Inspirational writing quotes

There is no royal path to good writing; and such paths as exist do not lead through neat critical gardens, various as they are, but through the jungles of self, the world, and of craft.
~ Jessamyn West

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. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.
~ William Faulkner

You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you've got something to say.
~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

You have all the scenes. Just go home and word it in.
~Samuel Goldwyn to Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond

If you steal from one author, it's plagiarism; if you steal from many, its research.
~ Wilson Mizner

You could compile the worst book in the world entirely out of selected passages from the best writers in the world.
~G.K. Chesterton

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

The wastebasket is a writer's best friend.
~Isaac Bashevis Singer

The story I am writing exists, written in absolutely perfect fashion, some place, in the air. All I must do is find it, and copy it.
~Jules Renard, "Diary," February 1895

When a man is in doubt about this or that in his writing, it will often guide him if he asks himself how it will tell a hundred years hence.
~Samuel Butler

Writing comes more easily if you have something to say.
~Sholem Asch

Writing is a struggle against silence.
~Carlos Fuentes

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.
~Ernest Hemingway, interview in Paris Review, Spring 1958

A man will turn over half a library to make one book.
~Samuel Johnson

The best style is the style you don't notice.
~Somerset Maugham

I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head.
~John Updike