Encouragement for Writers: Quotes for When Writing Gets Tough

 Some days writing is tough. It can be draining to pick up a pencil and string words together. Sometimes as writers, in the swirling confusion of wordcounts and query drafts, we forget why we're doing this. 

So today is a day of encouragement. Enjoy.

If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead, either write something worth reading or do things worth writing. ~Benjamin Franklin

I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it. ~Ernest Hemingway

I always wrote with the idea that what I put out there is going to stay there. Once I publish something, it has been published. I've never deleted more than one or two posts from my site. I don't think that there are takebacks. I don't feel right about it.

~Alison Headley, Digital Preservation and Blogs, SXSW 2006

If the weak hand, that has recorded this tale, has, by its scenes, beguiled the mourner of one hour of sorrow, or, by its moral, taught him to sustain it - the effort, however humble, has not been vain, nor is the writer unrewarded. ~Ann Radcliffe (1764 - 1823), The Mysteries of Udolpho, 1764

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.  ~Ray Bradbury

I love writing.  I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.  ~James Michener

Writing is my time machine, takes me to the precise time and place I belong.  ~Jeb Dickerson

If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood.  I'd type a little faster.  ~Isaac Asimov

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.  ~Ray Bradbury

The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.  ~Anaïs Nin 

If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.  ~Toni Morrison

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by.  How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment?  For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone.  That is where the writer scores over his fellows:  he catches the changes of his mind on the hop.  ~Vita Sackville-West

The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.  ~Vladimir Nabakov

Easy reading is damn hard writing.  ~Nathaniel Hawthorne    

Writing is my time machine, takes me to the precise time and place I belong.  ~Jeb Dickerson

If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood.  I'd type a little faster.  ~Isaac Asimov 

Quotes come from BrainyQuote, QuotationsPage, and QuoteGarden.

Do you have a favorite quote that keeps you writing?