50 Helpful Quotes About Creative Writing
Are you a writer? Are you experiencing writer’s block? Do you simply need some encouragement to help you in your journey as a writer? Here are 50 helpful quotes about creative writing meant just for you.
Creativity in writing has taken a long and bold step in this revolutionary generation. As the day goes by, the initialization process gets more enhanced, and writing appreciates more. By so doing, writers all over the world seek deeper knowledge that will accelerate their mindset to understand what goes on in the world today.
With writers and great sages on one hand and readers and learners on the other, creative writing achieves its goal of education and didactic information.
Several sages, professionals, or legends in the writing field exist who helped forge the path writing is taking today.
They, however, made many statements that were adopted as wise quotes to aid budding writers and even professionals, to tow in the right direction.
Below are some of the writers who made good positions and postulations.
The first on the list is Earnest Hemingway – a renowned writer and author of “The Old Man and the Sea“. Hemingway was an American novelist who gained widespread recognition in the 20th century for writing classical novels. Some of his quotes will serve as a basis for the other quotes in this post.
50 Helpful Quotes About Creative Writing
Quotes by Earnest Hemingway
These are ten powerful quotes from Ernest Hemingway, a great writer of the 20th century, that would help writers determine that they see the end of their writing journey.
● “When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen”.
● “All thinking men are Atheists”.
● “All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer”.
● “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”
● “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
● “There is no friend as loyal as a book.”
● “As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand.”
● “My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.”
● “Write hard and clear about what hurts.”
● “In order to write about life first you must live it.”
Other inspirational quotes regarding creative writing include:
● “Fiction can be more real to the reader than reality itself because fiction is the essence of life.”
— James N. Frey
● “Just write every day of your life. Read intensely. Then see what happens. Most of my friends who are put on that diet have very pleasant careers.”
— Ray Bradbury
● “All glory comes from daring to begin.” — Ruskin Bond
● “A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.” — Richard Bach
● “Write. Just do it. Then again. Then some more. And more. Do not wait for inspiration; if you do enough of it often enough, inspiration will eventually come.”
— Nancy Kress
● “Love the writing, love the writing, love the writing… the rest will follow.”
— Jane Yolen
● “One thing that helps is to give myself permission to write badly. I tell myself that I’m going to do my five or 10 pages no matter what, and that I can always tear them up the following morning if I want. I’ll have lost nothing—writing and tearing up five pages would leave me no further behind than if I took the day off.”
— Lawrence Block
● “A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it.”
— Roald Dahl.
● “Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.”
— Louis L’Amour
● “Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it’s the only way you can do anything really good.”
— William Faulkner
● “The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.” — Terry Pratchett
● “You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.” — Jack London
● “If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”
— Stephen King
● “Indeed, learning to write may be part of learning to read. For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.”
—Eudora Welty
● “I kept always two books in my pocket: one to read, one to write in.” —Robert Louis Stevenson
● “The Six Golden Rules of Writing: Read, read, read, and write, write, write.” —Ernest Gaines
● “Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river.” —Lisa See
● “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”
— Toni Morrison
● “Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.”
—Stephen King
● “When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.”
— George Orwell
● “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
● “Cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can’t fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.”
— William S. Burroughs
● “The story must strike a nerve in me. My heart should start pounding when I hear the first line in my head. I start trembling at the risk.”
—Susan Sontag
● “As for ‘Write what you know,’ I was regularly told this as a beginner. I think it’s a very good rule and have always obeyed it. I write about imaginary countries, alien societies on other planets, dragons, wizards, the Napa Valley in 22002. I know these things. I know them better than anybody else possibly could, so it’s my duty to testify about them.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin
● “Ideas are cheap. It’s the execution that is all-important.” —George R.R. Martin
● “To gain your own voice, you have to forget about having it heard.” —Allen Ginsberg
● “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”
—Robert Frost
● “Voice is not just the result of a single sentence or paragraph or page. It’s not even the sum total of a whole story. It’s all your work laid out across the table like the bones and fossils of an unidentified carcass.”
—Chuck Wendig
● “Your writing voice is the deepest possible reflection of who you are. The job of your voice is not to seduce or flatter or make well-shaped sentences. In your voice, your readers should be able to hear the contents of your mind, your heart, your soul.”
—Meg Rosoff
● “Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.”
—Virginia Woolf
● “There are some books that refuse to be written. They stand their ground year after year and will not be persuaded. It isn’t because the book is not there and worth being written — it is only because the right form of the story does not present itself. There is only one right form for a story and, if you fail to find that form, the story will not tell itself.”
— Mark Twain
● “First, find out what your hero wants, then just follow him.” —Ray Bradbury
● “Focus more on your desire than on your doubt, and the dream will take care of itself.”
—Mark Twain
● “A blank piece of paper is God’s way of telling us how hard it is to be God.” —Sidney Sheldon
● “Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.”
—Gloria Steinem
● “Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in a human situation.”
—Graham Greene
● “I do not over-intellectualise the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.”
—Tom Clancy
● “You learn to write by writing.” —William Zinsser
● “A word after a word after a word is power.” —Margaret Atwood
● “I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.” — Anne Frank.
Conclusion
Quotes are wise words said by wise men. They may look simple, but deep meanings are engraved within. They also serve to motivate writers who are either newbies or experiencing writer’s block. It helps them get going and keep going. Several writers’ works will forever be an inspiration to budding writers and serve as a guide. Creativity comes from the mind and the right psychological frame.