Are you a blogger? A writer? A copywriter? If so, these 90 famous quotes about writing reveal some surprising secrets about writing you probably did not know.
I don’t know about you but because I am not a native English speaker, writing in English is hard for me. Sometimes I’d like to cry… Or scream.
If you can write, here is an amazing opportunity on how you, by writing, can create your own passive income stream online.
It won’t cost you a bean to find out if it can help you.
Yes, I have great ideas and fantastic thoughts but guess what? I am not able to put them down on paper.
It’s like – Hey, I am desperate!
Here’s a question for you:
Do you think it is easy for pros?
Well, try these out o
f size:
“We are weak; writing is difficult…” ― Robert Falcon Scott.
“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” — Thomas Mann
“Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.” — George Orwell
See. They’re are native English speakers. They’re pros. They’re experienced, skilled, famous… But… They struggle.
Why?
Because writing is an art. And like with every other art in this world, mastering the art of writing takes time and pain.
Which brings me to the next step:
How to Improve English Writing Skills
When I began my blogging adventure, I quickly discovered that I needed to improve my writing skills.
See if the following steps could help you.
Step #1: I started copying some of the best mail-order (and others) ads into my notebook. I did it word-by-word and using my handwriting.
I learned this method from Gary Halbert. Gary Halbert (1939-2007) is one of the Hall-of-Fame copywriters and top marketing minds in the world. And HE recommended this simple method to all who want to master the art of copywriting.
And you know what?
My writing skills have improved indeed.
Why did I copy the ads? Simple. This way, I could improve my selling skills too.
Step #2: I bought the Grammarly Premium app. Grammarly seems to be the most accurate Online Grammar Checker by far – to Detect plagiarism, eliminate grammar errors, and help with punctuation and spelling. Or, as Forbes puts it, “Grammarly quickly and easily makes your writing better.”
As for me, Grammarly has been a tremendous help. I have learned from my mistakes a lot already. Frankly, I have become much stronger in grammar and punctuation. And, my articles are in much more correct English too.
Grammarly has a Free version also, so I recommend checking it out here. It’s an incredibly useful tool.
Step #3: I created this list of 90 Famous Quotes About Writing. Read these quotes, and you will discover quite a few hidden secrets that help you propel yourself ahead of your competition.
Let me ask you – Are you passionate about writing? Do you love writing?
Then, these 90 famous quotes about writing are for you.
Yes, you can find tons of great writing quotes on the Internet. However, a significant part of them is not relevant. Giant quote-database websites like Goodreads, BrainyQuotes, etc., toss in everything they can find.
But you don’t need everything. You need something relevant to you, right? Something that helps you, touches you, inspires you, and motivates you to keep going.
I did the work and selected the following 90 most relevant quotes for bloggers, writers, and copywriters.
I have specifically handpicked all of them.
If you can write, here is an amazing opportunity on how you, by writing, can create your own passive income stream online (which will serve you for years).
Don’t wait for the right moment to take the bull by the horns. It never arrives. Start whenever. Now.
So, here we go:
90 Famous Quotes About Writing
1. “Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it’s always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen), and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.” — Neil Gaiman
2. “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” — Ernest Hemingway
3. “I’m writing a book. I’ve got the page numbers done.”― Steven Wright
4. “Don’t expect the puppets of your mind to become the people of your story. If they are not realities in your own mind, there is no mysterious alchemy in ink and paper that will turn wooden figures into flesh and blood.” — Leslie Gordon Barnard, WD
5. “Read, read, read. Read everything — trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it.” — Then write. If it’s good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out of the window.” — William Faulkner
6. “The writer is an explorer. Every step is an advance into a new land.”― Ralph Waldo Emerson
7. “I almost always urge people to write in the first person. … Writing is an act of ego, and you might as well admit it.” — William Zinsser
8. “People say, ‘What advice do you have for people who want to be writers?’ I say, they don’t really need advice, they know they want to be writers, and they’re gonna do it. Those people who know that they really want to do this and are cut out for it, they know it.” — R.L. Stine, WD
9. “Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now.” — Annie Dillard
10. “I have been successful probably because I have always realized that I knew nothing about writing and have merely tried to tell an interesting story entertainingly.”― Edgar Rice Burroughs
11. “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.”― Barbara Kingsolver
12. “I don’t care if a reader hates one of my stories, just as long as he finishes the book.” — Roald Dahl, WD
13. “Begin with an individual, and before you know it you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find you have created – nothing.”― F. Scott Fitzgerald
14. “I do not over-intellectualize the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.” — Tom Clancy, WD
15. “Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.”― E. L. Doctorow
16. “Know that the Creator lives and moves and breathes within you. So those dreams? Risk them. Those words? Write them. Those hopes? Believe them.”― Elora Nicole Ramirez
17. “We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.” — Ernest Hemingway
18. “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
19. “The first draft of anything is shit.”― Ernest Hemingway
20. “Too many of us are not living our dreams because we are living our fears.”― Les Brown
21. “Write. Rewrite. When not writing or rewriting, read. I know of no shortcuts.” — Larry L. King, WD
22. “Let the world burn through you. Throw the prism light, white hot, on paper.” — Ray Bradbury, WD
23. “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.” — Elmore Leonard
24. “I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.”― Gustave Flaubert
25. “The difference between the almost-right word and the right word is … the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.” — Mark Twain
26. “Long patience and application saturated with your heart’s blood — you will either write or you will not — and the only way to find out whether you will or not is to try.” — Jim Tully, WD
27. “We are weak, writing is difficult, but for my own sake, I do not regret this journey, which has shown that Englishmen can endure hardships, help one another, and meet death with as great a fortitude as ever in the past.” ― Robert Falcon Scott
28. “Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.” — George Orwell
29. “Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.” — William Wordsworth
30. “The first sentence can’t be written until the final sentence is written.” — Joyce Carol Oates, WD
31. “The scariest moment is always just before you start.” — Stephen King,
32. “A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” — Thomas Mann
33. “The work never matches the dream of perfection the artist has to start with.”― William Faulkner
34. “Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader – not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.”― E. L. Doctorow
35. “It is perfectly okay to write garbage — as long as you edit brilliantly.”― C. J. Cherryh
36. “I find that I have about six bloggable ideas a day. I also find that writing twice as long a post doesn’t increase communication, it usually decreases it. And finally, I found that people get antsy if there are unread posts in their queue. ― Seth Godin
37. “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” — Ernest Hemingway
38. “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 one book.” — Samuel Johnson
39. “Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice.” ― Margaret Atwood
40. “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, WD
41. “Writing is really very easy. Tap a vein and bleed onto the page. Everything else is just technical.” — Derrick Jensen
42. “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.” — Robert Frost
43. “Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old-fashioned virtues of hard, constant labor, he’ll eventually make some kind of career for himself as a writer.”― Ray Bradbury
44. “If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”― Stephen King
45. “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
46. “Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.”― Henry David Thoreau
47. “Keep a small can of WD-40 on your desk — away from any open flames — to remind yourself that if you don’t write daily, you will get rusty.” — George Singleton
48. “When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people, not characters. A character is a caricature.” — Ernest Hemingway
49. “Learn as much by writing as by reading.” ― Lord Acton
50. “you can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will.” — Stephen King,
51. “One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.” — Jack Kerouac
52. “Writing is really just a matter of writing a lot, writing consistently and having faith that you’ll continue to get better and better. Sometimes, people think that if they don’t display great talent and have some success right away, they won’t succeed. But writing is about struggling through and learning and finding out what it is about writing itself that you really love.” — Laura Kasischke
53. “Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it’s the only way you can do anything really good.” ― William Faulkner
54. “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, WD
55. “People on the outside think there’s something magical about writing, that you go up in the attic at midnight and cast the bones and come down in the morning with a story, but it isn’t like that. You sit in back of the typewriter, and you work, and that’s all there is to it.” ― Harlan Ellison
56. “All writing comes by the grace of God.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson
57. “If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn’t matter a damn how you write.” — Somerset Maugham
58. “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
59. “Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.” — Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country
60. “Imagination is like a muscle. I found out that the more I wrote, the bigger it got.” — Philip José Farmer
61. “I always start writing with a clean piece of paper and a dirty mind.” — Patrick Dennis
62. “A wounded deer leaps the highest.” ― Emily Dickinson
63. “Half my life is an act of revision.” ― John Irving
64. “The difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.” — Mark Twain
65. “One thing that helps is to give myself permission to write badly. I tell myself that I’m going to do my five or 10 pages no matter what and that I can always tear them up the following morning if I want. I’ll have lost nothing — writing and tearing up five pages would leave me no further behind than if I took the day off.” — Lawrence Block, WD
66. “It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.” ― Robert Benchley
67. “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
68. “Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.” ― Louis L’Amour
69. “A blank piece of paper is God’s way of telling us how hard it to be God.” ― Sidney Sheldon
70. “The freelance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.” — Robert Benchley
71. “There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.” — Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist
72. “First, find out what your hero wants, then just follow him!” ― Ray Bradbury
73. “The most important thing is to read as much as you can, like I did. It will give you an understanding of what makes good writing and it will enlarge your vocabulary.” ― J. K. Rowling
74. “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it. Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can’t allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative.” — Elmore Leonard
75. “Write while the heat is in you. … The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with.” — Henry David Thoreau
76. “Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us get up and go to work.” ― Stephen King
77. “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. ” — Stephen King
78. “I don’t need an alarm clock. My ideas wake me.” — Ray Bradbury, WD
79. “It’s none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think you were born that way.” — Ernest Hemingway
80. “The road to hell is paved with adverbs.” — Stephen King
81. “This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It’s that easy, and that hard.” ― Neil Gaiman
82. “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.” — Stephen King
“When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.” ― Ernest Hemingway
83. “You must write every single day of your life… You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads… may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.” ― Ray Bradbury
84. “My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.” ― Ernest Hemingway
85. “You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.” ― Jack London
86. “Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.” ― Franz Kafka
87. “Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” ― Anton Chekhov
88. “You can make anything by writing.” ― C.S. Lewis
89. “There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.” ― W. Somerset Maugham
90. “We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.” ― Kurt Vonnegut
Conclusion
So… What do you think? Did you enjoy these famous quotes about writing? If you love writing, if you are a blogger or a writer, or a copywriter, I suspect you did enjoy them.
Here is my recommendation to you: Take at least one thing you have learned here, then apply it in your life. I am sure your writing skills will improve as well.
And just in case you don’t have a blog yet but would like to have one. Here’s how to start your blog with these four simple steps. It’s free.
Imagine for looking for legit work-from-home opportunities and finding THIS when you go inside… WOW
Yes, the raw, sizzling beauty of passive income stream online… Please click now. Because sometimes ‘later’ becomes ‘never .‘
What About You?
How do you improve your writing skills? Which methods do you like to apply; or plan to use in the future? Please drop me a comment in the comment section below.
ARE YOU looking for ways to create a legit passive income online?