Writers on Writing

Whatever stage you’re at with your writing – whether taking the first tentative steps towards starting something or struggling with finishing a first draft - people that have done it before you can help. This selection of quotations are for you to live and write by. Pick a favourite and pin it above your writing space. Let these wise words resonate and inspire…

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

- George Orwell

There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.

- W. Somerset Maugham

Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works.

- Virginia Woolf

A book is simply the container of an idea—like a bottle; what is inside the book is what matters.

- Angela Carter

Great is the art of beginning, but greater is the art of ending.

- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.

- Sylvia Plath

A word after a word after a word is power.

- Margaret Atwood

One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper.

- Michael Cunningham

Show up, show up, show up, and after a while the muse shows up, too

- Isabelle Allende

Good writing is rewriting.

- Truman Capote

Prowling about the rooms, sitting down, getting up, stirring the fire, looking out the window, teasing my hair, sitting down to write, writing nothing, writing something and tearing it up…

- Charles Dickens

The best time for planning a book is while you're doing the dishes.

- Agatha Christie

Books want to be born: I never make them. They come to me and insist on being written, and on being such and such.

- Samuel Butler

Which is your favourite of these quotes? Let me know in the comments below...