At their most fundamental level, words, written or spoken, allow us to communicate with each other, whether it’s as simple as “Go,” or something more profound, like “I love you.” We connect to words, with words, and they help us define the world around us. We can relate to each other based on what we say or don’t say, find understanding in somebody else’s words or have somebody reach out because of ours.
So, in the spirit of fostering a warm, welcoming community of wordsmiths, I have compiled fifteen of my favorite “writing quotes” in the hopes that they touch you or inspire you the way they do for me. We each bring something profound to the table, something worth saying. Don’t forget that.
Enjoy.
[tweetquote]“Creativity takes courage.”
—Henri Mattisse[/tweetquote]
[tweetquote]“Words are, in my not so humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic.”
—Albus Dumbledore[/tweetquote]
[tweetquote]“Write drunk, edit sober.”
—Ernest Hemingway[/tweetquote]
[tweetquote]“If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”
—Stephen King[/tweetquote]
[tweetquote]“To begin, begin.”
—William Wordsworth[/tweetquote]
[tweetquote]“If it can be destroyed by the truth, it deserves to be destroyed by the truth.”
—Carl Sagan[/tweetquote]
[tweetquote]“Write what should not be forgotten.”
—Isabel Allende[/tweetquote]
[tweetquote]“Put your ear down close to your soul and listen.”
—Anne Sexton[/tweetquote]
[tweetquote]“I write only because there is a voice within me that will not be still.”
—Sylvia Plath[/tweetquote]
“You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”
—Anne Lamot
[tweetquote]“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
—Ernest Hemingway[/tweetquote]
“I write to give myself strength. I write to be the characters that I am not. I write to explore all the things I’m afraid of.”
—Joss Whedon
[tweetquote]“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”
—Thomas Mann[/tweetquote]
[tweetquote]“If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word.”
—Margaret Atwood[/tweetquote]
“When we read, we start at the beginning and continue until we reach the end. When we write, we start in the middle and fight our way out.”
—Vickie Karp
What’s your favorite writer quote?
