Archives for May 2014

Or keep you going when you’re just about ready to throw in the towel. In other words, I’m sharing 14 inspiring writing quotes that ought to help you if you’re lacking in the inspiration department. If you’re looking for specific ideas for blog posts, take a look at my post last week: 5 Blog Post Topics When Your Inspiration Well Runs Dry.

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So, hate them or not, quotes can help give you a boost, even though sometimes, it’s a temporary one. You know that we like sharing all sorts of quotes on Facebook and Twitter, so I thought I’d take a look at put together some of the most inspiring writing quotes I’ve encountered.

You may ask, why 14? I like the number, that’s all.

14 Inspiring writing quotes

1. “Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up.”  ~Jane Yolen
2. “If you can quit, then quit. If you can’t quit, you’re a writer.” ~R.A. Salvatore
3. “This is how you do it; you sit down at the keyboard and put one word after another until its done. It’s that easy and that hard.” ~Neil Gaiman
4. “The scariest moment is always just before you start.” ~Stephen King
5. “Write even when the world is chaotic. You don’t need a cigarette, silence, music, a comfortable chair, or inner peace to write. You just need ten minutes and a writing implement.” ~Cory Doctorow
6. “It’s none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think you were born that way.” ~Ernest Hemingway
7. “If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn’t matter a damn how you write.” ~Somerset Maugham
8. “Start before you’re ready.” ~Steven Pressfield
9. “A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.” ~Richard Bach
10. “Don’t wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that. Your mind must know it has got to get down to work.” ~Pearl S. Buck
11. “Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it’s the only way you can do anything really good.” ~William Faulkner
12. “If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor.” ~Edgar Rice Burroughs
13. “The secret of it all is to write in the gush, the throb, the flood of the moment–to put things down without deliberation–without worrying about their style–without waiting for a fit time or place. I always worked that way. I took the first scrap of paper, the first doorstep, the first desk, and wrote–wrote, wrote…By writing at the instant, the very heartbeat of life is caught.” ~Walt Whitman
14. “In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.” ~Leo Tolstoy

I leave you with that last quote from Tolstoy, which may seem counterintuitive, but it does give you the license to take a step back and reflect for a while – but only for a while, after which you get right back to work. 😉