36 Quotes By Great Writers That Can Teach You How To Become A Writer Yourself

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If you admire classic writers as much as I do, then you must know that not all of them were geniuses. Sometimes talent itself is not enough; you also need to work hard to become a good writer. But there's still one other thing that's called life experiences. Your memories, your feelings and even your fears are the most important stuff you need to find the right way to express yourself.

Don't expect to become a great writer by tomorrow! As you may know, Rome wasn't built in a day.

So, if you like writing, then I think it would be useful for you to read some of the most famous quotes about writing.

Writing is art and some of history's greatest writers prove that by what they've said. Nobody can forget Mark Twain or Albert Camus' inspiring quotes. But there are more writers, some of them less famous, who can teach you all they know. You should only read them.

Take a look at the following quotes:

1) “In both writing and sleeping, we learn to be physically still at the same time we are encouraging our minds to unlock from the humdrum rational thinking of our daytime lives.” - Stephen King

2) “I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops.” - Stephen King

3) “At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it. You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then — and only then — it is handed to you.” - Annie Dillard

4) “Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life.” - Anne Lamott

5) “All bad writers are in love with the epic.” - Ernest Hemingway

6) “As a writer you should not judge. You should understand.” - Ernest Hemingway

7) “Work on one thing at a time until finished.” - Henry Miller

8) “Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.” - Kurt Vonnegut

9) “The most damning revelation you can make about yourself is that you do not know what is interesting and what is not.” - Kurt Vonnegut

10) “You have to simply love writing, and you have to remind yourself often that you love it.” - Susan Orlean

11) “Only a person who is congenially self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays” - E. B. White

12) “Anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time. You have to write up, not down.” - E. B. White

13) “Writing is not an exercise in excision, it’s a journey into sound.” - E. B. White

14) “Writers do not merely reflect and interpret life, they inform and shape life.” - E. B. White

15) “A page of Addison or of Irving will teach more of style than a whole manual of rules, whilst a story of Poe’s will impress upon the mind a more vivid notion of powerful and correct description and narration than will ten dry chapters of a bulky textbook.” - H. P. Lovecraft

16) “Sheer egoism… Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen — in short, with the whole top crust of humanity.” - George Orwell

17) “By using stale metaphors, similes and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself.” - George Orwell

18) “A problem with a piece of writing often clarifies itself if you go for a long walk.” - Helen Dunmore

19) “Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.” - Anaïs Nin

20) “It is in the movements of emotional crisis that human beings reveal themselves most accurately.” - Anaïs Nin

21) “The only environment the artist needs is whatever peace, whatever solitude, and whatever pleasure he can get at not too high a cost.” - William Faulkner

22) “It’s the most satisfying occupation man has discovered yet, because you never can quite do it as well as you want to, so there’s always something to wake up tomorrow morning to do.” - William Faulkner

23) “The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is … to help man endure by lifting his heart.” - William Faulkner

24) “To make your life being a writer, it’s an auto-slavery … you are both the slave and the task-master.” - Susan Sontag

25) “The cutting of the gem has to be finished before you can see whether it shines.” - Leonard Cohen

26) “For a person whose sole burning ambition is to write — like myself — college is useless beyond the Sophomore year.” - William Styron

27) “Truth that is naked is the most beautiful, and the simpler its expression the deeper is the impression it makes.” - Schopenhauer

28) “The only moral that is of any value is that which arises inevitably from the whole cast of the author’s mind.” - C.S. Lewis

29) “Style ought to prove that one believes in an idea; not only that one thinks it but also feels it.” - Nietzsche

30) “I doubt I would have written a line … unless some minor tragedy had sort of twisted my mind out of the normal rut.” - Roald Dahl

31) “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” - Maya Angelou (I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings)

32) “Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.” - Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own)

33) “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

34) “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 (The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath)

35) “Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” - Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)

36) “Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.” - Aldous Huxley (Brave New World)

Except for these great writers, Greek philosophy is an alternate way to improve your thinking. It might seem difficult to understand, so you could make a start by reading some Socrates' quotes, Plato's quotes and Aristotle's quotes.

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