Looking for inspiration whilst working on your novel? Here are quotes from great writers to keep you on track with your WIP.
“Give me books, fruit, French wine, fine weather and a little music.” — John Keats
“If a story is in you, it has to come out.” — William Faulkner
“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
“I’m very lucky in that I don’t understand the world yet. If I understood the world, it would be harder for me to write these books.” — Mo Willems
“Ideas are cheap. It’s the execution that is all important.” — George R.R. Martin
“If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word.” — Margaret Atwood
“You can make anything by writing.”— C.S. Lewis
“The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words.” — William H. Gass
“Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.” — Albert Einstein
“You don’t start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it’s good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it.” — Octavia E. Butler
“Start before you’re ready.” — Steven Pressfield
“You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.” — Jodi Picoult
“You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.” — Jack London
“I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.” — Robert Frost
“If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” — Toni Morrison
“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.” — Oscar Wilde
“To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.” — Herman Melville
“Unable are the loved to die for love is immortality.” — Emily Dickinson
“We are all broken, that’s how the light gets in.” — Ernest Hemingway
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” — Aristotle
“You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.” — Jodi Picoult
“You cannot find peace by avoiding life” — Virginia Woolf
“I can be changed by what happens to me. But I refuse to be reduced by it.” — Maya Angelou
“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.” — Alice Walker
“If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word.” — Margaret Atwood
“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.” — Anne Frank
“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.” — Kurt Vonnegut
“Maybe it’s not about having a beautiful day, but about finding beautiful moments. Maybe a whole day is just too much to ask. I could choose to believe that in every day, in all things, no matter how dark and ugly, there are shards of beauty if I look for them.” — Anna White
“The best time to plan a book is while you’re doing the dishes.” — Agatha Christie
“If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” — Toni Morrison
“It is never too late to be what you might have been.” — George Eliot
“Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.” — Mark Twain
“Let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences.” — Sylvia Plath
“Life is tough my darling, but so are you.” — Stephanie Bennett Henry
“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.” — Jack Kerouac
“When your story is ready for rewrite, cut it to the bone. Get rid of every ounce of excess fat. This is going to hurt; revising a story down to the bare essentials is always a little like murdering children, but it must be done.” — Stephen King
“It is perfectly okay to write garbage as long as you edit brilliantly.” — C. J. Cherryh
“Half my life is an act of revision.” — John Irving
“Writing without revising is the literary equivalent of waltzing gaily out of the house in your underwear.” — Patricia Fuller
“Write your first draft with your heart. Rewrite with your head.” — Mike Rich
“Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don’t see any.” — Orson Scott
“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
“Most writers regard the truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are most economical in its use.” — Mark Twain
“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
“Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.” — Natalie Goldberg
“It doesn’t matter how many book ideas you have if you can’t finish writing your book.” — Joe Bunting
“If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word.” — Margaret Atwood
“A blank piece of paper is God’s way of telling us how hard it is to be God.” — Sidney Sheldon
“I am not at all in a humor for writing; I must write on until I am.” — Jane Austen
“Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it’s the only way you can do anything really good.” — William Faulkner
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