Inspiring Quotes about Inspired Writing

My good friend C (who can be seen with me here having a lovely day in Amsterdam during the summer) wrapped this little book called  Inspiration For Writers up and gave it to me as a Christmas present last year. I flicked through it after opening, teared up at her handwritten note on the front page and then I read a few of the first quotes.

And then, I'm sad to say, I forgot all about it. Packed it up in a box, put it in storage and a few days later we left to travel around Finland.

That box found it's way to the Netherlands recently and that little green book has been keeping me company all this long month of NaNoWriMo.

Here are my favourite quotes about writing from this book. I hope they spur you on to either finish NaNoWriMo or to just keep the creative juice flowing and those poor fingers typing...

Quotes about writing

"You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say." F. Scott Fitzgerald

"If you don't think there is magic in writing, you probably won't write anything magical." Terry Brooks

"Sit down to write what you have thought, and not to think what you shall write." William Corbett

"Just leave your mind alone; your intuition knows what it wants to write, so get out of the way." Ray Bradbury

"Easy reading is damn hard writing." Nathaniel Hawthorne

Quotes about editing"

"Writing is 1 per cent inspiration, and 99 per cent elimination." Louise Brooks

"In a writer there must always be two people - the writer and the critic." Leo Tolstoy

"I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again." Oscar Wilde

"I try to leave out the parts that people skip." Elmore Leonard

Quotes about being a writer

"We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master." Ernest Hemingway

"Every writer is a thief, though some of us are more clever than others at disguising our robberies." Joseph Epstein.

"If you can't annoy somebody, there's little point in writing." Kingsley Amis

"I'm most happy to be a writer." Maya Angelou

Quotes about the laws of writing

"The six golden rules of writing: read, read, read and write, write, write." Ernest J. Gaines

"There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are." W. Somerset Maugham

"There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there be." Doris Lessing

"Forget all the rules. Forget about being published. Write for yourself and celebrate writing."  Melinda Haynes