10 Inspirational Quotes About Writing and Living the Creative Life

From Writing FAST by Jeff Bollow

“And the reason you hate writing so much is because you start analyzing your work before you’re done pouring it onto the page. Your Left-brain won’t let your Right-brain do it’s job … Your Right-brain gets the words on the page. The Left-brain makes them sing.”

From Escaping Into the Open by Elizabeth Berg:

“There are people who have never studied writing who are capable of being writers. I know this because I am an example. I was a part-time registered nurse, a wife, and a mother when I began publishing. I’d taken no classes, had no experience, no knowledge of the publishing world, no agent, no contacts … Take the risk to let all that is in you, out. Escape into the open.”

From The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp

“Creativity is a habit, and the best creativity is a result of good work habits. That’s it in a nutshell … In order to be creative you have to know how to prepare to be creative.”

From The Now Habit by Niel Fiore

“People don’t procrastinate just to be ornery or because they’re irrational. They procrastinate because it makes sense, given how vulnerable they feel to criticism, failure, and their own perfectionism.”

From The Writer’s Idea Book by Jack Heffron

“Writing, therefore, is also an act of courage. How much easier is it to lead an unexamined life than to confront yourself on the page? How much easier is it to surrended to materialism or cynicism or to a hundred other ways of life that are, in fact, ways to hide from life and from our fears. When we write, we resist the facile seduction of theses simpler roads. We insist on finding out and declaring the truths that we find, and we dare to out those truths on the page.”

From Write Faster, Write Better by David A. Fryxell

“Ironically, ‘making it look easy’ comes down to learning discipline. You have to make yourself follow the path of an organized writer until it becomes second nature, until you can’t imagine writing any other way.”

From The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron

“While there is no quick fix for instant, pain-free creativity, creative recovery (or discovery) is a teachable, trackable spiritual process. Each of us is complex and highly individual, yet there are common recognizable denominators to the creative recovery process.”

From Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg

“This is the practice school of writing. Like running, the more you do it, the better you get at it. Some days you don’t want to run and you resist every step of the three miles, but you do it anyway. You practice whether you want to or not. You don’t wait around for inspiration and a deep desire to run … That’s how writing is too … One of the main aims in writing practice is to learn to trust your own mind and body; to grow patient and nonaggressive.”

From Writing FAST by Jeff Bollow

“Here’s the first major lesson: Writing is not an activity. It’s not something you sit down at the keyboard, and just start doing. That’s called ‘typing.’ Typing is an activity … Writing is a process. And if you start thinking of it as a process, life gets so much easier.”

From On Writing by Stephen King

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There is no way around these two things that I am aware of, no shortcut.”