Great writers can teach us about writing and inspire us to write with excellence
Here are some of my favorite quotes from great writers and other famous people:
“Truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.” -Flannery O’Connor
“The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.” -Muriel Rukeyser
“Having fun isn’t hard when you’ve got a library card.” -Marc Brown
“A word has power in and of itself. It comes from nothing into sound and meaning; it gives origin to all things.” -N. Scott Momaday
“If the real world were a book, it would never find a publisher. Overlong, detailed to the point of distraction-and ultimately, without a major resolution.” -Jasper Fforde
“Never give up…No one knows what’s going to happen next.” -L. Frank Baum
“Not all those who wander are lost.” -J.R.R. Tolkien
“Humanity lives in its fiction.” -Blaise Cendrars
“You can’t stay in your corner of the Forest waiting for others to come to you. You have to go to them sometimes.” -A.A. Milne
“I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge, you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.” -Kurt Vonnegut
“It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.” -Herman Melville
“A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What one can be, one must be.” -Abraham Maslow
“If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.” -Juan Ramon Jimenez
“One day I was speeding along at the typewriter, and my daughter—who was a child at the time—asked me, ‘Daddy, why are you writing so fast?’ And I replied, ‘Because I want to see how the story turns out!’” -Louis L’Amour
“Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?” -Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
“Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.” – Benjamin Franklin
I hope you enjoyed these quotes from great writers and other famous people. May these writing quotes inspire you to write with more joy and purpose.
