Maya Angelou in Memorium

I woke up this morning and turned on my iPad to check my mail and Facebook from bed. (Yes, I'm that guy.)

I knew the minute I started scrolling through Facebook what had happened. Too many Maya Angelou quotes by too many people who don't know each other. I also knew she missed a recent engagement due to health concerns since I follow her Facebook page.

I read I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings in high school not because we had to but rather because I didn't. It wasn't on my school's curriculum (except for an excerpt in our English books) and I wanted more of that lovely writing. I fell in love, and never fell out.

Her activism and poetry have always moved me, even before I really understood or appreciated either, and it is not an exaggeration or hollow eulogizing to say that her words have very literally made me want to be a better human being, have often made me strive to be, and I hope have sometimes even helped me to succeed.

One of the greats of our time. She was the best of us.

As I noticed three, four, five of her quotes on my Facebook wall, my heart gave a cry and broke a little. The first news article was just a perfunctory period at the end of a sentence that had already been written. I knew.

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

― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.

― Maya Angelou

Courage is the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can't practice any other virtue consistently.

― Maya Angelou

My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style

― Maya Angelou (and did you ever!)

And perhaps my favorite with the possible exception of the macro up above...

You can only become truly accomplished at something you love. Don’t make money your goal. Instead pursue the things you love doing and then do them so well that people can’t take their eyes off of you. 

― Maya Angelou

2nd Half 2013 Quotations

Clearly we're still using 2013's budget for procuring images.

More quotes about writing, art, reading, inspiration, books, creativity, process, craft, blogging, grammar, linguistics and possibly cheese.

Some people die at 25 and aren’t buried until 75. 

Benjamin Franklin


If you have to find devices to coax yourself to stay focused on writing, perhaps you should not be writing what you're writing. And if this lack of motivation is a constant problem, perhaps writing is not your forte. I mean, what is the problem? If writing bores you, that is pretty fatal. If that is not the case, but you find that it is hard going and it just doesn't flow, well, what did you expect? It is work; art is work.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions. Their lives a mimicry. Their passions a quotation.

Oscar Wilde


Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It's a way of understanding it.

Lloyd Alexander

Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.

Virginia Woolf


Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters.

Neil Gaiman

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

The early bird may get the worm, but its the second mouse that gets the cheese.

Jeremy Paxman

Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.

Stephen King


A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

Thomas Mann, Essays of Three Decades

Stories may well be lies, but they are good lies that say true things, and which can sometimes pay the rent.

Neil Gaiman

Cheese is milk's leap toward immortality.

Cliff Fadiman

A little talent is a good thing to have if you want to be a writer. But the only real requirement is the ability to remember every scar.

Stephen King


When you make music or write or create, it's really your job to have mind-blowing, irresponsible, condomless sex with whatever idea it is you're writing about at the time. 

Lady Gaga

The mechanics of writing can be taught, the basic rules and tools and guidelines, but as in any art, all the rest comes from doing and doing and doing. The most important part of the process is learning to trust one's own vision, to work hard at developing one's own style and voice, and then having the confidence to follow where it goes.

Mary McGarry Morris


I have been successful probably because I have always realized that I knew nothing about writing and have merely tried to tell an interesting story entertainingly.

Edgar Rice Burroughs

You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.  

Maya Angelou


I don't care how fucking runny it is. Hand it over with all speed. 

Mousebender

Quotes by Writers on Taking Chances

Photo: Steve Punter (Wikimedia Commons)

In honor of the fact that I am in Vegas on vacation, today is a super quick post with some quotations on gambling, luck, and taking chances by writers.  Enjoy.

“Every time I read to her, it was like I was courting her, because sometimes, just sometimes, she would fall in love with me again, just like she had a long time ago. And that's the most wonderful feeling in the world. How many people are ever given that chance? To have someone you love fall in love with you over and over?” 

― Nicholas Sparks, The Wedding

“Fear? What has a man to do with fear? Chance rules our lives, and the future is all unknown. Best live as we may, from day to day.” 

― Sophocles, Oedipus Rex

“The first thing he noticed was that Las Vegas seemed to have invented a new school of functional architecture, 'The Gilded Mousetrap School' he thought it might be called, whose main purpose was to channel the customer-mouse into the central gambling trap whether he wanted the cheese or not.” 

― Ian Fleming, Diamonds Are Forever

“Everything's a gamble, love most of all.” 

― Tess Gerritsen, The Sinner

I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.

Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)

Oh don't chase your loss.  Just decide what's a fun enough game to keep you entertained while you slowly lose money and enjoy the free drinks and eye candy.

― Chris Brecheen to Supportive Girlfriend 

Also, in looking for these quotes, I found this really neat blog article on taking chances in writing/by writers.  Well worth a two minute read!

A Compilation of Awesome Writing Quotes

These have been up (piecemeal) on Writing About Writing's Facebook Page over the last few weeks.  I thought I'd share them in one post.

Planning to write is not writing. Outlining…researching…talking to people about what you're doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.

E.L. Doctorow

Never write about a place until you're away from it, because that gives you perspective.

Ernest Hemingway

I write the first sentence and trust in God for the next.

Laurence Sterne

Writing a poem is discovering.

Robert Frost

If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.

Derek Walcott

However great a man's natural talent may be, the art of writing cannot be learned all at once.

Jean Jacques Rousseau

You can be a little ungrammatical if you come from the right part of the country.

Robert Frost

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

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

Cyril Connolly

The secret of popular writing is never to put more on a given page than the common reader can lap off it with no strain whatsoever on his habitually slack attention.

Ezra Pound

I try to leave out the parts that people skip. 

Elmore Leonard

Nothing you write, if you hope to be any good, will ever come out as you first hoped.

Lillian Helman

Look for all fancy wordings and get rid of them…Avoid all terms and expressions, old or new, that embody affectation.

Jacques Barzun

You must write every single day of your life…You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads….may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.

Ray Bradbury

Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.

E.L. Doctorow

The idea is to get the pencil moving quickly…Once you've got some words looking back at you, you can take two or three - throw them away and look for others.

Bernard Malamud

If there's a book you really want to read but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it. 

Toni Morrison

To be clear is the first duty of a writer; to charm and to please are graces to be acquired later.

Brander Matthews

…your reader is at least as bright as you are.

William Maxwell

I put a piece of paper under my pillow, and when I could not sleep I wrote in the dark.

Henry David Thoreau

Writing is an adventure.

Winston Churchill

Know something, sugar? Stories only happen to people who can tell them.

Allan Gurganus

... only he is an emancipated thinker who is not afraid to write foolish things.

Anton Chekhov

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.

Robert Benchley

A writer lives, at least, in a state of astonishment. Beneath any feeling he has of the good or evil of the world lies a deeper one of wonder at it all. To transmit that feeling, he writes.

William Sansom

Whether or not you write well, write bravely. 

Bill Stout

The writer's duty is to keep on writing…

William Styron

Never trust the artist. Trust the tale.

D.H. Lawrence

The first draft of anything is shit

Ernest Hemingway

Use the right word and not its second cousin.

Mark Twain

Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write.

Robert Penn Warren

You only learn to be a better writer by actually writing. 

Doris Lessing

Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time…The wait is simply too long.

Leonard S. Bernstein

I seat myself at the typewriter and hope, and lurk.

Mignon Eberhart

The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Still at Disneyland: Enjoy This Awesome Quote

I'm still at Disneyland.  Turns out seeing a mouse about a thing is kind of tough.  I'll be granted an audience today, I'm sure.  In the meantime, enjoy a totally awesome quote:

‎[Be] willing to write really badly. It won't hurt you to do that. I think there is this fear of writing badly, something primal about it, like: "This bad stuff is coming out of me…" Forget it! Let it float away and the good stuff follows. For me, the bad beginning is just something to build on. It's no big deal. You have to give yourself permission to do that because you can't expect to write regularly and always write well. That's when people get into the habit of waiting for the good moments, and that is where I think writer's block comes from. Like: It's not happening. Well, maybe good writing isn't happening, but let some bad writing happen... When I was writing "The Keep," my writing was so terrible. It was God-awful. My working title for that first draft was, A Short Bad Novel. I thought: "How can I disappoint?"

-- Jennifer Egan

15 Totally Inspirational Quotes....That Aren't Real

Fiction enriches our lives.  I might not be quite the same person if I didn't read or see some of these quotations.  Here are some fantastically inspirational quotes from people who never actually existed (or who possibly existed, but probably didn't say anything like this):

Promise me you'll always remember: you're braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think

Winnie The Pooh

Never give up.  Never surrender.

Galaxy Quest

Just keep swimming (writing).  Just keep swimming (writing) swimming (writing) swimming.  What do we do?  We swim (write). Swim (write).

 Finding Nemo

Do or do not.  There is no try.

The Empire Strikes Back

Life moves pretty fast.  If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.

Ferris Beuller's Day Off

You are what you choose to be.

The Iron Giant

Every man dies.  Not every man really lives.

Braveheart

Each day means a new twenty-four hours.  Each day means everything's possible again.  You live in the moment.  You die in the moment.  You take it all one day at a time.

Legend

What are we holding onto, Sam?
That there's some good in the world, Mr. Frodo.  And it's worth fighting for. 

The Two Towers (Movie)

Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot,
Nothing is going to get better. It's not.

The Lorax

Strange, isn't it? Each man's life touches so many other lives. When he isn't around he leaves an awful hole, doesn't he?

It's a Wonderful Life

We're actors in our lives, pretending to be who we want people to think we are.

 Perfect Chemistry

Life is not about how hard you can hit.  It's about how hard you can get hit.

Rocky 5

It is not our abilities that define us.  It is our choices.

Harry Potter



And of course, last but not least, is the most important advice of all for all writers and would-be-writers alike:

The knack of flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

10 Gems From Ray Bradbury

When I was in sixth grade (so probably 12 years old), I read a different KIND of book as part of my GATE program curriculum.  It was like nothing I'd ever read.  The world was familiar but at the same time, completely alien and strange.  The premise was a little crazy, but at the same time everything that kept happening seemed oddly close to home.  In the end I felt like I'd read some crazy bit of literature with all these meaningful symbols and metaphors (yes, even at 12--Las Virginas USD GATE program didn't fuck around) but I'd still read something that was fun and kept me turning the pages.  I knew, whatever happened, I had to have more of this science fiction stuff in my life, and that really began my journey into speculative literature that wasn't simply young adult fare.  That was the moment I knew that I could write what I wanted, and my subject matter was never going to have to "grow up."

It was about this guy who was a fireman.  Except he didn't fight fires, he started them...on books. 

Ray Bradbury passed away on Tuesday night, and like every other geek I am doing the blog equivalent of holding up a candle to try and remember him.  He was the closest thing a booky nerd like me ever gets to a hero.

Just write every day of your life. Read intensely. Then see what happens. Most of my friends who are put on that diet have very pleasant careers. 

You will have to write and put away or burn a lot of material before you are comfortable in this medium. You might as well start now and get the necessary work done. For I believe that eventually quantity will make for quality. How so? Quantity gives experience. From experience alone can quality come. All arts, big and small, are the elimination of waste motion in favor of the concise declaration. The artist learns what to leave out. His greatest art will often be what he does not say, what he leaves out, his ability to state simply with clear emotion, the way he wants to go. The artist must work so hard, so long, that a brain develops and lives, all of itself, in his fingers.

Don’t talk about it; write.  

I know you've heard it a thousand times before. But it's true - hard work pays off. If you want to be good, you have to practice, practice, practice. If you don't love something, then don't do it.

If you enjoy living, it is not difficult to keep the sense of wonder.

 If we listened to our intellect, we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go into business, because we'd be cynical. Well, that's nonsense. You've got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.

I always say to students, give me four pages a day, every day. That’s three or four hundred thousand words a year. Most of that will be bilge, but the rest …? It will save your life!

Love what you do and do what you love. Don’t listen to anyone else who tells you not to do it. You do what you want, what you love. Imagination should be the center of your life.

I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it's better than college. People should educate themselves - you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I'd written a thousand stories.

 We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.

Ray Douglas Bradbury (August 22, 1920 – June 5, 2012)

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.

King Quotes on Writing--That's Stephen, Not Ultimate

I'm reading Stephen King's On Writing (again--for the third time), so that I can do a good review of it.  Considering that I'm about 2/3 done right now, and that today's agenda involves bringing in the trashcan from the street, I suspect tomorrow will be the actual review.

So I figured a few King quotes might tease and tantalize you.  All of these are from On Writing.

"Fiction is the truth inside the lie."

"While it is impossible to make a competent writer out of a bad one, and while it is equally impossible to make a great writer out of a good one, it is possible, with lots of hard work, dedication, and timely help, to make a good writer out of a merely competent one."

"A good deal of literary criticism serves only to reinforce a caste system which is as old as the intellectual snobbery which nurtured it."

"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,.  It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over.  Getting happy, okay?  Getting happy." 

"Talent in cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work."

 "When asked, 'How do you write?' I invariably answer, 'one word at a time.'"

See, doesn't he look happy?

Awesome Quotations from July-Dec 2012

You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it.
Maya Angelou

Lovers of print are simply confusing the plate for the food.
Douglas Adams

The person who has it in his mind that he will write to engineer better human beings is a despot before he writes the first line.
Richard Bausch

Until recently, I was an ebook sceptic, see; one of those people who harrumphs about the “physical pleasure of turning actual pages” and how ebook will “never replace the real thing”. Then I was given a Kindle as a present. That shut me up. Stock complaints about the inherent pleasure of ye olde format are bandied about whenever some new upstart invention comes along. Each moan is nothing more than a little foetus of nostalgia jerking in your gut. First they said CDs were no match for vinyl. Then they said MP3s were no match for CDs. Now they say streaming music services are no match for MP3s. They’re only happy looking in the rear-view mirror.
Charlie Brooker

Do you think it's possible to discuss politics without preaching?
Steven Brust

You don't start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it's good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That's why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.
Octavia Butler

It's a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money.
Albert Camus

Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and Determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan “Press On” has solved and will always solve the problems of the human race.
Calvin Coolidge

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat; the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon? And the day after that, and the next thirty years?
F. Scott Fitzgerald

Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

The person who deserves most pity is a lonesome one on a rainy day who doesn't know how to read.
Benjamin Franklin

Books are no more threatened by Kindle than stairs by elevators.
Stephen Fry

A well-composed book is a magic carpet on which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter in any other way
Caroline Gordon

I don't want to force my politics on my readers.
John Grisham

Loafing is the most productive part of a writer's life.
James Norman Hall

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof shit detector.  This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.
Ernest Hemingway

The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar and familiar things new.
Samuel Johnson

I try not to spend too much time on partisan politics. Life's too short for that. I don't really believe that there have been many human problems solved by politics.
Dean Koontz

The highest patriotism is not a blind acceptance of official policy, but a love of one's country deep enough to call her to a higher plain.
George McGovern

Writers don't make any money at all. We make about a dollar. It is terrible. But then again we don't work either. We sit around in our underwear until noon then go downstairs and make coffee, fry some eggs, read the paper, read part of a book, smell the book, wonder if perhaps we ourselves should work on our book, smell the book again, throw the book across the room because we are quite jealous that any other person wrote a book, feel terribly guilty about throwing the schmuck's book across the room because we secretly wonder if God in heaven noticed our evil jealousy, or worse, our laziness. We then lie across the couch facedown and mumble to God to forgive us because we are secretly afraid He is going to dry up all our words because we envied another man's stupid words. And for this, as I said, we are paid a dollar. We are worth so much more
Donald Miller

Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it.
George Bernard Shaw

The lack of money is the root of all evil.
Mark Twain

Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it.
Mark Twain

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time
Edwin Whipple

Writers Talking Smack

When writers talk about "the rules" of writing, they always forget to talk about them as THEIR rules. Young writers, especially standing in the splendor of a successful, published author, are sometimes in awe of another person who has made the magic work.

These writers forget to whip out their grains of salt, and the result is that legions of young writers forget that art is like Jujitsu--do what ever works. "Whatever works" might break one of another writers vaunted rules or even conventional writing wisdom. The end result being that writers are often quoted at length for their "Thou shalt..."/"Thou shalt not..." advice without a second thought. It's important to remember that writing is not an equation or it wouldn't be an art and a lot more people would be very good at it.

In the same way we have different tastes in reading, we have different tastes in writing. When a chef says "don't use too much butter in your cooking" we somehow know that is THEIR style and that Julia Child would have a thing or two to say about that, but when it comes to writing the tendency is to forget that not all writers--and even not all GOOD, FAMOUS, LITERARY writers--agree on rules or style or even what makes good writing.

And what could possibly illustrate that point more than seeing great writers talk shit about other great writers?

"[Hemingway] has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary."

-William Faulkner

"Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?"

-Ernest Hemingway

"[Ulysses is] the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples."

-Virginia Woolf (about Ulysses)

"That's not writing, that's typing."

-Truman Capote (on Jack Kerouac)

“…like a large shaggy dog just unchained scouring the beaches of the world and baying at the moon.”

-Robert Lewis Stevenson on Walt Whitman

“All raw, uncooked, protesting.”

-Virginia Woolf on Aldous Huxley

“Miss Austen’s novels . . . seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. The one problem in the mind of the writer . . . is marriageableness.”

-Ralph Waldo Emerson on Jane Austen

“A hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe, who tricked out a few of the old proven sure fire literary skeletons with sufficient local color to intrigue the superficial and the lazy.”

-William Faulkner on Mark Twain

Awesome Writing Quotations From Jan-June 2012

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

A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.
Richard Bach

Quantity produces quality. If you only write a few things, you're doomed.
Ray Bradbury

I know you've heard it a thousand times before. But it's true - hard work pays off. If you want to be good, you have to practice, practice, practice. If you don't love something, then don't do it.
Ray Bradbury

If we listened to our intellect, we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go into business, because we'd be cynical. Well, that's nonsense. You've got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.
Ray Bradbury

If you enjoy living, it is not difficult to keep the sense of wonder.
Ray Bradbury

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.
Walter Bagehot

Far better to live your own path imperfectly than to live another’s perfectly.
Bhagavad Gita

I suspect that every teacher hears the same complaints, but that, being seldom a practicing author, he tends to dismiss them as out of his field, or to see in them evidence that the troubled student has not the true vocation. Yet it is these very pupils who are most obviously gifted who suffer from these disabilities, and the more sensitively organized they are the higher the hazard seems to them. Your embryo journalist or hack writer seldom asks for help of any sort; he is off after agents and editors while his more serious brother-in-arms is suffering the torments of the damned because of his insufficiencies. Yet instruction in writing is oftenest aimed at the oblivious tradesman of fiction, and the troubles of the artist are dismissed or overlooked.
Dorothea Brande

It may be that the root of the trouble is youth and humility. Sometimes it is self-consciousness that stems the flow. Often it is the result of misapprehensions about writing, or it arises from an embarrassment of scruples: the beginner may be waiting for the divine fire of which he has heard to glow unmistakably, and may believe that it can only be lighted by a fortuitous spark from above. The particular point to be noted just here is that this difficulty is anterior to any problems about story structure or plot building and that unless the writer can be helped past it there is very likely to be no need for technical instruction at all.
Dorothea Brande

The grain of truth in the fin de siècle notion, though, is this: the author of genius does keep till his last breath the spontaneity, the ready sensitiveness, of a child, the ‘innocence of eye’ that means so much to the painter, the ability to respond freshly and quickly to new scenes, and to old scenes as though they were new; to see traits and characteristics as though each were new-minted from the hand of God instead of sorting them quickly into dusty categories and pigeonholing them without wonder or surprise; to feel situations so immediately and keenly that the word ‘trite’ hardly has any meaning for him; and always to see ‘the correspondences between things’ [I’ll write about this soon] of which Aristotole spoke two thousand years ago. This freshness of response is vital to the author’s talent.
Dorothea Brande

A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.
Albert Camus

That's not writing, that's typing.
Truman Capote (on Jack Kerouac)

With time and patience, the mulberry leaf becomes satin. With time and patience the mulberry leaf becomes a silk gown.
Chinese Proverb

From now on, ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.
Winston Churchill

If suffering brought wisdom, the dentist’s office would be full of luminous ideas.
Mason Cooley

Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan, 'press on' has solved, and always will solve, the problems of the human race.
Calvin Coolidge

If I had to select one quality, one personal characteristic that I regard as being most highly correlated with success, whatever the field, I would pick the trait of persistence. Determination. The will to endure to the end, to get knocked down seventy times and get up off the floor saying. "Here comes number seventy-one!"
Richard M. Devos

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

True art is characterized by an irresistible urge in the creative artist.
Albert Einstein

‎Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.
Albert Einstein

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction.
Albert Einstein

Imagination is more important than knowledge
Albert Einstein

I try to write parts for women that are as complicated and interesting as women actually are.
Nora Ephron

I don't care who you are. When you sit down to write the first page of your screenplay, in your head, you're also writing your Oscar acceptance speech.
Nora Ephron

I am continually fascinated at the difficulty intelligent people have in distinguishing what is controversial from what is merely offensive.
Nora Ephron

If you wish to be a writer; write!
Epictetus

[Hemingway] has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.
William Faulkner (on Hemingway--who has a return quote you should check out)

You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.
F Scott Fitzgerald

How can anyone govern a nation that has two hundred and forty-six different kinds of cheese?
Charles De Gaulle

If you want to be a writer, write.
Neil Gaiman

The muscles of writing are not so visible, but they are just as powerful: determination, attention, curiosity, a passionate heart.
Natalie Goldberg

Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward; they may be beaten, but they may start a winning game.
Goethe

Every English poet should master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them.
Robert Graves

Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?
Ernest Hemingway (on Faulkner--who has a return quote if you didn't see it)

When a thought takes one's breath away, a grammar lesson seems an impertinence.
Thomas W. Higginson

To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.
Elbert Hubbard

I think it's brought the world a lot closer together, and will continue to do that. There are downsides to everything; there are unintended consequences to everything. The most corrosive piece of technology that I've ever seen is called television - but then, again, television, at its best, is magnificent.
Steve Jobs

My mouth is full of decayed teeth and my soul of decayed ambitions.
James Joyce

A good deal of literary criticism serves only to reinforce a caste system which is as old as the intellectual snobbery which nurtured it.
Stephen King

If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.
Stephen King

While it is impossible to make a competent writer out of a bad one, and while it is equally impossible to make a great writer out of a good one, it is possible, with lots of hard work, dedication, and timely help, to make a good writer out of a merely competent one.
Stephen King

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,.  It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over.  Getting happy, okay?  Getting happy.
Stephen King

Television is the soma of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.
Robert MacNeil

There’s only us, There’s only this, Forget regret, Or life is your to miss.
Mimi, Rent

Grammar, which knows how to control even kings.
Moliere

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

Maybe that's just what happens; you start out wanting to change the world through language, and end up thinking it's enough to tell a few jokes.
David Nicholls

We have art in order not to die of the truth.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.
Alfred North

People who say they like to write but do not like to read are like people who say they only like to exhale.
D. de la Perriere (an instructor who may have been quoting someone else; I'm not sure)

A man's grammar, like Caesar's wife, should not only be pure, but above suspicion of impurity.
Edgar Allan Poe

The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.
Edwin Schlossberg

Writing gives you the illusion of control, and then you realize it's just an illusion, that people are going to bring their own stuff into it.
David Sedaris

Blue cheese contains natural amphetamines. Why are students not informed about this?
Mark E. Smith

I still can't decide which is more fun - reading or writing.
Rex Stout

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

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

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

Remember to always be yourself. Unless you suck.
Joss Whedon

People love a happy ending. So every episode, I will explain once again that I don't like people. And then Mal will shoot someone. Someone we like. And their puppy.
Joss Whedon

Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.
E. B. White

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

[Ulysses is] the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.
Virginia Woolf (about Ulysses)

So you see, imagination needs moodling - long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering.
Brenda Ueland

Quotations About Writing, Art, Inspiration, Creativity and (occasionally) Cheese

An aggregate list of quotations I put up on My Facebook Page to inspire, amuse, and sometimes humble lovers of writing and craft.

Awesome Quotations From Early 2012
Writers Talking Smack Writer on Writer insults from the greats, to the greats.
Great Quotes by Stephen King
Awesome Quotations From Late 2012
Quotes to Inspire You
Awesome Quotations From Early 2013