Most of us writers collect quotes from writers on writing. Whether we hang them above our desks, write them in journals, put them in our email signatures, or use them as epigraphs for our own writing, they remind us of what we find most important about writing and encourage us to keep on writing, even when we feel disheartened.  As the words of those who have gone before us help us gather momentum. We remember that we write because it is important to us, because writing, we bring ourselves into the world and the world into ourselves.

Here are 101 writing quotes to savor. Read them together as a piece and they tell a story about writing that you’ll recognize. Feeling familiar with writers’ situations and thoughts will help you recognize and support the writer in you. It is reassuring to have quotes to go back through when you want to think about writing and why you do it though it isn’t easy and few, if any, have asked you to devote your time to it. Plucking out the quotes that resonate with you for rereading will help you work your way through issues you are dealing with in your writing life right now.  Knowing there are many other quotes you might pluck from another time will be like rereading a favorite book and finding something new to focus on each time you read it.

These writers’ words on writing are a staircase you can trust; they are flashlights to take with you in what appears to be the dark, and they are the “surprise” yelled out at the party you didn’t know anyone was making:

1.      Write about the places exotic to you, but it’s cheaper (no airfare), and usually more effective, to find the exotic in the familiar. — Josip Novakovich, Fiction Writer’s Workshop

2.      Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of the writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities, and have them relate to other characters living with him .– Mel Brooks

3.      An artist must be a reactionary.  He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along; he must offer some little opposition. Even the great Victorian artists were all anti-Victorian, despite the pressure to conform. — Evelyn Waugh

 4.      The writer has a feeling and utters it from his true self. The reader reads it and is immediately infected.  He has exactly the same feeling.  This is the whole secret of enchantment, fascination. — Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write

5.      This is what I learned:  that everyone is talented, original and has something important to say. — Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write

6.      Everybody is original, if he tells the truth, if he speaks from himself. But it must be from his true self and not from the self he thinks he should be.  — Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write.

7.      In other words, it is when you are really living in the present–working, thinking, lost, absorbed in something you care about very much, that you are living spiritually. — Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write

8.      And one common kind of pseudo-art is that which pretends to be very hard to understand, subtle and abstruse, so that only a very exclusive few, a few extremely cultured people, can understand it. — Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write

9.      No human being, as long as he is living, can be exhausted of his ever changing, ever moving river of ideas. — Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write

10.   Therefore all should work.  First because it is impossible that you have no creative gift.  Second:  the only way to make it live and increase is to use it.  Third:  you cannot be sure that it is not a great gift. — Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write.

11.  A poet seeks personal and social transformation through poetry; the poet’s “art” is both a gift to the writer and from the writer who understands that no great gift can be truly given or received in an emotional or intellectual void. — Sam Hamill, Lu Chi’s Wen Fu, The Art of Writing

12.  We mourn leaves torn away/by the cruel hands of autumn; // we honor every tender bud of spring. –Lu Chi, “The Early Motion,” translated by Sam Hamill

13.  Past and present commingle: / Eternity in the single blink of an eye!  — Lu Chi, “Beginning,” translated by Sam Hamill

14.  Writing, the traveling is sometimes level and easy, / sometime rocky and steep. –Lu Chi, “Choosing Words,” translated by  Sam Hamill.

15.  Emotion and reason are not two things;/every shift in feeling must be read. — Lu Chi, “Choosing Words,” translated by Sam Hamill

16.  Out of non-being, being is born; / out of silence, a writer produces a song.  — Lu Chi, “The Satisfaction,” translated by Sam Hamill

17.  Bright winds lift each metaphor; / Clouds lift from a forest of writing brushes. — Lu Chi, “The Satisfaction,” translated by Sam Hamill

18.  A writer fills a reader’s eyes with splendor / and clarifies values.  — Lu Chi, “Catalogue of Genres,” translated by Sam Hamill

19.  Language must speak from its essence to articulate reason: / verbosity indicates lack of virtue. Lu Chi, “Catalogue of Genres,” translated by Sam Hamill

20.  Recognizing order / is like opening a dam in a river. — Lu Chi, “On Harmony,” translated by Sam Hamill.

21.  Art and virtue are measured in tiny grains.  — Lu Chi, “On Revision,” translated by Sam Hamill

22.  Hyper-aware of technique, the poem may be stripped / of its seasoning like a feast without gravy. — Lu Chi, “Refinement,” translated by Sam Hamill

23.  As infinite as space, good work / joins earth to heaven — Lu Chi, “The Masterpiece,” translated by Sam Hamill

24.  The mirror is the totem of the poet, who looks at and into himself, who creates himself, as it were.  And I would say the window belongs to the fiction writer, who looks out and around, and is a product of the world.  In the love affair that has occurred in this century, the novelist has flirted with mirrors and the poet with windows. — Howard Moss, The Poet’s Story

25.  You can’t swim if you don’t get in…try the kind of writing everyone does:  letters, recipes, little games.  The idea is that anyone can do it.  But even in the early pieces you begin to feel the current.  It gets powerful–dreams grab you; you feel the kick and surge of forms.  –Stephen Dunning and William Stafford, Getting the Knack

26.  And did you notice that when you mention something it tends to hint at other things?  And they begin to add up…  –Stephen Dunning and William Stafford, Getting the Knack

27.  The duende (or the demon) and the angel are vital spirits of creative imagination. They are anomalous figures. They come only when something enormous is at risk, when the self is imperiled and pushes against its limits, when death is possible.  — Edward Hirsch, The Demon and the Angel

28.  I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination.  –John Keats

29.  All truly profound art requires its creator to abandon himself to certain powers which he invokes but cannot altogether control. –Andre Malraux, “Goya”

30.  By implication the philosophy of Irish faery lore declares that all power is from the body, all intelligence from the spirit.  –W. B.  Yeats

31.  Flow hits a deeply unantagonized part of the mind. It is a concentrated fluidity of psychic energy, a highly focused alteration of consciousness.  –Edward Hirsch, The Demon and the Angel

32.  Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. –John Keats

33.  …writing itself is an encounter with the unknown, a hard struggle with the unsaid. To write is psychologically dangerous, because it means putting oneself at risk.  –Edward Hirsch, The Demon and the Angel

34.  It is our job to imprint this temporary, perishable earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its essence can rise again, “invisibly,” inside us.  We are the bees of the invisible.  We wildly collect honey of the visible, to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible. –Rainier Rilke

35.  We penetrate the mystery only to the degree that we recognize it in the everyday world, by virtue of the dialectical optic that perceives the everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable every day.  –Walter Benjamin

36.  Transcendentalism means “a little beyond.”  Ralph Waldo Emerson

37.  Meaning is always in search of itself.  Unsuspected revelations await us around the next corner.  –Charles Simic, “Dime-Store Alchemy: the Art of Joseph Cornell”

38.  …once one has learned to experience the poem as a poem, there inevitably arrives a sense that one is also experiencing himself as a human being.  –John Ciardi, How Does a Poem Mean?

39.  For a symbol is like a rock dropped into a pool:  it sends out ripples in all directions, and the ripples are in motion. Who can say where the last ripple disappears?  — John Ciardi, How Does a Poem Mean?

40.  …trust…in the small Things that hardly anyone sees and that can so suddenly become huge, immeasurable; if you have this love for what is humble and try very simply, as someone who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier for you… –Rainier Maria Rilke

41.  I believe that I am not alone in my attempts to create, / And that once I begin the work, settle in to the strangeness, / The words will take shape, the form find life, and the spirit take flight. –Jan Philips, Marry Your Muse

42.  We are writers…The words became our friends and our companions, and without even saying it aloud, a though danced with them:  I can do this. This is who I am.  –Anna Quindlan, How Reading Changed My Life

43.  Accept that sometimes the boring teacher, the hysteric or the social butterfly will come into your writing.  Your job is not to worry about their presence, but to learn to hear them covering or circumventing true experience. — Sheila Bender, Writing and Publishing Personal Essays

44.  …life’s fire can provoke us into bringing forth our voices, rich with human qualities.  –Sheila Bender, Writing and Publishing Personal Essays

45.  Embrace the cracks in your life and breaks in your heart as places into which divine light can shine.  –Iyanla Vanzant, Until Today!

46.  Truly, it is in the darkness that one finds the light, so when we are in sorrow, then this light is nearest of all to us.  –Meister Eckhart

47.  The darkest night that ever fell upon the earth never hid the light, never put out the stars. It only made the stars more keenly, kindly glancing, as if in protest against the darkness.  –George Eliot

48.  Fond memory brings the light of other days around me. –Thomas Moore

49.  …and the wind keeps dying and changing so the pattern / changes too:  graceful, asymmetrical, temporary.  –Robert Gregory, “What You Were Like.”

50.  You have something to say, something to share with the world or with the people close to you. Your life is important, and your memories document how you have changed your corner of the universe.  –Robert Goodman and Peggy Lang, Turning Your Life’s Stories into a Literary Memoir

51.  If trains load up, they must also deliver.  Emptying out is key to receiving.  –Terri Cohlene, “On Purpose,”

52.  …the earth accelerates / at micro-speed/ toward an uncertain future…  –Denel Bartsch, “The Nature of Impermanence”

53.  The goal is /to stitch our hearts /back together and /wash the dirt from our eyes/ to take that bold leap / into spirited creation.  –Elizabeth Harris, “Time Now”

54.  I look up at the sky and listen for birdsong. I pick up my broom and start sweeping, once again.  –Grace Jackson, “Diary”

55.  I arrived here by chance, if there is such a thing. Atlanta McIlwraith, “Walking”

56.  The thread is spun under tears, the cloth bleached with tears, the shirt sewn with tears, but then too it is a better protection than iron and steel. The secret to life is that everyone must sew it for himself. — Kierkegaard

57.  …we learn young that roads/ lead to many houses, many kitchens, /many gardens/many fires by mountain streams… –Molly Kane, “Song of the Clan of the  River Drinkers”

58.  Your isolation suddenly sings inside you…  –Bryanann Stavley, “Lost”

59.  The test of the artist is to be able to revise without showing a seam.  –Debra Gringerich

60.  I don’t like to use a lot of emotions or what I call “neon-lighting” because almost all of the time whatever I’m writing about has enough emotion in it, and all I have to do is tell the story.  –Edward P. Jones

61.  There are two worlds:  the world that we can measure with line and rule, and the world that we feel with our hearts and imagination. To be sensible of the truth of only one of these is to know truth by halves.  –L. Hunt, Fiction and the Matter of Fact

62.  Too much telling and we sound like academics or journalists–or institutional records.  Too much showing and we sound like fiction writers, hooked more on scene than on real world reflection. Get the two in balance, as Bartkevicius does, and we sound like creative nonfiction writers. –Mimi Schwartz, “Research and Creative Nonfiction:  Writing So the Seams Don’t Show”

63.  The world is full of paper.  / Write to me.”  –Agha Shahid Ali, “Stationery”

64.  Some nonfiction books are so filled with information, the character of the author never gets through, except in little flashes. And they’re kind of dull sometimes. Others are so full of the author that you get tired of them before you’re through, and there’s not enough information about the world around him.  –Richard Shelton, “An Interview with Richard Shelton”

65.  …in fiction the problem is that when you start cooking, the kitchen is empty. You have to bring in all the food from your garden or the store,; in nonfiction, when you start, there is already too much in the kitchen.  –Richard Terrill, “Creative Nonfiction and Poetry”

66.  One way to effect a voice in writing creative nonfiction is to imagine the reader as a person you know, but don’t know well, who has just pulled up the bar stool next to yours (Or, if you prefer, the chair across your table at a coffeehouse. You begin talking to this person:  “You won’t believe what happened to met he other day…”The implication is that this experience you are about to reveal is unique to you, and the detail with which you relate it will argue that.” –Richard Terrill, “Creative Nonfiction and Poetry”

67.  The lyric essay partakes of the poem in its density and shapeliness, its distillation of ideas and musicality of language.  It partakes of the essay in its weight, in its overt desire to engage with facts.  –Deborah Tall and John D’Agata

68.   Poetry, by relying on image and metaphor, in one respect at least, attempts to take language back to its original form–to a time when magic inhabited every word.  –Peter Grandbois, “Exploring the Cracks”

69.  The artist must, through his art, put society in touch with that part ignored and rejected by society as a whole, with the lower stories of the skyscraper. –Peter Grandbois, “Exploring the Cracks”

70.  All our lives we possess, side by side with our newly acquired directed and adapted thinking, a fantasy thinking which corresponds to the antique state of mind.”  Jung’s bold assertion is a manifesto for the artist looking to do battle with the homogenizing and destructive forces of society. –Peter Grandbois, “Exploring the Cracks”

71.  We are most attracted…by the discovery of a crack in our imperturbable reality. –Bioy Casares

72.  A writer means being true to the imagination–to something deeper. When I write a story, I write it because somehow I believe in it.  –Borges

73.  If the writer truly believes, he may not get all the details, but he will get the ones that matter, and he will connect them to the deep well of his imagination, bringing balance. –Peter Grandbois, “Exploring the Cracks”

74.  My attempt has been to find ways in which words can pull the rug out from under themselves and drop us back into an experience closer to original perception… –Sarah Maclay, “The Boot of Saying”

75.  A poet’s function–do not be startled by this remark–is not to experience the poetic state:  that is a private affair.  His function is to create it in others.”  –Paul Valery

76.  What is an adjective? Nouns name the world. Verbs activate the names. Adjectives come from somewhere else.  The word adjective (epitheton in Greek) is itself an adjective meaning “placed on top,” “added,” “appended,” “imported,” “foreign.”  Adjectives seem fairly innocent additions but look again. These small imported mechanisms are in charge of attaching everything in the world to its place in particularity. They are the latches of being.  –Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

77.  To a large extent, I agree with Valery that the project of poetry is similar to the project of dreaming, and it revolves around making new connections–the resulting spark of one thing hitting another in an unexpected way produces a kind of energy. –Sarah Maclay, “The Boot of Saying”

78.  And yet, to achieve something so alive that it defies fossilization, we must constantly be on the lookout for new ways to keep it breathing, and we must do this because language ends up somehow delimiting–or, conversely, opening the aperture of–vision. –Sarah Maclay, “The Boot of Saying”

79.   Keep your faith in all beautiful things; in the sun when it is hidden, in the spring when it is gone.  –Roy R. Gilson

80.  “Words are all we have.”  –Samuel Beckett

81.  I hope friends and relatives understand my need, as a writer, to tell my stories–but I also know that I can’t control how anyone might feel about my work.  –Sue William Silverman

82.  Things for one reason or another just appear, and if you’re in the right frame of mind, and if they fit, then it’s good to use them.  –John Haskell

83.  Keep your faith in all beautiful things; in the sun when it is hidden, in the spring when it is gone.  –Roy R. Gilson

84.  In everyone’s life, at some time, our inner fire goes out.  It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit.  –Albert Schweitzer

85.  To be involved with books is to live at the heart of light.  –Mary Cantwell

86.  Stop whining and simply get on with it.  –Jane Yolen

87.  Write about small, self-contained incidents that are still vivid in your memory. If you remember them, it’s because they contain a larger truth that your readers will recognize in their own lives. Think small and you’ll wind up finding the big themes in your family saga.  –William Zinsser, Writing About Your Life.

88.  He that will write well in any tongue must follow this counsel of Aristotle:  to speak as the common people do, to think as wise men do.  –Roger Ascham

89.  You write a hit play the same way you write a flop.  –William Saroyan

90.  Writing is easy; all you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead.  –Gene Fowler

91.  Nothing you write, if you hope to be any good, will ever come out as you first hoped. –Lillian Hellman

92.  With me a story usually begins with a single idea or memory or mental picture. The writing of the story is simply a matter of working up to that moment, to explain why it happened or what caused it to follow.  –William Faulkner

93.  Keeping a certain level of fun and humor makes everything easier and prevents a lot of frustration… –Carolyn M. King

94.  Young writers often suppose that style is a garnish for the meat of prose, a sauce by which a dull dish is made palatable.  Style has no such separate identity; it is non-detachable, unfilterable.  –E.B. White

95.  The writer who avoids writers’ workshops (or some other solid community of writers) is in for trouble.  –John Gardner

96.  Every freelancer has a story killed at some point–but that doesn’t mean the end of the piece.  –Kelly James-Enger

97.  Mundane details of everyday life…evoke a strong sense of time and place.  –Angela Jane Fountas

98.  Finding a good story takes imagination. Writing well takes practice.  –Theresa A. Washburn

99.  Nothing is without meaning, [everything] has its truest meaning under the aspect of eternity.  –Marilynne Robinson

100.  Melville and Faulkner both write from a love of the splendors of consciousness, including such things as knowledge and speculation, never to the exclusion–indeed to the enhancement–of immediate experience.  –Marilynne Robinson

101.   I write for the same reasons that other people dance or paint, I suppose.  Any art is an intensifier of experience, an exploration of experience itself.  –Marilynne Robinson