For many aspiring authors, the art of writing can often feel like a lonely and even confusing craft. Writers tend to work alone in a deeply subjective medium, and even great writers like John Keats, Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka, Kate Chopin, and Marcel Proust were deeply misunderstood by publishers and the general public in their own lifetimes. No slouch himself where writing was concerned, the poet Derek Walcott was said to have considered giving up his career after reading four lines of Ovid and no longer feeling up to the task; a few years later he won the Nobel Prize in literature.
Indeed, it is normal for even the greatest authors to struggle with a sense of uncertainty about their work. Here are just a few great quotes about the writing life from successful authors, and why seeking inspiration from the experience of others can give us the strength we need to tackle the next big challenge in our writing careers.
On Developing Good Taste
“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
“In many cases when a reader puts a story aside because it ‘got boring,’ the boredom arose because the writer grew enchanted with his powers of description and lost sight of his priority, which is to keep the ball rolling.” ― Stephen King
On the Difficulties of Writing
“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” ― Ernest Hemingway
“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.” ― Douglas Adams
On Moving the Reader
“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” ― Anton Chekhov
“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.” ― Robert Frost
On Getting the Job Done
“Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.” ― Louis L’Amour
“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.” ― Stephen King
On Why We Write
“I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.” ― Anne Frank
“There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know where they’ll take you.” ― Beatrix Potter
On Dedication to the Craft
“You must write every single day of your life… You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads… may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.” ― Ray Bradbury
On the Importance of Writing
“A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called “leaves”) imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time ― proof that humans can work magic.” ― Carl Sagan