Words to live by: quotes about writing, to inspire and inform you

There is a writing self which is not quite your ordinary social self and which you don’t really have access to except at the moment when you’re writing, and certainly in my view, I think of that as my best self. To be able to be that person feels good; it feels better than anything else.
— Salman Rushdie

Don’t let anyone or anything cut into your time with words.
–Eudora Welty
There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.
–Somerset Maugham

I felt like you can write forever, but you have a short time to raise a family. And I think a family is a lot more important than writing.
– Ken Kesey

Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human condition.
– Graham Greene

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 writer.
–Ray Bradbury

All writing is difficult. The most you can hope for is a day when it goes reasonably easily. Plumbers don’t get plumber’s block, and doctors don’t get doctor’s block; why should writers be the only profession that gives a special name to the difficulty of working, and then expects sympathy for it?
— Philip Pullman

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot…reading is the creative center of a writer’s life…you cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.
–Stephen King

The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.
— John Steinbeck

Most people won’t realise that writing is a craft.  You have to take your apprenticeship in it like anything else.
— Katherine Ann Porter

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
— Virginia Woolf

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
— Joan Didion

Write as often as possible, not with the idea at once of getting into print, but as if you were learning an instrument.
— J B Priestley

Even if my marriage is falling apart and my children are unhappy, there is still a part of me that says, ‘God, this is fascinating!’
— Jane Smiley

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

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by.  How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment?  For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone.  That is where the writer scores over his fellows:  he catches the changes of his mind on the hop.
— Vita Sackville-West

Writing became such a process of discovery that I couldn’t wait to get to work in the morning:  I wanted to know what I was going to say.
— Sharon O’Brien

I love writing.  I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.
— James Michener

Writing, I think, is not apart from living.  Writing is a kind of double living.  The writer experiences everything twice.  Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind.
— Catherine Drinker Bowen

Every writer I know has trouble writing.
— Joseph Heller

What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when (s)he’s staring out of the window.
— Burton Rascoe

The best time for planning a book is while you’re doing the dishes.
— Agatha Christie

A writer’s mind seems to be situated partly in the solar plexus and partly in the head.
— Ethel Wilson

It is impossible to discourage the real writers – they don’t give a damn what you say, they’re going to write.
— Sinclair Lewis

Writing is both mask and unveiling.
— E.B. White

Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.
— Franz Kafka

There’s only one person who needs a glass of water oftener than a small child tucked in for the night, and that’s a writer sitting down to write.
— Mignon McLaughlin

Loafing is the most productive part of a writer’s life.
— James Norman Hall

Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted.
— Jules Renard

Every author in some way portrays himself in his works, even if it be against his will.
— Goethe