Writing Quotes To Motivate and Inspire

Pithy writing quotes can motivate and inspire with just a few words. We’ve put together some of our favorites to help ring in the new year! Since there are literally thousands of great writing quotes, we’ll focus on just a few categories in this post. If you need help working through frustration, perfectionism, or self-doubt, this is your jam. And we’ve wrapped it up with quotes about persistence—the key to getting out of a writing funk.

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Writing Quotes About…

FRUSTRATION

“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” – Thomas Mann

“Anyone who says writing is easy isn’t doing it right.” – Amy Joy

“Discomfort is always a necessary part of enlightenment.” – Pearl Cleage

“I hate writing, I love having written.” – Dorothy Parker

“If you are not discouraged about your writing on a regular basis, you may not be trying hard enough. Any challenging pursuit will encounter frequent patches of frustration. Writing is nothing if not challenging.” – Maxwell Perkins

“Easy reading is damn hard writing.”– Nathaniel Hawthorne

“It always seems impossible until it's done.” – Nelson Mandela

“Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes … including you.” – Anne Lamott

PERFECTIONISM

“Be willing to write really badly.” – Jennifer Egan

“If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word.” – Margaret Atwood

“Don’t be paralyzed by the idea that you’re writing a book; just write.” – Isabelle Allende

“Don’t be afraid to write crap because crap makes great fertilizer.” – Jessica Brody

“Mistakes are the portals of discovery.” – James Joyce

“Don't get it right, get it written.” – Ally Carter

SELF-DOUBT

“I went for years not finishing anything. Because, of course, when you finish something you can be judged.” – Erica Jong

“Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.” – Oscar Wilde

“Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.” – Ray Bradbury

“Focus more on your desire than on your doubt, and the dream will take care of itself.” – Mark Twain

“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

“To write something you have to risk making a fool of yourself.” – Anne Rice

“The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always.” – Arthur Miller

“Writer's block is only a failure of the ego.” – Norman Mailer

“Very few writers really know what they are doing until they’ve done it.”– Anne Lamott

“I don't think you have time to waste not writing because you are afraid you won't be good at it.” – Anne Lamott

PERSISTENCE

“I'm not telling you it's going to be easy. I'm telling you it's going to be worth it.” – Art Williams

“The harder I work, the luckier I get.” – Samuel Goldwyn

“Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.” – Vincent Van Gogh

“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

"No one succeeds without effort... Those who succeed owe their success to perseverance." – Ramana Maharshi

“A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.” – Richard Bach

“I believe myself that a good writer doesn’t really need to be told anything except to keep at it.” – Chinua Achebe

“It is only by writing, not dreaming about it, that we develop our own style.” – P.D. James

“Nothing ever comes to one, that is worth having, except as a result of hard work.” – Booker T. Washington

“A writer should get as much education as possible, but just going to school is not enough; if it were, all owners of doctorates would be inspired writers.” – Gwendolyn Brooks

“First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won’t. Habit is persistence in practice.” – Octavia E. Butler

“A blank page isn’t the end of the world. Writer’s block will end eventually.” – Jen Petro-Roy

“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

“A writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, or because everything she does is golden. 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

“It’s pretty nice to be talented. If you are, enjoy, but it won’t take you that far. Work takes you a lot further.” – Natalie Goldberg

“I write every single day.” – Jason Reynolds

“I don't know where my ideas come from, but I know where they come to. They come to my desk, and if I'm not there, they go away again.” – Philip Pullman

“The learning curve for fiction is long. The journey goes much better when the object is not getting published but rather telling a great story.” – Donald Maass

“Finish what you’re writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.” – Neil Gaiman

“Keep writing. Even if you think it’s terrible, keep writing; you will only get better with practice.” – Lucy Saxon

“Write a short story every week. It's not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.” – Ray Bradbury

“There was a moment when I changed from an amateur to a professional. I assumed the burden of a profession, which is to write even when you don't want to, don't much like what you're writing, and aren't writing particularly well.” – Agatha Christie

“The desire to write grows with writing.” – Erasmus

“Nature never hurries. Atom by atom, little by little she achieves her work.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

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