35 Quotes for Writers When You Need Inspiration

There are days when I’m ready to throw in the towel. Either I’ve received another rejection letter, or I can’t figure out how to fix my story and want to give up. When that happens, I look up quotes for writers on Pinterest.

Being able to see and read these bits of inspiration really turns around my attitude and reminds me why I want to be a writer in the first place. When you have those days, read any of these quotes for writers to refresh yourself.

(I’d even write them on a sticky note and stick them on my desk!)

35 Quotes for Writers When You Need Inspiration:

• Maybe it won’t be famous. Maybe it won’t be a movie. But that’s not why I started it. And that’s not why I’ll finish.- Ryan Reudell

• Don’t forget-no one else sees the world the way you do, so no one else can tell the stories that you have to tell.- Charles de Lint

• If you don’t see the book you want on the shelf, write it.- Beverly Cleary

• Quiet people have the loudest minds.- Stephen King
• A true artist is not one who is inspired but one who inspires others.- Salvador Dali
• Writers aren’t exactly people. They’re a whole bunch of people trying to be one person.- F Scott Fitzgerald
• Writer: A peculiar organism capable of transforming caffeine into books.- Unknown
• If you want to be a writer you must do two things above all others: read a lot, and write a lot.- Stephen King

• Writing is something you do alone. It’s a profession for introverts who want to tell you a story but don’t want to make eye contact while doing it.- John Green
• As a writer, you try to listen to what others aren’t saying about the silence. -NR Hart
• A writer is a world trapped in a person.- Victor Hugo
• A real writer doesn’t just want to write; a real writer has to write– Unknown
• The writer is by nature a dreamer-a conscious dreamer. -Carson McCullers

• I think new writers are too worried that it has all been said before. Sure it has, but not by you.- Asha Dornfest
• Only a writer will hold conversations between people that don’t exist. We don’t talk to ourselves. We talk to the people we create from nothing.- Joseph Eastwood
• Put something silly in the world that ain’t been there before- Shel Silverstein
• A writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, or because everything she does is golden. A writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway.- Junot Diaz

• Someday you’re going to be someone’s favorite author– Flash Fiction
• A day will come when the story inside you will want to breathe on its own. That’s when you’ll start writing. -Sarah Noffke
• Writers don’t write from experience, although many are hesitant to admit that they don’t…if you wrote from experience, you’d get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy. -Nikki Giovanni
• Writing is a job, a talent, but it’s also the place to go in your head. It is the imaginary friend you drink your tea with in the afternoon. -Ann Patchett
• We are writers, my love. We don’t cry. We bleed on paper.- AY

• A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.– Susan Sontag
• The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, and familiar things new.- Unknown
• Most writers write to say something about other people- and it doesn’t last. Good writers write to find out about themselves– and it lasts forever. – Gloria Steinem
• A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. -Ursula K LeGuin
• Don’t be ‘a writer’, be writing. – William Faulkner

• You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should’ve behaved better. -Anne Lamott
• The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say. – Anais Nin
• You can’t blame a writer for what the characters say. -Truman Capote
• I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear. -Joan Didion
• Nothing haunts us like the things we don’t say. -Mitch Albom

• The greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. -Roald Dahl
• Open your mind to new experiences, particularly to the study of other people. Nothing that happens to a writer- however happy, however tragic- is ever wasted. -PD James
• Think only about the work, about writing a book as good as you can make it. It helps to have the sensation that you are writing a book that doesn’t exist and that you, as a reader, would like to exist. -Adam Foulds

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I love to write quotes on sticky notes or put them in the margin of my planner–anything that will remind me throughout the day of the inspiration I need. 

Feel free to share these quotes for writers with your other writer friends! We all need to uplifted every now and then.

For more quotes for writers and inspiration, check out these other articles on the blog:

• What it takes to be a Successful Writer
• 45 Writing Quotes when You can’t Write
• 20 Reasons Why You Need to Read

Share these quotes for writers with your friends!