The 52 Offbeat Inspirational quotes for writers below showcase the art of writing, creativity, personal writing, and writing rituals.
“Writers don’t choose their craft; they need to write in order to face the world.”
– Alice Hoffman
“Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.”
– Stephen King
“It unfolds as you write it. That’s something I never believed before I wrote a book, but it does.”
– Joan Didion
“A writer should have this little voice inside of you saying, ‘Tell the truth. Reveal a few secrets here.’”
– Quentin Tarantino
“When you’re stuck, go back to your characters’ motivations.”
– David Mamet
“Just know that everyone’s writing is terrible. Until it’s not. No one’s stuff is right immediately. You gotta work it. Refine it. Shape it. Spend time with it. It’s a relationship. Between you and what comes from you. Not easy. Gonna be terrible before it’s not. And that’s okay.”
– Ava DuVernay
“Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at the close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.”
– Dylan Thomas
“My creative muse is wabi-sabi, a practice where inessentials are trimmed away or eliminated. The intersection where Wabi (minimal) and Sabi (functional) meet is the platform for my creativity: space and quiet solitude, simplicity.”
– Laurie Buchanan
“I’ve always felt that the more personal you get, the more universal the application, rather than the other way around. If you begin to address yourself to the masses like that, then I suppose you could have a hit, but to me the more accurate you get about your situation, then the more accessible it is to other people.”
– Leonard Cohen
“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’s nothing to stop a man from writing unless that man stops himself. If a man truly desires to write, then he will. Rejection and ridicule will only strengthen him.
“And the longer he is held back the stronger he will become, like a mass of rising water against a dam. There is no losing in writing, it will make your toes laugh as you sleep, it will make you stride like a tiger, it will fire the eye and put your face to face with death.
“You will die a fighter, you will be honored in hell. The luck of the word. Go with it, send it.”
– Charles Bukowski
“Address the people you seek, and them only.”
– Claude C. Hopkins
“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”
– Anton Chekhov
“I write one page of masterpiece to 91 pages of $@*#. I try to put the $@*# in the wastebasket.”
– Ernest Hemingway
“The difference between the ‘almost right’ word and the ‘right’ word is really a large matter … ’tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”
– Mark Twain
“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”
– Anaïs Nin
“I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.”
– Blaise Pascal
“Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.”
– Flannery O’Connor
“The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.”
– Dorothy Parker
“I think perfection is ugly. Somewhere in the things humans make, I want to see scars, failure, disorder, distortion.”
– Yohji Yamamoto
“Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.”
– Salman Rushdie
“Italics provide a wonderful advantage: you see, right away, that the words are in a rush. When something exists at a slant, you can’t help but consider the irony.”
– Ann Beattie
“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”– Haruki Murakami
“The secret of all effective advertising is not the creation of new and tricky words and pictures, but one of putting familiar words and pictures into new relationships.”
– Leo Burnett
“I prefer to be on the side of losers, the misunderstood or lonely people rather than writing about the strong and powerful.”
– Núria Añó