My FAVE Writing Quotes

Well of course I have a big fat file of writing quotes all organized on my computer! Here are a few of them for you to enjoy!


"Ink on paper is as beautiful to me as flowers on the mountains; God composes, why shouldn't we?"

--Audra Foveo-Alba


"A writer's voice is like a snowflake--complicated, beautiful, and individual. It is the essence of self, distilled and offered in service to the world."

--Mary Pipher


"All writing comes by the grace of God."

-Ralph Waldo Emerson


"I wrote because I couldn't stop. There wasn't anything else I could do."

--Tennessee Williams


"Writers get to live twice."

--Anne Lamott


"If a picture is worth a thousand words than please paint me the Gettysburg address."

--Leo Rosten


"An original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate."

--Chateaubriand


"True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those who move easiest have learned to dance."

--Alexander Pope


"No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader."

--Robert Frost


"Writing is an act of love; if not, it is merely paperwork."

--Jean Cocteau


"A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit."

--Richard Bach


"The best writing style is the style you don't notice."

--Somerset Maugham


"I even shower with my pen, in case any ideas drip out of the waterhead."

--Graycie Harmon


"A writer's voice is like the stroke of an artist's brush."

--Patricia Lee Gauch


"If there is one thing left that I would like to do, it's to write something beautiful."

--J.B. Priestley


"I found that it was boring--not to write--it made the world emptier and thinner for me."

--Alison Lurie


"There is one thing your writing must have if it is to be any good at all. It must have you."

--Elizabeth Ayres


"Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart."

--William Wordsworth


"When something can be read without great effort, great effort has gone into its writing."

--Enrique Jardiel Poncela


"What I like about a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers."

--Logan Pearsall Smith


"Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing about."

--Benjamin Franklin


"A good style should show no effort. What is written should seem like a happy accident."

--W. Somerset Maugham


"Writing is an act of courage."

--Cynthia Ozick


"A writer never has a vacation. For a writer life consists of either writing or thinking about writing."

--Eugene Ionesco


"Write the truest sentence you know."

--Ernest Hemingway


"The difference between the right word and nearly the right word is the same as that between lightening and the lightening bug."

--Mark Twain


"This morning I took out a comma, and this afternoon I put it back again."

--Oscar Wilde


"How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live." 

--Thoreau


"A successful book is not made up of what is in it, but what is left out of it."

--Mark Twain


"And He said unto me, 'Write.' "

--Revelation 2:15, The Bible