Who is your favorite writer?
Sometimes writing feels like a mysterious process. Lucky for us, many writers have offered clues, advice, humor and other reflections about sharing their work.
Here are 11 quotes, ranging from thoughtful to funny, from famous writers.
Photo by Janko Ferlič on Unsplash
Quotes about starting to write:
1. “The scariest moment is always just before you start.”
― Stephen King, “On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft”
2. “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
― Maya Angelou
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. “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”
― Anaïs Nin
5. “If you want to change the world, pick up your pen and write.”
― Martin Luther
Quotes about the middle of the writing process:
6. “Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
― Virginia Woolf
7. “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”
― Robert Frost
8. “Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It’s a way of understanding it.”
― Lloyd Alexander
9. “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”
― Douglas Adams
Quotes about the end of writing:
10. “What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though.”
― J.D. Salinger
11. “If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.”
― Isaac Asimov
What is your favorite quote about writing? Please share with us in the comments below any lessons learned, questions or any other comments you have about writing.