I’ve been looking up content for my writing groups, for our social media platforms. Here are a few I’ve found that seem particularly relevant:
“Chain that muse to your desk and get the job done.” ~Barbara Kingsolver
“You can’t think yourself out of a writing block; you have to write your way out of a thinking block.” ~John Rogers
“It seems writer’s block is often a dislike of writing badly and waiting for better writing to happen.” ~Jennifer Egan
“I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.” ~James Michener
“If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, all of us.”
—William Faulkner
“For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.”
—Catherine Drinker Bowen
“Let the world burn through you. Throw the prism light, white hot, on paper.”
—Ray Bradbury
“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
“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
“There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.”
—Doris Lessing
“Style means the right word. The rest matters little.”
—Jules Renard
“The first sentence can’t be written until the final sentence is written.”
—Joyce Carol Oates
“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
“I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing his talent he would be wise to develop a thick hide.”
—Harper Lee
“I don’t need an alarm clock. My ideas wake me.”
—Ray Bradbury,
“It’s none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think you were born that way.”
—Ernest Hemingway
“Writers are always selling somebody out.”
—Joan Didion
“Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.”
—Robert A. Heinlein
“Remember: Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations.”
—Ray Bradbury
“Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.”
—Virginia Woolf
“When I say work I only mean writing. Everything else is just odd jobs.”
—Margaret Laurence
“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is … the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”
—Mark Twain
“I always start writing with a clean piece of paper and a dirty mind.”
—Patrick Dennis
“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
“A book is simply the container of an idea—like a bottle; what is inside the book is what matters.”
—Angela Carter
