I was researching writing quotes for another site of mine when I quickly discovered it was impossible to chose just one! There’s nothing quite as inspiring as the words of wisdom from the great writers themselves – that said, I thought an entire post dedicated to writing quotes was necessary.

1. “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live!” – Thoreau
2. “The first draft of everything is shit” – Hemingway
3. “Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.” – E.B. White
4. “Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wresting alligators.” – Olin Miller
5. “It’s not wise to violate rules until you know how to observe them.” – T.S. Eliot
6. “Writing isn’t hard – no harder than ditch-digging.” – Patrick Dennis
7. “The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in shock-proof shit detector.” – Hemingway
8. “Read over your compositions and, when you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.” – Samuel Johnson
9. “If a young writer can refrain from writing, he shouldn’t hesitate to do so.” – Gide.
10. “People do not deserve good writing, they are so pleased with bad.” – Emerson
11. “The secret of good writing is to say an old thing in a new way or to say a new thing in an old way.” – Richard harding David
12. “I shall live bad if I do not write, and I shall write bad if I do not live.” – Francoise Sagan
13. “An essayist is a lucky person who has found a way to discourse without being interrupted.” Charles Poore.
14. “If you are in difficulties with a book, try the element of surprise: attack it at an hour when it isn’t expecting it.” – H.G. Wells
15. “The tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.” Faulkner
16. “A good writer is not per se a good book critic, no more so than a good drunk is automatically a good bartender.” – Jum Bishop
17. “To write simply is as difficult as to be good.” Somerset maugham
18. “The physical business of writing is unpleasant to me, but the psychic satisfaction of discharging bad ideas in worse English makes me forget it.” – Mencken
19. “I write fast because I have not the brains to write slow.” – Georges Simenon
20. “I have tried simply to write the best I can; sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.” -Heminway
21. “He is a writer for the ages – the ages of four to eight” – Dorothy Parker
22. “A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.” – Richard Bach
23. “To me the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it’s about, but the music the words make.” – Truman Capote
24. “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.” – William Faulkner
25. “I put a piece of paper under my pillow, and when I could not sleep I wrote in the dark.”  Henry David Thoreau”