National Novel Writing Month 2016: 15 Quotes About Writing A Book From Famous Authors To Inspire You This NaNoWriMo

Writing a successful novel is a dream for many and a reality for few. For amateurs and professionals alike, November is the time to give writing a book a shot. National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, begins Tuesday and invites scribes to take the time to sit down and turn their thoughts into words on a page.

But writing a novel is easier said than done and you'll need all the inspiration you can get. What better way to get motivated than to hear from some of the greats?

See below for what some well-known authors have to say about the writing process according to Goodreads and Reader's Digest.

1. "There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed." Ernest Hemingway

2. "Go spit in the face of our inevitable obsolescence and finish your @#$%ng novel." John Green

3. "There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be." Doris Lessing

4. "One thing that helps is to give myself permission to write badly. I tell myself that I'm going to do my five or 10 pages no matter what and that I can always tear them up the following morning if I want. I'll have lost nothing- writing and tearing up five pages would leave me no further behind than if I took the day off." Lawrence Block

5. "First, find out what your hero wants, then just follow him!" Ray Bradbury

6. "I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." Douglas Adams

7. "Writing isn't about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid or making friends. In the end, it's about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life as well." Stephen King

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

9. "Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way." E.L. Doctorow

10. "If I waited for perfection I would never write a word." Margaret Atwood

11. "When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself 'I am going to produce a work of art.' I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing." George Orwell

12. "It's none of their business that you had to learn to write. Let them think you were born that way." Ernest Hemingway

13. "And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right." Ray Bradbury

14. "Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer." Barbara Kingsolver.

15. "What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it." JD Salinger