Quotes to Inspire You

I could use a little inspiration myself today.  I have had a rough 18 hours or so.  So here are some inspiring quotes, and "The Field" song from The Legend of Bagger Vance*.  The beginning is a little cornball, but a couple of minutes in, you will probably recognize the part of the song I find particularly inspiring.

Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.

Mark Twain

You must want to enough. Enough to take all the rejections, enough to pay the price of disappointment and discouragement while you are learning. Like any other artist you must learn your craft—then you can add all the genius you like.

Phyllis A. Whitney

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by.  How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment?  For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone.  That is where the writer scores over his fellows:  he catches the changes of his mind on the hop.

Vita Sackville-West

"This is for writers yet to be published who think the uphill climb will never end. Keep believing. This is also for published writers grown jaded by the process. Remember how lucky you are."

- Terry Brooks

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

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

- William Faulkner

Writing is its own reward.

- Henry Miller


*For now I will ignore the whole "Magic Negro" thing that is so very very wrong with a lot of current pop culture and that this movie is insanely guilty of, and instead I will focus on the music.