Quotes on Inspiring Writing

Some critics will write 'Maya Angelou is a natural writer' - which is right after being a natural heart surgeon.

Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone.

The scariest moment is always just before you start.

Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer.

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.

Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.

What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy.

I don't wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that. Your mind must know it has got to get down to work.

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.

If you show someone something you've written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, ‘When you’re ready’.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.

Inspiration is a guest that does not willingly visit the lazy.

If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time or the tools to write.

Easy reading is damn hard writing.

I write to give myself strength. I write to be the characters that I am not. I write to explore all the things I'm afraid of.

I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works.

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.

Being a writer means taking the leap from listening to saying 'Listen to me'.

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