15 Delightfully Inspirational Quotes from Great Writers

Any writer knows that unsolicited advice about their work is easy to come by, but finding inspiration on those days when the words just won’t come is a lot tougher. Here, 15 of history’s most famous names give you the positive words you need to get back to writing.

1. “Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.” —Percy Bysshe Shelley

2. “The power of fictitious writing, for good as well as for evil, is a thing which ought most seriously to be reflected upon.” ―Harriet Beecher Stowe

3. “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” —Oscar Wilde

4. “The good writer seems to be writing about himself, but has his eye always on that thread of the Universe which runs through himself and all things.” ―Ralph Waldo Emerson

5. "My ambition is to say in ten sentences what other men say in whole books—what other men do not say in whole books." —Friedrich Nietzsche

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6. “Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can, impatient to restore everybody not greatly in fault themselves to tolerable comfort, and to have done with all the rest.” ―Jane Austen

7. “I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and I look at it, until it begins to shine.” ―Emily Dickinson

8. “A writer is a world trapped in a person.” ―Victor Hugo

9. “But this I know; the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master--something that at times strangely wills and works for itself. He may lay down rules and devise principles, and to rules and principles it will perhaps for years lie in subjection; and then, haply without any warning of revolt, there comes a time when it will no longer consent.” ―Charlotte Brontë

10. “Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.” ―William Wordsworth

11. “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter ― it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.” ―Mark Twain

12. "I wish I could write books to amuse myself, as you can! How delightful it must be to write books after one's own taste instead of reading other people's! Home-made books must be so nice.” ―George Eliot

13. “Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.” ―Nathaniel Hawthorne

14. “An idea, like a ghost, must be spoken to a little before it will explain itself.” ―Charles Dickens

15. “As a child I scribbled; and my favorite pastime during the hours given me for recreation was to ‘write stories.’ Still, I had a dearer pleasure than this, which was the formation of castles in the air—the indulging in waking dreams—the following up trains of thought, which had for their subject the formation of a succession of imaginary incidents.” ―Mary Shelley