Here are 25 of my favorite quotes on writing to help inspire and motivate you in your writing journey.

“A word after a word after a word is power.”  

Margaret Atwood

“You do an awful lot of bad writing in order to do any good writing. Incredibly bad. I think it would be very interesting to make a collection of some of the worst writing by good writers.” –William S. Burroughs

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.” –Stephen King

“Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.” –Mark Twain

“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 Butler

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

“In writing. Don’t use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the thing you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us a thing was “terrible,” describe it so that we’ll be terrified. Don’t say it was “delightful”; make us say “delightful” when we’ve read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers, “Please will you do my job for me.” –C.S. Lewis

“You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.” –Jack London

“You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.”

Madeleine L’Engle

“I’m writing a first draft and reminding myself that I’m simply shovelling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.” –Shannon Hale

“Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.” –John Steinbeck

Put down everything that comes into your head and then you’re a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff’s worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.” –Colette (Sidonie-Gabrielle Collette)

“If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”

Stephen King

“I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.” –Anne Frank

“Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.” –Virginia Woolf

“A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called “leaves”) imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time–proof that humans can work magic.” –Carl Sagan

“The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.”

Thomas Jefferson

“I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.” –Douglas Adams

“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 one book.” –Samuel Johnson

“If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it. Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can’t allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative.” –Elmore Leonard

“Know your literary tradition, savor it, steal from it, but when you sit down to write, forget about worshiping greatness and fetishizing masterpieces.”

Allegra Goodman

“I do not over-intellectualize the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.” –Tom Clancy

“I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing his talent he would be wise to develop a thick hide.” –Harper Lee

“Don’t expect the puppets of your mind to become the people of your story. If they are not realities in your own mind, there is no mysterious alchemy in ink and paper that will turn wooden figures into flesh and blood.” –Leslie Gordon Barnard

“The first sentence can’t be written until the final sentence is written.”

Joyce Carol Oates