10 Quotes on Writing

Every once in a while, we need a pick-me-up to continue writing. Here are some of my favourite inspirational nuggets. Print them out, tape them to your wall, and refer to them whenever you need some guidance and self-discipline.

"Substitute "damn" every time you're inclined to write "very"; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be."

Mark Twain

"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

"Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it's the only way you can do anything really good."  

William Faulkner

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

Stephen King

"I have to write the story I want to write. I never wrote them with a focus group of 8-year-olds in mind. I have to continue telling the story the way I want to tell it."

JK Rowling

"You can never read your own book with the innocent anticipation that comes with that first delicious page of a new book, because you wrote the thing. You've been backstage. You've seen how the rabbits were smuggled into the hat. Therefore ask a reading friend or two to look at it before you give it to anyone in the publishing business. This friend should not be someone with whom you have a ­romantic relationship, unless you want to break up."

Margaret Atwood

"The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe."

Gustave Flaubert

"I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it."

Ernest Hemingway

"Authors with a mortgage never get writer's block."

Mavis Cheek

"My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying."

Anton Chekhov