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

You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.

Jodi Picoult

Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.

Louis L’Amour

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

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

Maya Angelou

A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.

Richard Bach

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

Stephen King

You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.

Saul Bellow

Read, read, read. Read everything – trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it’s good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out of the window.

William Faulkner

A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

Thomas Mann

Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

You can make anything by writing.

C. S. Lewis

A word after a word after a word is power.

Margaret Atwood

Tears are words that need to be written.

Paulo Coelho

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

Writers live twice.

Natalie Goldberg

It’s none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.

Ernest Hemingway

A writer is working when he’s staring out of the window.

Burton Rascoe

If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.

Isaac Asimov

There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.

W. Somerset Maugham

If you wait for inspiration to write you’re not a writer, you’re a waiter.

Dan Poynter