Motivational Quotes from Famous Writers

Sometimes all you need is a little motivation to start writing, keep writing, and chase your dreams.

That’s why I’ve compiled this list of great quotes from famous writers.

Use it to find the inspiration to write, live up to your full potential, and start building your dreams.

1. “Start writing no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.” — Louis L’Amour

2. “In order to rise from its own ashes, a phoenix first must burn.” — Octavia E. Butler

3. “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

4. “There’s a difference between writing for a living and writing for life. If you write for a living, you make enormous compromises…If you write for life, you’ll work hard; you’ll do what’s honest, not what pays.” — Toni Morrison

5. “I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.” — Robert Frost

6. “90 percent perfect and shared with the world always changes more lives than 100 percent perfect and stuck in your head.” — Jon Acuff

7. “Write without pay until someone offers pay. If nobody offers within three years, the candidate may look upon this as a sign that sawing wood is what he was intended for.” — Mark Twain

8. “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” — Maya Angelou

9. “A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.” -Richard Bach

10. “Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it’s the only way you can do anything really good.” — William Faulkner

11. “First, find out what your hero wants, then just follow him.” — Ray Bradbury

12. “When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you’re done, you have to step back and look at the forest.” — Stephen King

13. “Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

14. “The most important thing about art is to work. Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying.” — Steven Pressfield

15. “The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order to write. A man will turn over half a library to make a book.” — Samuel Johnson

16. “The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time, you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is you really want to say.” — Mark Twain

17. “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

18. “There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story.” — Frank Herbert

19. “Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them. There’s many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.” — Flannery O’Connor

20. “Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.” — Ray Bradbury

21. “The most important thing in life is to stop saying ‘I wish’ and start saying ‘I will.’ Consider nothing impossible, then treat possibilities as probabilities.” — Charles Dickens

22. “We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.” — Ernest Hemingway

23. “It was not a matter of believing or disbelieving what I read, but of feeling something new, of being affected by something that made the look of the world different.” — Richard Wright

24. “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.” — Robert Frost

25. “Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written largely in his works.” — Virginia Woolf

I hope you find the inspiration you need to keep writing from these quotes.

What’s your favorite quote on writing?