Quotes About Writing

Writing is difficult. Working on my second draft revisions and rewrites (so…much…rewriting…) has proven more complicated than originally expected, which, in a way, was expected. It’s been a bit of a struggle and in my more dramatic moments, it feels like the book will never be what I want it to be and the whole world is ending. I wanted to write a post about my writing, but there’s not much to update you on. I feel like I’m still in the same place as I was when I wrote my last writing post—not the same place in the revision process, just the same half-panicked mindset. Sometimes it seems impossible to get right. I alternate between hopeful confidence and unbearable dread that it’s all for naught. In those moments of dread, it’s nice to be reassured that others have felt that way and the struggle is universal among writers. At other times, it’s nice to see how writers have summed up the experience of writing and why I love it and why I must keep going. So, I thought I’d share some quotes about writing that perhaps will do the same for fellow writers.

“It is a delicious thing to write, to be no longer yourself, but to move in an entire universe of your own creation.” —Gustave Flaubert

“You ask me why I spend my life writing? Do I find entertainment? Is it worthwhile? Above all, does it pay? If not, then, is there a reason? I write only because there is a voice within me that will not be stilled.” —Sylvia Plath

“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

“A writer by nature is a dreamer—a conscious dreamer.”—Carson McCullers

“Writing is the painting of the voice.”—Voltaire

“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 word after a word after a word is power.” —Margaret Atwood

“You can make anything by writing.”—C.S. Lewis 

“There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know where they’ll take you.”—Beatrix Potter

For Moments of Dread:

“The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.” —Terry Pratchett

“You might not write well every day, but you can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.” —Jodi Picoult

“I think the hard work of writing is just how long a book is terrible before it’s good.” —Leigh Bardugo

“The first draft is as bad as the book is ever going to be.”—Robin Stevens

“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.” —Ernest 

Hemingway

“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

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

“If I waited for perfection, I would never write.” —Margaret Atwood

“A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.”—Richard Bach

As a solitary craft, it can be easy to slip into thinking you’re the only writer who has ever been so slow or uninspired or lost in your book or whatever it may be that plagues your writing process. Sometimes all you need is a reminder that every person who ever got their book on a shelf in a bookstore felt those same things to make you feel like you can keep going.

A couple of quotes from unknown sources to leave you with: 

“And one day, the girl with the books became the woman writing them.” 

“Someday you’re going to be someone’s favorite author.” 

Thanks for reading, 

Madison