the typewriter and you work, and that’s all there is to it. – Harlan Ellison
45. People do not deserve to have good writing, they are so pleased with bad. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
46. I went for years not finishing anything. Because, of course, when you finish something you can be judged. – Erica Jong
47. Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It’s the one and only thing you have to offer. – Barbara Kingsolver
48. A word is dead, When it is said, Some say. I say it just begins to live that day. – Emily Dickinson
49. Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. – E. L. Doctorow
50. Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it’s the only way you can do anything really good. – William Faulkner
51. I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within. – Gustave Flaubert
52. There’s no money in poetry, but then there’s no poetry in money either. – Robert Graves
53. It is the writer who might catch the imagination of young people, and plant a seed that will flower and come to fruition. – Isaac Asimov
54. The work never matches the dream of perfection the artist has to start with. – William Faulkner
55. Begin with an individual, and before you know it you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find you have created – nothing. – F. Scott Fitzgerald
56. Writing is its own reward. – Henry Miller
57. The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story. – Ursula K. Le Guin
58. Almost anyone can be an author; the business is to collect money and fame from this state of being. – A. A. Milne
59. A wounded deer leaps the highest. – Emily Dickinson
60. Only in men’s imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life. – Joseph Conrad
61. Literature is all, or mostly, about sex. – Anthony Burgess
62. Writers are always selling somebody out. – Joan Didion
63. Anecdotes don’t make good stories. Generally I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdotes were about. – Alice Munro
64. You learn by writing short stories. Keep writing short stories. The money’s in novels, but writing short stories keeps your writing lean and pointed. – Larry Niven
65. Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them. – Flannery O’Connor
66. I can’t write five words but that I change seven. – Dorothy Parker
67. There’s no such thing as writer’s block. That was invented by people in California who couldn’t write. – Terry Pratchett
68. Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards. – Robert A. Heinlein
69. The more closely the author thinks of why he wrote, the more he comes to regard his imagination as a kind of self-generating cement that glued his facts together, and his emotions as a kind of dark and obscure designer of those facts. Reluctantly, he comes to the conclusion that to account for his book is to account for his life. – Richard Wright
70. No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader’s intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing. – E. B. White
71. A poet can survive everything but a misprint. – Oscar Wilde
72. Rejection slips, or form letters, however tactfully phrased, are lacerations of the soul, if not quite inventions of the devil—but there is no way around them. – Isaac Asimov
73. Fiction is about stuff that’s screwed up. – Nancy Kress
74. In general…there’s no point in writing hopeless novels. We all know we’re going to die; what’s important is the kind of men and women we are in the face of this. -Anne Lamott
75. Great is the art of beginning, but greater is the art of ending. – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
76. 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
77. If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic. – Ursula K. Le Guin
78. All the information you need can be given in dialogue. – Elmore Leonard
79. Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don’t see any. – Orson Scott Card
80. All the words I use in my stories can be found in the dictionary—it’s just a matter of arranging them into the right sentences. – Somerset Maugham
81. 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
82. If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor. – Edgar Rice Burroughs
83. Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it. – Truman Capote

If you have already gone through all the famous personalities quotes, then you certainly might have observed those quotes about passion and writing.