Notes, Quotes, and things to Inspire the Writer in You.
Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep. -- Scott Adams (creator of Dilbert)
We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason why they write so little. -- Anne Lamott
All writers are discontent. That's because they're aware of a potential and believe they're not reaching it. -- William Saroyan
I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let's start with typewriters. -- Frank Lloyd Wright
When a writer is born into a family, that family is finished. -- Czeslaw Milosz
When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages a sick sense of failure falls on me and I know I can never do it. This happens every time. Then gradually I write one page and then another. One day's work is all I can permit myself to contemplate and I eliminate the possibility of ever finishing. -- John Steinbeck
People are always asking me if the university stifles writers. I reply that it hasn't stifled enough of them. There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good writing teacher. -- Flannery O'Connor
Writing a book is like driving a car at night. You only see as far as your headlights go, but you can make the whole trip that way. -- E.L. Doctorow
It's the life you can't escape that gives you the knowledge you need to grow as a writer. -- Norman Mailer
You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you're working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success -- but only IF YOU PERSIST. -- Isaac Asimov
Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing. -- Sylvia Plath
A good writer is a person who has to take his excitement into a lonely room. -- author unknown
Self-expression must pass into communication for its fulfillment. -- Pearl S. Buck
Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after. -- Anne Morrow Lindburgh
Jump into the middle of things, get your hands dirty, fall flat on your face, and then reach for the stars. -- Joan. L. Curcio
Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it. -- Colette
Very young writers often do not revise at all. Like a hen looking at a chalk line, they are hypnotized by what they have written. "How can it be altered?" they think. It has to be altered. You have to learn how. -- Dorothy Canfield Fisher
It was a book to kill time for those who like it better dead. -- Rose Macauley
A person who publishes a book appears willfully in public with his pants down. -- Edna St. Vicent Millay
This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force. -- Dorothy Parker
When creative juices flow
Catch them with a pen
Cause if you don't
You may find you can't
Recapture them again.
Writing is a solitary occupation. Family, friends and society are the natural enemies of a writer. He must be alone, uninterrupted and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking. -- Lawrence Clark Powell
A writer has many sucesses.
Each new word captured.
Each completed sentence.
Each rounded paragraph leading into the next.
Each idea that sustains and then develops.
Each character who, like a wayward adolescent, leaves home and finds a life.
Each new metaphor that, like the exact error it is, somehow works.
Each new book that ends -- and so begins.
Selling the piece is only an exclamation point, a spot of punctuation.
Authors like cats because they are such quiet, lovable, wise creatures, and cats like authors for the same reasons. -- Robertson Davies
Women and cats do as they please, and men
and dogs should relax and get used to the idea.
-- Robert Heinlein
If writers were good businessmen, they'd have too much sense to be writers. -- Irwin S. Cobb, author and journalist (1876-1944)
