Hearing the voices and thoughts of those who came before you can be inspirational and help you live. As someone who loves quotes, here are some quotes from authors about writing that can be thought of when it comes to school, writing papers, writing professionally or for personal reasons, or can be used to think about life in a different way.

And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
– William Shakespeare (from A Midsummer Night’s Dream)

My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.
– Anton Chekhov

Poetry creates the myth, the prose writer draws its portrait.
– Jean-Paul Sartre

Half my life is an act of revision.
– John Irving

A word is dead
When it is said,
Some say.
I say it just begins
to live that day.
– Emily Dickinson

Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it’s the only way you can do anything really good.
– William Faulkner

If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor.
– Edgar Rice Burroughs

The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.
– Ursula K. Le Guin

To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.– F. Scott Fitzgerald

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.
– Maya Angelou

Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.
Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.”
– William Faulkner