quotes

Quotes

If a man is called to be a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.

Kurt Vonnegut

Perhaps it would be better not to be a writer, but if you must, then write. If all feels hopeless, if that famous 'inspiration' will not come, write. If you are a genius, you'll make your own rules, but if not - and the odds are against it - go to your desk no matter what your mood, face the icy challenge of the paper - write.

J. B. Priestly

When one door of happiness closes another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.

Helen Keller

Some people drop their wings in order to grow a hump

Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

He who limps is still walking.

Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it; boldness has genius, power and magic in it.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Motivation is when your dreams put on work clothes.

Benjamin Franklin

It is never too late to be what you might have been.

George Elliot

Opportunity dances with those who are already on the dance floor.

H. Jackson Brown Jr.

It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.

William Faulkner

I try to create sympathy for my characters, then turn the monsters loose.

Stephen King

 Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.

Cyril Connolly

Writing wasn’t easy to start. After I finally did it, I realized it was the most direct contact possible with the part of myself I thought I had lost, and which I constantly find new things from. Writing also includes the possibility of living many lives as well as living in any time or world possible. I can satisfy my enthusiasm for research, but jump like a calf outside the strict boundaries of science. I can speak about things that are important to me and somebody listens. It’s wonderful!

Virpi Hämeen-Anttila

Writing is the best way to talk without being interrupted.

Jules Renard

I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like a child stringing beads in kindergarten - happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another.

Brenda Ueland

Like everyone else, I am going to die. But the words – the words live on for as long as there are readers to see them, audiences to hear them. It is immortality by proxy. It is not really a bad deal, all things considered.

J. Michael Straczynski

Write something to suit yourself and many people will like it; write something to suit everybody and scarcely anyone will care for it.

Jesse Stuart

A blank piece of paper is God's way of telling us how hard it to be God.

Sidney Sheldon

 I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.

Oscar Wilde

I get up in the morning, torture a typewriter until it screams, then stop.

Clarence Budington Kelland

The faster I write the better my output. If I'm going slow, I'm in trouble. It means I'm pushing the words instead of being pulled by them.

Raymond Chandler

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

E. L. Doctorow

When my horse is running good, I don't stop to give him sugar.

William Faulkner

When we read, we start at the beginning and continue until we reach the end. When we write, we start in the middle and fight our way out.

Vickie Karp

It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters in the end.

Ursula K. LeGuin

Writing makes no noise, except groans, and it can be done everywhere, and it is done alone.

Ursula K. LeGuin

You may be able to take a break from writing, but you won't be able to take a break from being a writer.

Stephen Leigh

At night, when the objective world has slunk back into its cavern and left dreamers to their own, there come inspirations and capabilities impossible at any less magical and quiet hour. No one knows whether or not he is a writer unless he has tried writing at night.

H. P. Lovecraft

When once the itch of literature comes over a man, nothing can cure it but the scratching of a pen.

Samuel Lover

The secret of becoming a writer is to write, write and keep on writing.

Ken MacLeod

We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to.

Somerset Maugham

Through joy and through sorrow, I wrote. Through hunger and through thirst, I wrote. Through good report and through ill report, I wrote. Through sunshine and through moonshine, I wrote. What I wrote it is unnecessary to say.

Edgar A. Poe

There's no such thing as writer's block. That was invented by people in California who couldn't write.

Terry Pratchett

Writing energy is like anything else. The more you put in, the more you get out.

Richard Reeves

Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up.

Jane Yolen

Writing is its own reward.

Henry Miller

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.

Gaston Bachelard

The pen is the tongue of the mind.

Miguel de Cervantes

I don't pretend we have all the answers. But the questions are  certainly worth thinking about.

Arthur C. Clarke

The spirit of creation is the spirit of contradiction. It is the breakthrough of appearances toward an unknown reality.

Joan Cocteau

A writer doesn't solve problems. He allows them to emerge.

Friedrich Dürrenmatt

I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.

Joan Didion

Curiosity has its own reason for existence. The important thing is not to stop questioning.

Albert Einstein

Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.

T. S. Eliot

Writing, I explained, was mainly an attempt to out-argue one's past; to present events in such a light that battles lost in life were either won on paper or held to a draw.

Jules Feifer

How do I know what I think until I see what I say?

E. M. Forster

Authors who never give you something to disagree with never give you anything to think about.

Michael LaRocca

The only time I know that something is true is the moment I discover it in the act of writing.

Jean Malaquais

We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection.

Anais Nin

Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.

George Bernard Shaw

 If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put foundations under them.

Henry David Thoreau

You cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

Mark Twain

One of the things that draws writers to writing is that they can get things right that they got wrong in real life by writing about them.

Tobias Wolf

Detail makes the difference between boring and terrific writing. It’s the difference between a pencil sketch and a lush oil painting. As a writer, words are your paint. Use all the colors.

Rhys Alexander

Zest. Gusto. How rarely one hears these words used. How rarely do we see people living, or for that matter, creating by them. Yet if I were asked to name the most important items in a writer’s make-up, the things that shape his material and rush him along the road to where he wants to go, I could only warn him to look to his zest, see to his gusto.

Ray Bradbury

If you have other things in your life - family, friends, good productive day work - these can interact with your writing and the sum will be all the richer.

David Brin

Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader. Not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.

E.L. Doctorow

 Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

Albert Einstein

If you start with a bang, you won't end with a whimper.

T. S. Eliot

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

Benjamin Franklin

You can take for granted that people know more or less what a street, a shop, a beach, a sky, an oak tree look like. Tell them what makes this one different.

Neil Gaiman

Writing a novel is like heading out over the open sea in a small boat. It helps, if you have a plan and a course laid out.

John Gardner

My mother drew a distinction between achievement and success. She said that achievement is the knowledge that you have studied and worked hard and done the best that is in you. Success is being praised by others, and that's nice, too, but not as important or satisfying. Always aim for achievement and forget about success.

Helen Hayes

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration.

Ernest Hemingway

Never bend your head. Always hold it high. Look the world straight in the face.

Helen Keller

There will never be another now -

I'll make the most of today.

There will never be another me -

I'll make the most of myself.

Helen Keller

Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say 'infinitely' when you mean 'very'. Otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.

C. S. Lewis

If you think you're boring your audience, go slower not faster

Gustav Mahler

For all my longer works, for example novels, I write chapter outlines so I can have the pleasure of departing from them later on.

Garth Nix

We writers have this saying 'Kill your darlings'... but I suppose you family men don't agree with it.

Mike Pohjola

You only pass through this life once, you don't come back for an encore.

Elvis Presley

Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.

Theodore Roosevelt

To grow in craft is to increase the bredth of what I can do, but art is the depth, the passion, the desire, the courage to be myself and myself alone.

Pat Schneider

If you don't know it, don't write it.

Darrell Schweitzer

Suit the action to the word, the word to the action.

William Shakespeare

If you think that something small cannot make a difference, try going to sleep with a mosquito in the room.

Anonymous

Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats.

Howard Aiken

Invent your own mythology or be slave to another man’s.

William Blake

Everething that doesn't kill you, makes you stronger. And later on you can use it in some story.

Tapani Bagge

Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don't see any.

Orson Scott Card

When I examine myself and my methods of thought I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing knowledge.

Albert Einstein

The mind can proceed only so far upon what it knows and can prove. There comes a point where the mind takes a higher plane of knowledge, but can never prove how it got there. All great discoveries have involved such a leap.

Albert Einstein

Every bush can burn if you fire it with your imagination.

Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

If you’re going to be a writer, the first essential is just to write. Do not wait for an idea. Start writing something and the ideas will come. You have to turn the faucet on before the water starts to flow.

Louis L’Amour

You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.

Jack London

The value of life lies not in the length of days, but in the use we make of them; a man may live long yet live very little.

Michel de Montaigne

How vain it is to sit down to write if you have not stood up to live.

Henry David Thoreau

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

Kurt Vonnegut

An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an  idea at all.

Oscar Wilde

We grow great by dreams. All big men are dreamers. They see things in the soft haze of a spring day or in the red fire of a long winter's evening. Some of us let these great dreams die, but others nourish and protect them; nurse them through bad days till they bring them to the sunshine and light which coms always to those who sincerely hope that their dreams will come true.

Woodrow Wilson

Writing makes a map, and there is something about a journey that begs to have its passage marked.

Christina Baldwin

When you want to fool the world, tell the truth.

Otto von Bismarck

The difference between fiction and reality is that fiction has to make sense.

Tom Clancy

Story is to human beings what the pearl is to the oyster.

Joseph Gold

Our lives with all their miracles and wonders are merely a discontinuous string of incidents – until we create the narrative that gives them meaning

Arlene Goldbard

Why would anybody lie? The truth is always more colourful.

Jerry Hall

Fiction is a lie, and good fiction is the truth inside the lie.

Stephen King

Stories open up new paths, sometimes send us back to old ones, and close off still others. Telling and listening to stories we too imaginatively walk down those paths – paths of longing, paths of hope, paths of desperation.

Arthur Kleinman

Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away.

Elvis Presley

I write fiction because it's a way of making statements I can disown.

Tom Stoppard

Get you facts first, and then you can distort 'em as much as you please.

Mark Twain

Most writers regard the truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are most economical in its use.

Mark Twain

Don't mistake a good setup for a satisfying conclusion -- many beginning writers end their stories when the real story is just ready to begin.

Stanley Schmidt

I write plays because dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting myself.

Tom Stoppard

There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the Mafia.

Kurt Vonnegut

A story isn't about a moment in time, a story is about the moment in time.

W. D. Wetherell

A person without a sense of humor is like a wagon without springs, jolted by every pebble in the road.

Henry Ward Beecher

It is only one step from the sublime to the ridiculous.

Napoleon Bonaparte

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.

Robert Frost

The writer who cares more about words than about story – characters, action, setting, atmosphere – is unlikely to create a vivid and continuous dream; he gets in his own way too much; in his poetic drunkenness, he can't tell the cart – and its cargo – from the horse.

John Gardner

We read five words on the first page of a really good novel and we begin to forget that we are reading printed words on a page; we begin to see images.

John Gardner

If you would write emotionally, be first unemotional. If you would move your readers to tears, do not let them see you cry.

James J. Kilpatrick

I have a duty to speak the truth as I see it and share not just my triumphs, not just the things that felt good, but the pain, the intense, often unmitigated pain. It is important to share how I know survival is survival and not just a walk through the rain.

Audre Lorde

Do not the most moving moments of our lives find us all without words?

Marcell Marceau

If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn't matter a damn how you write.

Somerset Maugham

Everything changes when you change.

Jim Rohn

In a thousand words I can have the Lord's Prayer, the 23rd Psalm, the Hippocratic Oath, a sonnet by Shakespeare, the Preamble to the Constitution, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and almost all of the Boy Scout Oath. Now exactly what picture were you planning to trade for all that?

Roy H. Williams

I think the first duty of all art, including fiction of any kind, is to entertain. That is to say, to hold interest. No matter how worthy the message of something, if it's dull, you're just not communicating.

Poul Anderson

I keep six honest serving men

They taught me all I knew;

Their names are What and Why and When

and How and Where and Who.

Rudyard Kipling

It is a cardinal sin to bore the reader.

Larry Niven

Editors also know that the people who are really readers want to read. They hunger to read. They will forgive a vast number of clumsinesses and scamped work of every sort if the author will delight them just enough to keep them able to continue.

William Sloane

The main question to a novel is - did it amuse? Were you surprised at dinner coming so soon? Did you mistake eleven for ten? Were you too late to dress? And did you sit up beyond the usual hour? If a novel produces these effects, it is good; if it does not – story, language, love, scandal itself cannot save it. It is only meant to please; and it must do that or it does nothing.

Sydney Smith

No fathers or mothers think their own children ugly; and this self-deceit is yet stronger with respect to the offspring of the mind.

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.

Albert Einstein

Thank your readers and the critics who praise you, and then ignore them. Write for the most intelligent, wittiest, wisest audience in the universe: Write to please yourself.

Harlan Ellison

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.

Scott Adams

Don't fear making a mistake; fear failing to learn and move forward.

Pilip Humbert

The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.

Thomas Jefferson

 I have made this letter longer, because I have not had the time to make it shorter.

Blaise Pascal

One extends one's limits only by exceeding them.

M. Scott Peck

Write quickly and you will never write well. Write well, and you will soon write quickly.

Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, 65 A.D.

It is better to write a bad first draft than to write no first draft at all.

Will Shetterly

In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing. The worst thing you can do is nothing.

Theodore Roosevelt

 Being defeated is often a temporary condition. Giving up is what makes it permanent.

Marilyn vos Savant

 It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.

Seneca

(3 BC - 65 AD)

People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them.

George Bernard Shaw

It is better to arouse envy than pity.

Pubilius Syrus

Once we choose hope, everything is possible.

Christopher Reeve

The future belongs to those who believe in their dreams.

Eleanor Roosevelt

If you're not failing every now and again, it's a sign you're not doing anything very innovative.

Woody Allen

Eighty percent of success is showing up.

Woody Allen

It is defeat that turns bone to flint; it is defeat that turns gristle to muscle; it is defeat that makes men invincible. Do not then be afraid of defeat. You are never so near to victory as when defeated in a good cause.

Henry Ward Beecher

Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old-fashioned virtues of hard, constant labor, he'll eventually make some kind of career for himself as writer.

Ray Bradbury

Writing a book is a adventure. To begin with it is a toy and amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him out to the public.

Winston Churchill

Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail.

Confucius

Try not to become a man of success, but rather a man of value.

Albert Einstein

If you don't allow yourself the possibility of writing something very, very bad, it would be hard to write something very good.

Steven Galloway

The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you've got it made.

Jean Giraudoux

To achieve great things requires that we become great people.

Philip Humbert

It isn't easy to live after death. It takes a lifetime.

Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

The first condition of immortality is death.

Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

One can never consent to creep when one feels the impulse to soar.

Helen Keller

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Success is not the result of spontaneous combustion. You must set yourself on fire.

Reggie Leach

The only one who doesn't make mistakes is the one who doesn't do anything.

V. I. Lenin

I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark burn out in a brilliant blaze than it be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.

Jack London

I think I did pretty well, considering I started out with nothing but a bunch of blank paper.

Steve Martin

You shouldn't change what you are in the search for success.

Sissy Spacek

You should never be ashamed to admit you have been wrong. It only proves you are wiser today than yesterday.

Jonathan Swift

Failure? I never encountered it. All I ever met were temporary setbacks.

Dottie Walters

        Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.

        Oscar Wilde

        Success comes to a writer, as a rule, so gradually that it is always something of a shock to him to look back and realize the heights to which he has climbed.

        P. G. Wodehouse