Bottom

In a mood of faith and hope my work goes on. A ream of fresh paper lies on my desk waiting for the next book. I am a writer and I take up my pen to write.

Pearl S. Buck

The best way to become more creative is to create nothing.

Ilchi Lee

An incurable itch for scribbling takes possession of many, and grows inveterate in their insane breasts.

Juvenal

Write against patterns. Go against the devils. Write what you never write. Lie. Validate what you don’t validate. Indulge what you don’t like. Wallow in it. Write the opposite of what you always write, think, speak. Do everything against the grain!

Deena Metzger

If you would be a writer, first be a reader. Only through the assimilation of ideas, thoughts and philosophies can one begin to focus his own ideas, thoughts and philosophies.

Allan W. Eckert

When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.

Hunter Thompson

Life stand still here.

Virginia Woolf

The more man meditates upon good thoughts, the better will be his world and the world at large.

Confucius

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

Toni Morrison

Half of being smart is knowing what you’re dumb at.

David Gerrold

And your very flesh shall be a great poem.

Walt Whitman

I never quite know when I’m not writing. Sometimes my wife comes up to me at a party and says, “Dammit, Thurber, stop writing.” She usually catches me in the middle of a paragraph. Or my daughter will look up from the dinner table and ask, “Is he sick?”

“No,” my wife says, “he’s writing something.”

James Thurber

I love being a writer. What I can’t stand is the paperwork.

Peter De Vries

Thinking is common to all.

Heraclitus

If you start to edit as you write, you are climbing into your ‘editor’ self, the self that reads. You’ve done plenty of reading, you don’t need practise right now.

Just write.

Sandra Jensen

Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.

Oscar Wilde

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

Truth is the silliest thing under the sun. Let any clergyman try to preach the Truth from its very stronghold, the pulpit, and they would ride him out of his church on his own bannister.

Herman Melville

When I wish to find out how good or how wicked anyone is, or what his thoughts are at the moment, I fashion the expression of my face, as accurately as possible, in accordance with the expression of his, and then wait to see what thoughts or sentiments arise in my own mind or heart, as if to match or correspond with the expression.

Edgar Allan Poe

Put weather in.

Joseph Hansen

A mighty flame followeth a tiny spark.

Dante Alighieri

A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.

Charles Peguy

A great deal of talent is lost to the world for want of a little courage.

Sidney Smith

Reading and weeping opens the door to one’s heart, but writing and weeping opens the window to one’s soul.

M. K. Simmons

An artist needn’t be a clergyman or a churchwarden, but he certainly must have a warm heart for his fellow men.

Vincent Van Gogh

No man should ever publish a book until he has first read it to a woman.

Van Wyck Brooks

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

Samuel Johnson

The best style is the style you don’t notice.

Somerset Maugham

There are thousands of thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up the pen and writes.

William Makepeace Thackeray

Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth. He knows where the Old Ones broke through of old, and where They shall break through again.

H. P. Lovecraft

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

G.K. Chesterton

This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.

Dorothy Parker

If you hear a voice within you say “you cannot paint,” then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.

Vincent Van Gogh

Life itself is a quotation.

Jorge Luis Borges

Pay attention to the sound of words.

Dave Wolverton

Too often we opt for the decorative or the superficial, avoiding the beauty that Keats associated with truth – the terrible beauty, the terrifying beauty that strips us naked by its presence.

Deena Metzger

There is no idea so stupid or hackneyed that a sufficiently-talented writer can’t get a good story out of it.

Lawrence Watt-Evans

When God laughs at the soul and the soul laughs back at God, the persons of the Trinity are begotten.

Meister Eckhart

Writing is a dog’s life, but the only life worth living.

Gustave Flaubert

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

I started with all the handicaps, incapabilities, and helplessness. I didn’t talk when I was twenty. I taught myself by the act of writing.

Anaïs Nin

A man’s got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.

Ernest Hemingway

Occasionally, there arises a writing situation where you see an alternative to what you are doing, a mad, wild gamble of a way for handling something, which may leave you looking stupid, ridiculous or brilliant – you just don’t know which. You can play it safe there, too, and proceed along the route you’d mapped out for yourself. Or you can trust your personal demon who delivered that crazy idea in the first place.

Trust your demon.

Roger Zelazny

‘Whenever they start talking foreign,’ observed John Harris, forecastleman, starboard watch, ‘you know they are at a stand, and that all is, as you might say, in a matter of speaking, up.’

Patrick O’Brian

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

Robert C. Benchley

I think we got much better poetry when it was all regarded as sinful or subversive, and you had to hide it under the cushion when somebody came in.

Anthony Trollope

There’s no money in poetry, but then there’s no poetry in money either.

Robert Graves

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

T. S. Eliot

I want to write, but more than that, I want to bring out all kinds of things that lie buried deep in my heart.

Anne Frank

We are all of us failures, at least, the best of us are.

James M. Barrie

I follow the scent of falling rain and head for the place where it is darkest. I follow the lightning and draw near to the place where it strikes.

Navaho Chant

There are three rules for writing. Unfortunately, no one can agree what they are.

Somerset Maugham

If I don’t write to empty my mind, I go mad.

Lord Byron

That terrible mood of depression of whether it’s any good or not is what is known as The Artist’s Reward.

Hemingway

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

Jack London

Joy is of the will which labours, which overcomes obstacles, which knows triumph.

William Butler Yeats

Most people won’t realise that writing is a craft. You have to take your apprenticeship in it like anything else.

Katherine Ann Porter

First thought, best thought.

Allen Ginsberg

I felt a curious thrill, as if something had stirred in me, half wakened from sleep. There was something very remote and strange and beautiful behind those words, if I could grasp it, far beyond ancient English.

J.R.R. Tolkien

Third thought, best thought.

Frank Conroy

The First Key is that which opens the dark prisons in which the Sulphur is shut up: this it is which knows how to extract the seed out of the body, and which forms the Stone of the philosophers by the conjunction of the spirit with the body – of sulphur with mercury. Hermes has manifestly demonstrated the operation of this First Key by these words: In the caverns of the metals there is hidden the Stone, which is venerable, bright in colour, of mind sublime, and an open sea, the Sea of the Wise, in which they angle for their mysterious Fish. But the operations have a great deal of analogy one to another, to the end that those who have not the Lynx’s eyes may pursue wrong, and be lost. Take heed, therefore, not to be deceived here; for it is a truth, that in each work the Wise Artist ought to dissolve the body with the spirit; he must cut off the Raven’s head, whiten the Black, and vivify the White; yet it is properly in the First operation that the Wise Artist cuts off the head of the Black Dragon and of the Raven. Hence, Hermes says: What is born of the Crow is the beginning of this Art. Consider that it is by separation of the black, foul, and stinking fume of the Blackest Black that our astral, white, and resplendent Stone is formed, which contains in its veins the blood of the Pelican. It is at this First Purification of the Stone, and at this shining whiteness, that the work of the First Key is ended.

The Six Keys of Eudoxus

You must have been warned against letting the golden hours slip by; but some of them are golden only because we let them slip by.

James M. Barrie

Science explains the world, but only Art can reconcile us to it.

Stanislaw Lem

To look a fool is the secret of a wise man.

Edgar Allen Poe

Shakespeare is the happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance.

James Joyce

Easy reading is damn hard writing.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

Stephen King

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

Scott Adams

There are worlds beyond worlds and times beyond times, all of them true, all of them real, and all of them (as children know) penetrating each other.

P. L. Travers

The hard part is getting to the top of page one.

Tom Stoppard

When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.

Raymond Chandler

It’s not always easy to tell the difference between thinking and looking out of the window.

Wallace Stevens

I have never grown out of the infantile belief that the universe was made for me to suck.

Aleister Crowley

The whole process of writing a novel is having this great, beautiful idea and then spoiling it.

Diane Johnson

Resolve and thou art free.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Poetry has been to me its own exceeding great reward; it has given me the habit of wishing to discover the good and beautiful in all that meets and surrounds me.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

When people ask me how I know so much about mankind, they get a simple answer: everything I know about men, I learned from me.

Anton Chekhov

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one’s luck.

Iris Murdoch

The ancient historians gave us delightful fiction in the form of fact; the modern novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction.

Oscar Wilde

Writing is fighting.

Muhammad Ali

It is perfectly okay to write garbage – as long as you edit brilliantly.

C. J. Cherryh

The effect of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.

Herbert Spencer

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

I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don’t know what I did before that. Just loafed I suppose.

P. G. Wodehouse

An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice.

Mark Twain

Enter into the object, the whole of its delicate life, feeling as it feels.

Shinkichi Takahashi

The more skill you have, the further you are from what your deepest love wants.

Rumi

I keep the subject constantly before me and wait till the first dawnings open little by little into the full light.

Sir Isaac Newton

He thought and suffered a good deal, but lacked the resolution to dare, the first requsite of a practicioner.

Lawrence Durrell

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

Jean Giraudoux

Beauty is not caused. It is.

Emily Dickinson

We should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.

Friedrich Nietzsche

I took a number of stories by popular writers as well as others by Maupassant, O. Henry, Stevenson, etc., and studied them carefully. Modifying what I learned over the next few years, I began to sell.

Louis L’Amour

An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.

Gustave Flaubert

All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Alice Walker

This is a world of action, and not for moping and droning in.

Charles Dickens

What we plant in the soil of contemplation, we shall reap in the harvest of action.

Meister Eckhart

Sometimes you have to go on when you don’t feel like it, and sometimes you’re doing good work when it feels like all you’re managing to do is shovel shit from a sitting position.

Stephen King

How to write a poem? Rip your chest wide open and pour out whatever is crowded there.

Pirjo Zeylon

To write must be an act devoid of will. The word, like the deep ocean current, has to float to the surface of its own impulse.

Henry Miller

At the center of your being you have the answer; you know who you are and you know what you want.

Lao Tzu

The secret is to start a story near the ending.

Chris Offut

Why don’t you get a haircut? You look like a chrysanthemum.

P. G. Wodehouse

A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end – but not necessarily in that order.

Jean Luc Godard

But words are things, and a small drop of ink,
Falling, like dew, upon a thought, produces
That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.

Lord Byron

God protects those he loves from worthless reading.

J.K. Lavater

Good writing is true writing.

Hemingway

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.

Gloria Steinem

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

Ray Bradbury

The world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.

William James

I’d like to have money. And I’d like to be a good writer. These two can come together, and I hope they will, but if that’s too adorable, I’d rather have money.

Dorothy Parker

Writing is turning one’s worst moments into money.

J. P. Donleavy

The cat sat on the mat is not a story. The cat sat on the other cat’s mat is a story.

John le Carre

I guess I don’t so much mind being old, as I mind being fat and old.

Benjamin Franklin

No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.

Henry Brooks Adams

Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of spring without the fear that after them may come no summer.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Write what comes up.

Barbara Turner-Vesselago

You shall know the truth, and it will make you odd.

Flannery O’Connor

The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its supreme purpose through him.

Carl Jung

Most writers need to write. I write for money, really. If I won the lottery, I would never write another word. I would rather read.

Clarissa Dickson Wright

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

Stephen King

I asked Ring Lardner the other day how he writes his short stories, and he said he wrote a few widely separated words or phrases on a piece of paper and then went back and filled in the spaces.

Harold Ross

Listening not to me but to the Logos, it is wise to agree that all things are one.

Heraclitus

Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect.

J. Krishnamurti

I just sit at a typewriter and curse a bit.

P. G. Wodehouse

If you desire faith, then you have faith enough.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

A poet never speaks directly, as to someone at the breakfast table.

William Butler Yeats

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

Doris Lessing

There are three points of view from which a writer can be considered: he may be considered as a story teller, as a teacher, and as an enchanter. A major writer combines these three – storyteller, teacher, enchanter – but it is the enchanter in him that predominates and makes him a major writer.

Vladimir Nabokov

Outside of a dog, a man’s best friend is a book. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.

Groucho Marx

There is no need to imagine before you paint. Painting brings forth imagination.

Kazuaki Tanahashi

In America only the successful writer is important, in France all writers are important, in England no writer is important, and in Australia you have to explain what a writer is.

Geoffrey Cotterell

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.

George Eliot

I do not write for such dull elves as have not a deal of ingenuity themselves.

Jane Austen

Read poetry: it’s quite hard.

Don Paterson

Write without thinking of the result in terms of a result, but think of the writing in terms of discovery, which is to say that creation must take place between the pen and the paper, not before in a thought or afterwards in a recasting. It will come if it is there and if you will let it come.

Gertrude Stein

The inner life strengthens the outer life, and vice versa. And it is stories that can unite these two precious worlds – one mundane, the other mythic.

Clarrissa Pinkola Estés

Being a writer is like having homework every night for the rest of your life.

Lawrence Kasdan

Nature is the art of God.

Dante Alighieri

I have never thought of myself as a good writer. Anyone who wants reassurance of that should read one of my first drafts. But I’m one of the world’s great rewriters.

James A. Michener

A critic can only review the book he has read, not the one which the writer wrote.

Mignon McLaughlin

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

Helen Keller

Let not your mind run on what you lack as much as on what you have already.

Marcus Aurelius

In composing, as a general rule, run a pen through every other word you have written; you have no idea what vigor it will give your style.

Sydney Smith

Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truth.

Henry Miller

Dream making emerges from a fundamental desire for intimacy, the love of creation, and the necessity to speak.

Deena Metzger

I feel that criticism is a letter to the public which the author, since it is not directed to him, does not have to open and read.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them. There’s many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.

Flannery O’Connor

Take care that you never spell a word wrong. Always before you write a word, consider how it is spelled, and, if you do not remember, turn to a dictionary. It produces great praise to a lady to spell well.

Thomas Jefferson to his daughter

Lighting does occasionally strike and occasionally the result isn’t a corpse.

Tillie Olsen

The teacher who is indeed wise does not bid you to enter the house of his wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of your mind.

Kahlil Gibran

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.

Mark Twain

Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance, that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature: for any thing so o’erdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold as ‘twere the mirror up to nature: to show virtue her feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.

William Shakespeare

I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.

James Michener

Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart.

Carl Jung

Make a list of everything you must not write about.

Deena Metzger

The road to ignorance is paved with good editors.

George Bernard Shaw

You could compile the worst book in the world entirely out of selected passages from the best writers in the world.

G.K. Chesterton

It’s none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think you were born that way.

Ernest Hemingway

Intolerance is evidence of impotence.

Aleister Crowley

It’s not plagiarism – I’m recycling words, as any good environmentally conscious writer would do.

Uniek Swain

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne Du Maurier

A work of art has an author, and yet, when perfect, it has something which is essentially anonymous about it.

Simone Weil

You thunder and lightning too much the reader ceases to get under the bed by and by.

Mark Twain

The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty and delicacy. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes.

Somerset Maugham

A metaphor is like a simile.

Unknown

Life’s enchanted cup sparkles near the brim.

Lord Byron

I turn sentences around. That’s my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around. Then I read the two sentences over and turn them both around. Then I lie down on my sofa and think. Then I get up and throw them out and start from the beginning.

Philip Roth

If any organism fails to fulfill its potentialities, it becomes sick.

William James

I try to leave out the parts that people skip.

Elmore Leonard

An artist cannot do anything slovenly.

Jane Austen

Ice-cream is exquisite – what a pity it isn’t illegal.

Voltaire

I dislike modern memoirs. They are generally written by people who have either entirely lost their memories, or have never done anything worth remembering.

Oscar Wilde

I firmly believe every book was meant to be written.

Marchette Chute

If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don’t listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

Lillian Hellman

Nothing is made worse or better by praise.

Marcus Aurelius

Writer’s block is simply a failure of ego.

Norman Mailer

Writing, like life itself, is a voyage of discovery. The adventure is a metaphysical one; it is a way of approaching life indirectly, of acquiring a total rather than a partial view of the universe. The writer lives between the upper and lower worlds: he takes the path in order eventually to become that path himself.

Henry Miller

If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.

Isaac Asimov

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

Robert Frost

Television is actually closer to reality than anything in books. The madness of TV is the madness of human life.

Camille Paglia

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

Honore de Balzac

Thou art God, and I am God and all that groks is God.

Robert Heinlein

A woman, especially if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.

Jane Austen

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Benjamin Franklin

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.

William Wordsworth

When you are describing,
A shape or sound or tint;
Don’t state the matter plainly,
But put it in a hint;
And learn to look at all things,
With a sort of mental squint.

Lewis Carroll

Novels seem to me to be richer, broader, deeper, more enjoyable than poems.

Philip Larkin

I write as straight as I can, just as I walk as straight as I can, because that is the best way to get there.

H.G. Wells

The author must keep his mouth shut when his work starts to speak.

Frederich Nietzsche

I never dare to write as funny as I can.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

If the sex scene doesn’t make you want to do it – whatever it is they’re doing – it hasn’t been written right.

Sloan Wilson

Poetry: the best words in the best order.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The first thing you have to consider when writing a novel is your story, and then your story – and then your story!

Ford Madox Ford

Sometimes I can better describe a person by another person’s reaction. In a story in my first book, I couldn’t think of a way to sufficiently describe the charisma of a certain boy, so the narrator says, “I knew girls who saved his gum.”

Amy Hempel

Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.

Robert Heinlein

Critics sometimes appear to be addressing themselves to works other than those I remember writing.

Joyce Carol Oates

An editor should have a pimp for a brother, so he’d have somebody to look up to.

Gene Fowler

I’m writing a book. I’ve got the page numbers done.

Stephen Wright

All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

George Orwell

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.

Douglas Adams

Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.

Truman Capote

One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment.

Hart Crane

Writers are just people who have a whole lot on the inside that they need to get to the outside, with pen and paper as their preferred method of transport. Same with dancers, artists, and singers – all the same urges with differing transportation.

Graycie Harmon

Now and again thousands of memories converge, harmonize, arrange themselves around a central idea in a coherent form, and I write a story.

Katherine Anne Porter

Remember not only to say the right thing in the right place, but far more difficult still, to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.

Benjamin Franklin

Why do writers write? Because it isn’t there.

Thomas Berger

It’s not enough to create magic. You have to create a price for magic.

Eric A. Burns

To accuse others for one’s own misfortunes is a sign of want of education. To accuse oneself shows that one’s education has begun. To accuse neither oneself nor others shows that one’s education is complete.

Epictetus

I do not read advertisements. I would spend all of my time wanting things.

Franz Kafka

Substitute damn every time you’re inclined to write very; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

Mark Twain

An original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate.

Francois-Rene, Vicomte de Chateaubriand

Adults are just obsolete children.

Dr Seuss

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.

Ezra Pound

People are beginning to see that the first requisite to success in life is to be a good animal.

Herbert Spencer

People on the outside think there’s something magical about writing, that you go up in the attic at midnight and cast the bones and come down in the morning with a story, but it isn’t like that. You sit in back of the typewriter and you work, and that’s all there is to it.

Harlan Ellison

Bravery never goes out of fashion.

William Makepeace Thackeray

I’ve been reading reviews of my stories for twenty-five years, and can’t remember a single useful point in any of them, or the slightest good advice. The only reviewer who ever made an impression on me was Skabichevsky, who prophesied that I would die drunk in the bottom of a ditch.

Anton Chekhov

True Ease in Writing comes from Art, not Chance,
As those move easiest who have learn’d to dance.

Alexander Pope

Being an author is like being in charge of your own personal insane asylum.

Graycie Harmon

Good things, when short, are twice as good.

Gracián

Art is the proper task of life.

Friedrich Nietzsche

You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance.

Ray Bradbury

The key to non-anxious sermon-writing is that it’s not about me. It’s about the congregation. I honor the fact that the listeners bring more to the sermon than I do. I remind myself of the hundreds of times someone says, “I loved how you said…,” and then tell me things that they heard that were nowhere in my text and that I never said.

Reverend Sean Parker Dennison

Great things are done when men and mountains meet.

William Blake

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

What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.

Logan Pearsall Smith

I have offended God and mankind because my work did not reach the quality it should have.

Leonardo da Vinci

Poetry gave me back my voice.

Maya Angelou

Many people hear voices when no one is there. Some of them are called mad and are shut up in rooms where they stare at the walls all day. Others are called writers and they do pretty much the same thing.

Meg Chittenden

When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.

Erasmus

Wake the happy words.

Theodore Roethke

No one connected intimately with a writer has any appreciation of his temperament, except to think him overdoing everything.

Zane Grey

The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.

Albert Camus

I believe there are two ways of writing novels. One is mine, making a sort of musical comedy without music and ignoring real life altogether; the other is going right deep down into life and not caring a damn.

P. G. Wodehouse

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

T. S. Eliot

I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody’s head.

John Updike

Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement.

Jackson Pollock

Every writer I know has trouble writing.

Joseph Heller

Be generous, be delicate, and always pursue the prize.

Henry James

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

Terry Pratchett

Sorrow is knowledge, those that know the most must mourn the deepest. The tree of knowledge is not the tree of life.

Lord Byron

The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.

Vladimir Nabakov

Writers have lives, too.

Doug Kurtz

To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it’s about, but the inner music the words make.

Truman Capote

Be obscure clearly.

E.B. White

If a kid asks where rain comes from, I think a cute thing to tell him is “God is crying.” And if he asks why God is crying, another cute thing to tell him is “Probably because of something you did.”

Jack Handy

Writing well means never having to say, ‘I guess you had to be there.’

Jef Mallett

The end of a novel, like the end of a children’s dinner-party, must be made up of sweetmeats and sugar-plums.

Anthony Trollope

But novels are never about what they are about; that is, there is always deeper, or more general, significance. The author may not be aware of this till she is pretty far along with it. A novel’s whole pattern is rarely apparent at the outset of writing, or even at the end; that is when the writer finds out what a novel is about, and the job becomes one of understanding and deepening or sharpening what is already written. That is finding the theme.

Diane Johnson

Avoid cliches like the plague. Unqualified superlatives are the worst of all.

William Safire

Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.

Anton Chekhov

The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.

Ray Bradbury

‘Begin at the beginning,’ the King said, very gravely, ‘and go on till you come to the end: then stop.’

Lewis Carroll

Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.

T. S. Eliot

Great is the art of beginning, but greater is the art of ending.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money.

P. G. Wodehouse

Any magazine-cover hack can splash paint around wildly and call it a nightmare, or a witches sabbath or a portrait of the devil; but only a great painter can make such a thing really scare or ring true. That’s because only a real artist knows the anatomy of the terrible.

H. P. Lovecraft

If I chance to talk a little wild, forgive me.

William Shakespeare

Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man wanted to make a million dollars, the best way would be to start his own religion.

L. Ron Hubbard

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

Henry David Thoreau

Never throw up on an editor.

Ellen Datlow

A good style should show no signs of effort. What is written should seem a happy accident.

W. Somerset Maugham

Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake.

E.L. Doctorow

Imagine an inner living dimension within yourself in which you create, in miniature psychic form, all the exterior conditions that you know.

Jane Roberts

Writing became such a process of discovery that I couldn’t wait to get to work in the morning: I wanted to know what I was going to say.

Sharon O’Brien

For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain and the noise of battle.

John Cheever

A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone’s feelings unintentionally.

Oscar Wilde

I conceive that the great part of the miseries of mankind are brought upon them by false estimates they have made of the value of things.

Benjamin Franklin

The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.

Muriel Rukeyser

Kill my boss? Do I dare live out the American dream?

Homer Simpson

No ideas but in things.

William Carlos Williams

Writing is its own reward.

Henry Miller

Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed there are many rewards, if you disgrace yourself you can always write a book.

Ronald Reagan

It’s hard enough to write a good drama, it’s much harder to write a good comedy, and it’s hardest of all to write a drama with comedy. Which is what life is.

Jack Lemmon

Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.

Orson Scott Card

Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence; he is just using his memory.

Leonardo da Vinci

Write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable.

Francis Bacon

Writing is a struggle against silence.

Carlos Fuentes

The best time for planning a book is while you’re doing the dishes.

Agatha Christie

We do not know it because we are fooling away our time with outward and perishing things, and are asleep in regard to that which is real within ourself.

Paracelsus

After being turned down by numerous publishers, he had decided to write for Posterity.

George Ade

There is nothing fantastic or ultradimensional about crab grass...unless you are an sf writer, in which case pretty soon you are viewing crab grass with suspicion. What are it’s real motives? And who sent it here in the first place? It only looks like crab grass. That’s what they want us to think it is. One day the crab grass suit will fall off and their true identity will be revealed. By then the Pentagon will be full of crab grass and it’ll be too late. The crab grass, or what we took to be crab grass, will dictate terms.

Phillip K. Dick

The story is not in the plot but in the telling.

Ursula K. LeGuin

The conditions of the Transvaal ordinance cannot in the opinion of His Majesty’s Government be classified as slavery in the extreme acceptance of the word without some risk of terminological inexactitude.

Winston Churchill

Novelists: fashioning nets to sustain and support the reader as he falls helplessly through the chaos of his own existence.

Fay Weldon

A writer’s duty is to register what it is like for him or her to be in the world.

Zadie Smith

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

William Blake

Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.

John Lennon

Why are there trees I never walk under but large and melodious thoughts descend upon me?

Walt Whitman

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.

Karl Kraus

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

Blaise Pascal

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

Getting ahead in a difficult profession – singing, acting, writing, whatever – requires avid faith in yourself. You must be able to sustain yourself against staggering blows and unfair reversals.

Sophia Loren

Be curious, not judgmental.

Walt Whitman

Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering – and it’s all over much too soon.

Woody Allen

You must write for children in the same way as you do for adults, only better.

Maxim Gorky

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

Of course the game is rigged. Don’t let that stop you – if you don’t play, you can’t win.

Robert Heinlein

I’ve always said fantasy is sort of ‘stealth philosophy’.

Terry Goodkind

The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.

Ursula K. LeGuin

A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor.

Ring Lardner

There was never a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn’t be. He is too many people if he’s any good.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Having been unpopular in high school is not just cause for book publications.

Fran Lebowitz

Writing well is the best revenge.

Dorothy Parker

What I am saying, I suppose, is that you write as if everyone is dead. Then you face the music. I don’t know any other way to keep the teeth sharp and the spirit alive.

Lynn Freed

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

Steve Martin

To anyone capable of suspending for a moment the cavortings of the rational mind, of accepting myth for what it is – not lie but the very veritable truth – it needs no great inward effort to act upon such advice. It’s a matter, merely, of listening.

P. L. Travers

Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery.

Jane Austen

Only great minds can afford a simple style.

Stendhal

Character is determined more by the lack of certain experiences than by those one has had.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Every writer is a frustrated actor who recites his lines in the hidden auditorium of his skull.

Rod Serling

Tell the truth, but tell it slant.

Emily Dickinson

It had never occurred to me before that music and thinking are so much alike. In fact you could say music is another way of thinking, or maybe thinking is another kind of music.

Ursula K. Le Guin

Let us read and let us dance – two amusements that will never do any harm to the world.

Voltaire

From the first words of a fairy story, we relax – not because we are entertained but because we are in the presence of truthfulness.

Deena Metzger

Words are but wind; and learning is nothing but words.

Jonathan Swift

I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

Maya Angelou

An idea, like a ghost, must be spoken to a little before it will explain itself.

Charles Dickens

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

Reggie Leach

I write to keep from going mad from the contradictions I find among mankind – and to work some of those contradictions out for myself.

Michel de Montaigne

Tell the readers a story! Because without a story, you are merely using words to prove you can string them together in logical sentences.

Anne McCaffrey

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

There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you.

Z. N. Hurston

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

Oscar Wilde

There are no dull subjects. There are only dull writers.

H.L. Mencken

Writing is the flip side of sex – it’s good only when it’s over.

Hunter S. Thompson

I take the view, and always have, that if you cannot say what you are going to say in twenty minutes you ought to go away and write a book about it.

Lord Brabazon

Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.

Sir Francis Bacon

Less than an hour before, he had congratulated himself on escaping all the traps of Earth, all the snares of Man. Not knowing that the greatest trap of all, the final and the fatal trap, lay on this present planet.

Clifford D. Simak

I don’t think anyone should write their autobiography until after they’re dead.

Samuel Goldwyn

An artist is his own fault.

John O’Hara

Somebody is a good dreamer.

Pirjo Zeylon

Touching your cap to the Squire may be damn bad for the Squire, but it’s damn good for you.

J.R.R. Tolkien

There are only three things to be done with a woman. You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.

Lawrence Durrell

Without a knowledge of mythology much of the elegant literature of our own language cannot be understood and appreciated.

Thomas Bulfinch

Always speak the truth, think before you speak, and write it down afterwards.

Lewis Carroll

On the other hand, I still approach each book with the same basic plan in mind – to put some people under severe stress and see how they hold up.

Terry Brooks

Words are the physicians of a mind diseased.

Aeschylus

A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose.

Samuel McChord Crothers

Words – so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

They lard their lean books with the fat of others’ works.

Robert Burton

A bad book is as much of a labour to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author’s soul.

Aldous Huxley

Why, after all, should readers never be harrowed? Surely there is enough happiness in life without having to go to books for it.

Dorothy Parker

Nature also forges man, now a gold man, now a silver man, now a fig man, now a bean man.

Paracelsus

No one does anything from a single motive.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.

H. L. Mencken

The difference between reality and fiction? Fiction has to make sense.

Tom Clancy

He was such a bad writer, they revoked his poetic license.

Milton Berle

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

In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo de Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.

Orson Welles

Zest is the secret of all beauty. There is no beauty that is attractive without zest.

Christian Dior

I’m very proud of my flops, as much as of my successes.

Francis Ford Coppola

A witty saying proves nothing.

Voltaire

What is a hero without love for mankind?

Doris Lessing

You taught me language and my profit on’t is I know how to curse.

William Shakespeare

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

Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish. And yet it also pleases me and seems right that what is of value and wisdom to one man seems nonsense to another.

Hermann Hesse

Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

Lewis Carroll

All paths are the same, leading nowhere. Therefore, pick a path with heart.

Carlos Castaneda

He is the true enchanter, whose spell operates, not upon the senses, but upon the imagination and the heart.

Washington Irving

Write what you like; there is no other rule.

O. Henry

A writer is, after all, only half his book. The other half is the reader and from the reader the writer learns.

P. L. Travers

Anybody can make an easy deal, but only a true agent can sell a dog.

Irving “Swifty” Lazar

A man’s errors are his portals of discovery.

James Joyce

At one time I thought the most important thing was talent. I think now that the young man or the young woman must possess or teach himself, training himself, in infinite patience, which is to try and to try until it comes right. He must train himself in ruthless intolerance – that is to throw away anything that is false no matter how much he might love that page or that paragraph. The most important thing is insight, that is to be – curiosity – to wonder, to mull, and to muse why it is that man does what he does, and if you have that, then I don’t think the talent makes much difference, whether you’ve got it or not.

William Faulkner

Fire lives in the death of earth, air in the death of fire, water in the death of air, and earth in the death of water.

Heraclitus

A word is dead
When it is said,
Some say.
I say it just begins
to live that day.

Emily Dickinson

If it has horses and swords in it, it’s a fantasy, unless it also has a rocketship in it, in which case it becomes science fiction. The only thing that’ll turn a story with a rocketship in it back into fantasy is the Holy Grail.

Debra Doyle

Keep a diary and one day it’ll keep you.

Mae West

Loafing is the most productive part of a writer’s life.

James Norman Hall

The words have just crawled down my sleeve and come out on the page.

Joan Baez

The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone’s neurosis, and we’d have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.

William Styron

The world is so great and rich, and life so full of variety, that you can never lack occasions for poems.

J. W. Goethe

He is able who thinks he is able.

Buddha

It is the writer who might catch the imagination of young people, and plant a seed that will flower and come to fruition.

Isaac Asimov

The misuse of language induces evil in the soul.

Socrates

I suspect that one of the reasons we create fiction is to make sex exciting.

Gore Vidal

The adjective is the enemy of the noun.

Francois Marie Arouet de Voltaire

Anybody can have ideas – the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.

Mark Twain

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

E. M. Forster

‘It is odd how the law always harps upon the unnaturalness of sodomy,’ observed Stephen. ‘Though I know at least two judges who are paederasts; and of course barristers.’

Patrick O’Brian

You have to talk to the stone, and it has to talk to you.

Ben Nighthorse Campbell

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

Mark Twain

I feel happy to terrify kids.

R. L. Stine

The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.

Ayn Rand

Always think of what is useful and not what is beautiful. Beauty will come of its own accord.

Nikolai Gogol

I soothe my conscience now with the thought that it is better for hard words to be on paper than that Mummy should carry them in her heart.

Anne Frank

Everything in this world has a hidden meaning.

Nikos Kazantzakis

He who fears he shall suffer already suffers what he fears.

Michel de Montaigne

Next to excellence is the appreciation of it.

William Makepeace Thackeray

May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air.

Franz Kafka

Follow your bliss and doors will open where there were no doors before.

Joseph Campbell

Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.

Ernest Hemingway

Writing is a fairly lonely business unless you invite people in to watch you do it, which is often distracting and then you have to ask them to leave.

Marc Lawrence

I am writing in the garden. To write as one should of a garden one must write not outside it or merely somewhere near it, but in the garden.

Frances Hodgson Burnett

The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else by the same name.

Aldous Huxley

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

Virginia Woolf

The maker of a sentence launches out into the infinite and builds a road into Chaos and old Night, and is followed by those who hear him with something of wild, creative delight.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Uncertainty is the essential, inevitable and all-pervasive companion to your desire to make art. Tolerance for uncertainty is a prerequisite for succeeding.

David Byles and Ted Orland

Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living. The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind.

Catherine Drinker Bowen

Writing is a product of silence.

Carrie Latet

Prune what is turgid, elevate what is commonplace, arrange what is disorderly, introduce rhythm where the language is harsh, modify where it is too absolute.

Marcus Fabius Quintilianus

What is needed is, in the end, simply this: solitude, great inner solitude. Going into yourself and meeting no one for hours on end – that is what you must be able to attain.

Rainer Maria Rilke

I have been an author for 20 years and an ass for 55.

Mark Twain

There are many reasons why novelists write – but they all have one thing in common: a need to create an alternative world.

John Fowles

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

Kurt Vonnegut

If you wait for inspiration, you’re not a writer, but a waiter.

Louis L’Amour

Since we cannot change reality, let us change the eyes which see reality.

Nikos Kazantzakis

Art is rare and sacred and hard work, and there ought to be a wall of fire around it.

Anthony Burgess

I don’t have to have faith, I have experience.

Joseph Campbell

To go against sense, to go against reason, to deliberately deconstruct the world of grammar and thoughtful orderliness is, in effect, to destroy the world as we know it and allow something new to emerge. Grammar is, above all, a system of thought and perception, the way the world is defined and primary relationships are perceived.

Deena Metzger

Big words are always punished.

Sophocles

Beware thoughts that come in the night.

William Least Heat-Moon

Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn’t matter. I’m not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn’t make us better, then what on earth is it for?

Alice Walker

Observe, don’t imitate.

John M. Ford

‘I have no notion of two sisters wearing the same clothes, the same flaunting meretricious gawds, the same tortured Gorgon curls low over their brutish criminal foreheads; it bespeaks a superfetation of vulgarity, both innate and studiously acquired.’

Patrick O’Brian

The proper use of imagination can propel ideas in the direction you desire.

Jane Roberts

Being scared can keep a man from getting killed, and often makes a better fighter of him.

Louis L’Amour

I desired dragons with a profound desire.

J.R.R. Tolkien

In the aftermath of the crisis, tulip mania gave way to tulip-phobia. The professor of botany at Leyden, Evrard Forstius, was said to be so incensed by the flower that he could not see a tulip without attacking it viciously with his stick.

Edward Chancellor

Should I lose my demons, wherefore my angels?

Nathanial Hawthorne

When you are old and gray and full of sleep, and nodding by the fire, take down this book and slowly read, and dream of the soft look your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep.

William Butler Yeats

Fear is excitement without the breath.

Robert Heller

Homer has taught all other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.

Aristotle

The books that help you most are those which make you think that most. The hardest way of learning is that of easy reading; but a great book that comes from a great thinker is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty.

Pablo Neruda

I still can’t decide which is more fun – reading or writing.

Rex Stout

Doughnuts. Is there anything they can’t do?

Homer Simpson

From a technical point of view there are two essential things to solve or create when writing a novel. The first is the invention of the narrator. I think the narrator is the most important character in a novel. In some cases this importance is obvious because the narrator is also a central figure, a central character in the novel. In other cases, the narrator is not a character, not a visible figure, but an invisible person whose creation is even more complicated and difficult than the creation of one of the characters.

Mario Vargas Llosa

Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by reason.

André Gide

Language is to the mind more than light is to the eye.

William Gibson

A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.

John le Carre

You look at the world around you, and you take it apart into all its components. Then you take some of those components, throw them away, and plug in different ones, start it up and see what happens.

Frederik Pohl

You sit down and you do it, and you do it, and you do it, until you have learned to do it.

Ursula K. LeGuin

If you liked being a teenager, there’s something really wrong with you.

Stephen King

I think of an author as somebody who goes into the marketplace and puts down his rug and says, “I will tell you a story,” and then he passes the hat.

Robertson Davies

If only she could put them together, she felt, write them out in some sentence, then she would have got at the truth of things.

Virginia Woolf

A man who is a genius and doesn’t know it, probably isn’t.

Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

Every artist joins a conversation that’s been going on for generations, even millennia, before he or she joins the scene.

John Barth

Be anything you want to be, but don’t be dull.

Frank Robinson

It is not down in any map; true places never are.

Herman Melville

Only self-educated is educated. Others are merely taught.

Erno Paasilinna

No tricks.

Raymond Carver

To write is, above all else, to construct a self.

Deena Metzger

There is in each of us an ongoing story. It contains our meaning and our destiny. And it goes on inevitably whether we pay attention to it or not.

Al Kreinheder

I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself.

Henry David Thoreau

The essence of drama is that man cannot walk away from the consequences of his own deeds.

Harold Hayes

A writer’s mind seems to be situated partly in the solar plexus and partly in the head.

Ethel Wilson

Drama, instead of telling us the whole of a man’s life, must place him in such a situation, tie such a knot, that when it is untied, the whole man is visible.

Leo Tolstoy

Contrary to what many of you may imagine, a career in letters is not without its drawbacks – chief among them the unpleasant fact that one is frequently called upon to sit down and write.

Fran Lebowitz

My task is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel. It is, before all, to make you see. That – and no more – and it is everything.

Joseph Conrad

My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.

William Faulkner

History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.

Winston Churchill

I may as well tell you that if you are going about the place thinking things pretty, you will never make a modern poet. Be poignant, man, be poignant!

P. G. Wodehouse

The pen is the tongue of the mind.

Miguel de Cervantes

Many modern novels have a beginning, a muddle and an end.

Philip Larkin

Following the creative is a path, but it is not a known path.

Deena Metzger

When a mighty tree is felled, a star falls from the sky. Before you cut down a mahogany you should ask permission of the keeper of the forest, and you should ask permission of the keeper of the star.

Chan K’in

To disbelieve is easy; to scoff is simple; to have faith is harder.

Louis L’Amour

Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths.

Joseph Campbell

I have no mouth, and I must scream.

Harlan Ellison

When you read a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before.

Clifton Fadiman

Never let inexperience get in the way of ambition.

Terry Josephson

Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

Samuel Johnson

I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve it through not dying.

Woody Allen

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.

William Faulkner

Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor.

Anne Lamott

The reality is more excellent than the report.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

The Sibyl with raving mouth utters solemn, unadorned, unlovely words, but she reaches out over a thousand years with her voice because the god is in her.

Heraclitus

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

Decide to examine the contents of your conscious mind.

Jane Roberts

We forget that what matters begins with the imagination.

Terry Brooks

Every activity of the creative process requires that we bring spirit into form, that we create a vessel – ourselves or a work of art – that can hold the spirit.

Deena Metzger

Via clear nature of mind and methods of words, the glows of meanings and direct perceptions: with these four kinds of excellent awareness all things are manifest in views compassionate.

Prajna Paramita

In art economy is always beauty.

Henry James

No great art has ever been made without the artist having known danger.

Rainer Maria Rilke

I like to write when I feel spiteful: it’s like having a good sneeze.

D.H. Lawrence

The easiest thing to do on earth is not write.

William Goldman

Speak, that I may see thee.

Ben Jonson

This writing business. Pencils and whatnot. Overrated, if you ask me.

Winnie the Pooh

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

Sidney Sheldon

Of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.

Ecclesiastes

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

Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality.

Joseph Conrad

The only time to believe any kind of rating is when it shows you at the top.

Bob Hope

He who limps is still walking.

Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.

Rainer Maria Rilke

A man may write at any time, if he will set himself doggedly to it.

Dr Samuel Johnson

A book is like a man – clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly. For every flowering thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy mongrel, and for every looping flight a tap on the wing and a reminder that wax cannot hold the feathers firm too near the sun.

John Steinbeck

Talent is a long patience.

Gustave Flaubert

He who Works with his Hands, is a Laborer.
He who Works with his Hands and his Head is a Craftsman.
He who Works with his Hands, his Head, and his Heart is an Artist.

Seneca

The archetypal situation and the mythic realm hover around the perimeters of story.

Deena Metzger

A blow with a word strikes deeper than a blow with a sword.

Robert Burton

Sometimes you have to look reality in the eye and deny it.

Garrison Keillor

If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor.

Edgar Rice Burroughs

First, find out what your hero wants. Then just follow him.

Ray Bradbury

The truth is not for all men, but only for those who seek it.

Ayn Rand

I get up and I have coffee and I speak to no man and I go to my desk.

Hortense Calisher

Mystery is the basic element of all works of art.

Luis Buñuel

Words are a lens to focus one’s mind.

Ayn Rand

It is an unscrupulous intellect that does not pay to antiquity its due reverence.

Erasmus

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

Samuel Beckett

One ought only to write when one leaves a piece of one’s own flesh in the inkpot, each time one dips one’s pen.

Leo Tolstoy

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.

Elias Canetti

My fortune somewhat resembled that of a person who should entertain an idea of committing suicide, and, altogether beyond his hopes, meets with a murderer.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

I spent the afternoon musing on Life. If you come to think of it, what a queer thing Life is! So unlike anything else, don’t you know, if you see what I mean.

P. G. Wodehouse

Writers speak stench.

Franz Kafka

Deep writing comes from our bodies, from our breath, and from our ability to remain solid in the places that scare us.

Laraine Herring

What I would say to a young person trying to become a writer is Don’t. It won’t make any difference because they’ll do it anyway, but they really shouldn’t.

Robert Burton

The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything.

Walter Bagehot

When the sun hit that bonnet just right, I could swear I saw angels in her hair.

Billy-Bob Hornwinkle

The good writer seems to be writing about himself, but has his eye always on that thread of the Universe which runs through himself and all things.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The clothes make the man. Naked people contribute little or nothing to society.

Mark Twain

It’s just my smart ass gorglings.

Pirjo Zeylon

Editing is Human, free-writing Divine!

Milli Thornton

I am so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I am saying.

Oscar Wilde

One extends one’s limits only by exceeding them.

M. Scott Peck

Comedy has to be done en clair. You can’t blunt the edge of wit or the point of satire with obscurity. Try to imagine a famous witty saying that is not immediately clear.

James Thurber

Progress might have been alright once, but it has gone on too long.

Ogden Nash

If the present world go astray, the cause is in you, in you it is to be sought.

Dante Alighieri

The best things in life aren’t things.

Art Buchwald

I shall christen this style the Mandarin, since it is beloved by literary pundits. It is the style of all the writers whose tendency is to make their language convey more than they mean to and more than they feel. It is the style of most artists and all humbug.

Cyril Connolly

I am two with nature.

Woody Allen

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.

Pablo Picasso

Writing a book is an 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

The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.

Rainer Maria Rilke

There are two kinds of light – the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures.

James Thurber

I have no fear of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own.

Jackson Pollock

The best stories don’t come from good vs. bad but from good vs. good.

Leo Tolstoy

The beginning and end of all literary activity is the reproduction of the world that surrounds me by means of the world that is in me, all things being grasped, related, moulded and constructed in a personal form and an original manner.

Goethe

One of my students wrote a story about a nun who got a piece of dental floss stuck between her lower left molars, and who couldn’t get it out all day long. I thought that was wonderful. The story dealt with issues a lot more important than dental floss, but what kept readers going was anxiety about when the dental floss would finally be removed. Nobody could read that story without fishing around in his mouth with a finger.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted.

Jules Renard

Too clever is dumb.

Ogden Nash

All the soarings of my mind begin in my blood.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Books will speak plain when counsellors blanch.

Francis Bacon

He had the look of one who had drained the cup of life and found a dead beetle at the bottom.

P. G. Wodehouse

There is no exception to the rule that every rule has an exception.

James Thurber

If you are going to make a book end badly, it must end badly from the beginning.

Robert Louis Stevenson

Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

Virginia Woolf

All books are either dreams or swords,
You can cut, or you can drug, with words.

Amy Lowell

I have only to let myself go! So I have said all my life, yet I have never fully done it.

Henry James

These experiences were very memorable and valuable to me – anchored in forty feet of water, and twenty or thirty rods from the shore, surrounded sometimes by thousands of small perch and shiners, dimpling the surface with their tails in the moonlight, and communicating by a long flaxen line with mysterious nocturnal fishes which had their dwelling forty feet below, or sometimes dragging sixty feet of line about the pond as I drifted in the gentle night breeze, now and then feeling a slight vibration along it, indicative of some life prowling about its extremity, of dull uncertain blundering purpose there, and slow to make up its mind. At length you slowly raise, pulling hand over hand, some horned pout squeaking and squirming to the upper air. It was very queer, especially in dark nights, when your thoughts had wandered to vast and cosmogonal themes in other spheres, to feel this faint jerk, which came to interrupt your dreams and link you to Nature again. It seemed as if I might next cast my line upward into the air, as well as downward into this element, which was scarcely more dense. Thus I caught two fishes as it were with one hook.

Henry David Thoreau

It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.

John Wooden

Spinning straw into gold is not just a pretty phrase or an image from a fanciful tale but is a real activity.

Deena Metzger

A new character has come on the scene. I am sure I did not invent him, I did not even want him, but there he came walking through the woods of Ithilien.

J.R.R. Tolkien

I think it was the fact that I liked it so much that made the writing just come out of me automatically.

James Herriot

I haven’t much opinion of words. They’re apt to set fire to a dry tongue, that’s what I say.

Ellen Glasgow

We cannot write well or truly but what we write with gusto.

Henry David Thoreau

I love all men who dive. Any fish can swim near the surface, but it takes a great whale to go downstairs five miles or more.

Herman Melville

We know what a person thinks not when he tells us what he thinks, but by his actions.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way round, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise.

Adolph Hitler

I hope that after I die, people will say of me: “That guy sure owed me a lot of money.”

Jack Handy

Words are only painted fire; a look is the fire itself.

Mark Twain

A story is: the king died, the queen died. A plot is: the king died, the queen died of grief.

E. M. Forster

How every fool can play upon the word!

William Shakespeare

Originality does not consist in saying what no one has ever said before, but in saying exactly what you think yourself.

James Stephen

If you do not tell the truth about yourself, you can’t tell it about other people.

Virginia Woolf

Thinking is linking.

P. L. Travers

The secret of being tiresome is in telling everything.

Voltaire

There are three necessary elements in a story – exposition, development, and drama. Exposition we may illustrate as “John Fortescue was a solicitor in the little town of X”; development as “One day Mrs Fortescue told him she was about to leave him for another man”; and drama as “You will do nothing of the kind,” he said.

Frank O’Connor

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

Mark Twain

Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.

Friedrich Nietzsche

A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.

Franz Kafka

The only rules comedy can tolerate are those of taste, and the only limitations those of libel.

James Thurber

A book is so much a part of oneself that in delivering it to the public one feels as if one were pushing one’s own child out into the traffic.

Quentin Bell

A fool is agog at every word.

Heraclitus

In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood.

Ursula K. Le Guin

A ship is safe in harbor, but that’s not what ships are for.

John Shedd

There are no classes in life for beginners; right away you are always asked to deal with what is most difficult.

Rainer Maria Rilke

It should consist of short, sharply focused sentences, each of which is a whole scene in itself.

Theodore Sturgeon

I may therefore venture to say that the air of reality seems to me to be the supreme virtue of the novel – the merit upon which all its other merits hopelessly and submissively depend. The cultivation of this success, the study of this exquisite process, form, to my taste, the beginning and the end of the art of the novelist.

Henry James

Honest criticism is hard to take, particularly from a relative, a friend, a teacher, an acquaintance, or a stranger.

Franklin Jones

You who write, choose a subject suited to your abilities and think long and hard on what your powers are equal to and what they are unable to perform.

Horace

I am not a cat man, but a dog man, and all felines can tell this at a glance – a sharp, vindictive glance.

James Thurber

He felt about books as doctors feel about medicines, or managers about plays – cynical, but hopeful.

Rose Macaulay

A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.

Lao Tzu

What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is only related to objects, and not to individuals, or to life.

Michel Foucault

You write to communicate to the hearts and minds of others what’s burning inside you. And we edit to let the fire show through the smoke.

Arthur Polotnik

I don’t believe in writers’ block. Plumbers don’t get plumbers’ block. Why should writing be the only profession that gives a special name to the difficulty of working?

Philip Pullman

Literature is all, or mostly, about sex.

Anthony Burgess

The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.

Linus Pauling

Writing is a solitary occupation. Family, friends, and society are the natural enemies of the writer. He must be alone, uninterrupted, and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking.

Jessamyn West

Study the rules so that you won’t beat yourself by not knowing something.

Babe Didricksen Zaharias

There is one story and one story only.

Robert Graves

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

William Faulkner

The things I want to express are so beautiful and pure.

M.C. Escher

Always write with the ear, not the eye. You should hear every sentence you write as if it was being read aloud or spoken.

C. S. Lewis

I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.

James A. Michener

I do like a little romance, just a sniff, as I call it, of the rocks and valleys. Of course, bread-and-cheese is the real thing. The rocks and valleys are no good at all, if you haven’t got that.

Anthony Trollope

Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.

Carl Jung

It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.

Douglas Adams

His words were simple words enough
And yet he used them so
That what in other mouths was rough
In his seemed musical and low.

James Russell Lowell

And by the way, everything in life is writable if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.

Sylvia Plath

The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.

Vladimir Nabakov

Becoming the reader is the essence of becoming a writer.

John O’Hara

Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking.

William Butler Yeats

A writer’s duty is to register what it is like to be in the world.

Zadie Smith

The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The beginning is always today.

Mary Wollstonecraft

I have a great deal of company in the house, especially in the morning when nobody calls.

Henry David Thoreau

I do not think I have ever prayed in words. I pray in conscious desire. I pray in concepts – concepts of whole ideas, not parts. I never go to sleep at night without consciously thinking that kind of prayer in which I express desire in whole ideas of what my day for the morrow must be. I do not weaken my prayer by trying to find words for it. I keep my desire strong by not thus dividing it into words or in parts. My prayers are communions, not conversations.

Walter Russell

Nothing builds confidence like accomplishment.

Thomas Carlyle

The Malabar Caves represented an area in which concentration can take place. A cavity. Something to focus everything up: to engender an event like an egg.

E. M. Forster

There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel.

Anthony Trollope

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.

Emily Dickinson

The words of truth are always paradoxical.

Lao Tzu

The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.

G. K. Chesterton

“Do you know,” Peter asked, “why swallows build in the eaves of houses? It is to listen to the stories.”

James M. Barrie

In a drama of the highest order there is little food for censure or hatred; it teaches rather self-knowledge and self-respect.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

The purpose of writing is to make your mother and father drop dead with shame.

J P Donleavy

The beautiful part of writing is that you don’t have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, brain surgery.

Robert Cormier

Contact with the larger story is imperative in order to gain wisdom and to restore those parts of ourselves that become amputated in a secular society.

Deena Metzger

I want story, wit, music, wryness, color, and a sense of reality in what I read, and I try to get it in what I write.

John D. MacDonald

Everything changes when you change.

Jim Rohn

The poet is a good citizen turned inside out.

William Butler Yeats

Dialogue in fiction is what characters do to one another.

Elizabeth Bowen

And this is the way a novel gets written, in ignorance, fear, sorrow, madness, and a kind of psychotic happiness as an incubator for the wonders being born.

Jack Kerouac

When we see a natural style we are quite amazed and delighted, because we expected to see an author and find a man.

Blaise Pascal

Better to write twaddle, anything, than nothing at all.

Katherine Mansfield

Start early and work hard. A writer’s apprenticeship usually involves writing a million words (which are then discarded) before he’s almost ready to begin. That takes a while.

David Eddings

You must push further and harder, reach deeper into your own mind until you break through into the strange and terrible country wherein live your own dreams.

Gardner Dozois

I have written a great many stories and I still don’t know how to go about it except to write it and take my chances.

John Steinbeck

The best way to become acquainted with a subject is to write a book about it.

Benjamin Disraeli

I, being poor, have only my dreams. I have spread my dreams under your feet. Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

William Butler Yeats

Insanity is the illusion you are wrong.

Verber Quimply

The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.

Will Rogers

A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.

Richard Bach

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.

Mark Twain

Save me the first dance in your dreams tonight.

Frank Sinatra

It is advantageous to an author that his book should be attacked as well as praised. Fame is a shuttlecock. If it be struck at one end of the room, it will soon fall to the ground. To keep it up, it must be struck at both ends.

Samuel Johnson

Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain.

Elie Wiesel

To see things in the seed, that is genius.

Lao Tzu

The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself.

James Thurber

I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.

Rainer Maria Rilke

I could just do the whole thing in one day but sadly my character had gone to bed at the end of the last scene.

Sandra Jensen

The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is you really want to say.

Mark Twain

There is no way of writing well and also of writing easily.

Anthony Trollope

When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away even if it’s only a glass of water.

Kurt Vonnegut

The greatest rules of dramatic writing are conflict, conflict, conflict.

James Frey

That which is above is from that which is below, and that which is below is from that which is above, working the miracles of one.

Hermes Trismegistus

Life is a long preparation for something that never happens.

William Butler Yeats

All the information you need can be given in dialogue.

Elmore Leonard

Anyone who believes you can’t change history has never tried to write his memoirs.

David Ben Gurion

There is no iron that can enter the human heart with such stupefying effect as a period placed at just the right moment.

Isaac Babel

All my life I’ve looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.

Ernest Hemingway

Perplexity is the beginning of knowledge.

Kahlil Gibran

Read almost any newspaper interview, and you’ll conclude that the dialogue of real people is more stilted and implausible than the dialogue of invented characters. Trying to make real people sound real on the page is necessarily an exercise in impressionism. Nothing teaches one the subtleties of punctuation so well as an attempt to take a skein of actual speech and restore to it the pauses, ellipses, switches of tone and speed, that it had in life.

Jonathan Raban

It is all very well to write books, but can you wiggle your ears?

James M. Barrie

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I suppose I’m one of those fellows my father always warned me against.

P. G. Wodehouse

Art is elimination of the unnecessary.

Waldo Salt

Make everybody fall out of the plane first, and then explain who they were and why they were in the plane to begin with.

Nancy Ann Dibble

A thousand words will not leave so deep an impression as one deed.

Henrik Ibsen

When the book comes out it may hurt you – but in order for me to do it, it had to hurt me first.

James Baldwin

The only important thing in a book is the meaning it has for you.

Somerset Maugham

Just because I don’t care doesn’t mean I don’t understand.

Homer Simpson

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

Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision.

Norman Mailer

Writers seldom write the things they think. They simply write the things they think other folks think they think.

Ethan Hubbard

When it came to my art, I went my own way and did not follow the trends.

Frank Frazetta

When I hear a man preach, I like to see him act as if he were fighting bees.

Abraham Lincoln

If you attack the establishment long enough and hard enough, they will make you a member of it.

Art Buchwald

Generally speaking, a howling wilderness does not howl: it is the imagination of the traveler that does the howling.

Henry David Thoreau

Kindness in words creates confidence.

Lao Tzu

Think before you speak, is criticism’s motto; speak before you think is creation’s.

E. M. Forster

If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don’t put it there.

Anton Chekhov

Out beyond ideas of wrong doing and right doing there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

Rumi

Whatever fortune brings, don’t be afraid of doing things.

Herman Melville

It is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception and compassion and hope.

Ursula K. Le Guin

There are few things, apparently, more helpful to a writer than having once been a weird little kid.

Katherine Paterson

So this is always the key: you have to write the book you love, the book that’s alive in your heart. That’s the one you have to write.

Lurleen McDaniel

How does one get to be a bit of a bee?

P. L. Travers

You cannot escape your own attitudes, for they will form the nature of what you see.

Jane Roberts

I was a free man in Paris.

Joni Mitchell

All great truths begin as blasphemies.

G. B. Shaw

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

Omar Khayyam

People die, but books never die.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

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

Albert Einstein

The blank page gives the right to dream.

Gaston Bachelard

The poet is the one who is able to keep the fresh vision of the child alive.

Anaïs Nin

A year from now you’ll wish you had started today.

Karen Lamb

In the room the women come and go talking of Michelangelo.

T. S. Eliot

Come Fairies, take me out of this dull world, for I would ride with you upon the wind and dance upon the mountains like a flame!

William Butler Yeats

We have it in our power to begin the world over again.

Thomas Paine

“Please,” she whispered as she opened the book, “please get me out of here just for an hour or so, please take me far, far away.”

Cornelia Funke

A note, by way of advising other Virginias with other books that this is the way of the thing: up down up down.

Virginia Woolf

A good writer refuses to be socialized. He insists on his own version of things, his own consciousness.

Bill Barich

Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on.

John Steinbeck

As I was walking among the fires of Hell, delighted with the enjoyments of Genius; which to Angels look like torment and insanity, I collected some of their Proverbs.

William Blake

Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places.

H. P. Lovecraft

I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.

Jack Kerouac

It takes an awful long time to not write a book.

Douglas Adams

Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a book.

Edward Gibbon

To be matter of fact about the world is to blunder into fantasy – and dull fantasy at that, as the real world is strange and wonderful.

Robert A. Heinlein

Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.

Carl Jung

Nothing will work unless you do.

Maya Angelou

The writer’s only responsibility is to his art.

William Faulkner

The most exciting happiness is the happiness generated by forces beyond your control.

Ogden Nash

The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.

William Blake

Writing is finally a series of permissions you give yourself to be expressive in certain ways. To invent. To leap. To fly. To fall. To be strict without being too self-excoriating. Not stopping too often to think it’s going well (or not too badly), simply to keep rowing along.

Susan Sontag

When in doubt, go to your where.

Viola Spolin

A great part of courage is the courage of having done the thing before.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ken yer inner body.

Shivas Irons

There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Nowadays men lead lives of noisy desperation.

James Thurber

Without knowing the force of words, it is impossible to know men.

Confucius

Hold a book in your hand and you’re a pilgrim at the gates of a new city.

Hebrew Saying

I wrote no words this day.

Lynda Carnes

Let the readers do some of the work themselves.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I sang of leaves, of leaves of gold,
and leaves of gold there grew.
Of wind I sang, a wind there came
and in the branches blew.

J.R.R. Tolkien

The use of point of view is to bring the reader into immediate and continuous contact with the heart of the story and sustain him there.

Tom Jenks

When I read it, I don’t wince, which is all I ever ask for a book I write.

Norman Mailer

I come from a family where gravy is considered a beverage.

Erma Bombeck

I love to doubt as well as know.

Dante Alighieri

To finish is a sadness to a writer – a little death. He puts the last word down and it is done. But it isn’t really done. The story goes on and leaves the writer behind, for no story is ever done.

John Steinbeck

The loveship of her Guardian was all she knew of men.

Bernice Ellis

A child of three once said to me, ‘I am two boys, Goodly and Badly.’ Alas, too young for this! I thought, but at the same time recalled that truth requires us to be young, no matter what our age. And then came the faltering, anxious question – ‘Which do you like best?’ I knew the answer, and all the breadth and depth of it, but had to appear to pay it mind. If I chose Goodly, then Badly would be in the wilderness, alone with his badliness and lost. If Badly, then Goodly would be in the same plight, alone with his goodliness. ‘Joy and woe are woven fine/A clothing for the soul divine.’ ‘To tell you the truth,’ I said gravely, ‘I like them both the same.’ The look of anxiety turned to relief and a trustful hand met mine.

Pamela Travers

Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you’ve got to say, and say it hot.

D. H. Lawrence

As for my next book, I am going to hold myself from writing it till I have it impending in me: grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall.

Virginia Woolf

The coroner will find ink in my veins and blood on my typewriter keys.

Astrid Weber

Don’t plan anything.
Write what comes up.
Give all the details.
Go fearward.
Don’t edit.

Barbara Turner-Vesselago

Did you ever stop to think, and forget to start again?

A. A. Milne

If a book is not alive in the writer’s mind, it is as dead as year-old horse-shit.

Stephen King

Draw your chair up close to the edge of the precipice and I’ll tell you a story.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

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

W. D. Wetherell

The writer is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do.

Donald Barthelme

I feel a kind of reverence for the first books of young authors. There is so much aspiration in them, so much audacious hope and trembling fear, so much of the heart’s history, that all errors and shortcomings are for a while lost sight of in the amiable self-assertion of youth.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Problems in writing can come unknotted in a miraculous way after a nap. I go to sleep with the problem, and wake up with the answer.

Patricia Highsmith

All good ideas arrive by chance.

Max Ernst

Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can’t forgive.

Salman Rushdie

Sometimes if I’m stuck for a word I just put X – easy to search for later when I come to edit.

Sandra Jensen

There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions.

Martha Graham

Liberty doesn’t work as well in practice as it does in speeches.

Will Rogers

Smell is a potent wizard that transports us across thousands of miles and all the years we have lived.

Helen Keller

You have to write whichever book it is that wants to be written. And then, if it’s going to be too difficult for grown-ups, you write it for children.

Madeleine L’Engle

We shall see that at which dogs howl in the dark.

H. P. Lovecraft

If this is coffee, please bring me some tea; but if this is tea, please bring me some coffee.

Abraham Lincoln

Take, if you must, this little bag of dreams,
Unloose the cord, and they will wrap you round.

William Butler Yeats

There’s nothing more empty than a life devoted to leisure.

George Hamilton

Words are also actions, and actions are a kind of words.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret of style.

Matthew Arnold

I think “taste” is a social concept, not an artistic one. Our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another’s brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.

John Updike

Always behave as though tomorrow is the day.

Buck Henry

You can’t try to do things; you simply must do them.

Ray Bradbury

Something was swinging from a slightly bowed branch.

Michelle Bidwell

You can do whatever you want through imagination and characters when writing fiction. Anything.

Michael Swerdloff

Plain words are special to me.

Bernice Ellis

I am starting to fall in love with Quinlan. It’s going to suck when I have to kill him.

Leigh-Anne Tyson

Says the God of Art: I shall give you hunger, and pain, and sleepless nights. Also beauty, and satisfactions known to few, and glimpses of the heavenly life. None of these you shall have continually, and of their comings and goings you shall not be foretold.

Howard Lindsay

I’m dying to get into some action.

Sandra Jensen

Every time I sit down, someone else is speaking.

Jody Strimling-Muchow

Creativity means that I access.

Jeanne Beauchamp Adwani

Nature never breaks her own laws.

Leonardo da Vinci

The process of delving into the black abyss is to me the keenest form of fascination.

H. P. Lovecraft

Pay no attention to what the critics say; there has never yet been set up a statue in honor of a critic.

Jean Sibelius

Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite:
‘Fool!’ said my Muse to me, ‘look to thy heart and write.’

Sir Philip Sidney

I am bigger than the spider.

Bernice Ellis

The story will only go as far as the author will allow it.

Michael Swerdloff

Fiction is about stuff that’s screwed up.

Nancy Kress

Satan, really, is the romantic youth of Jesus re-appearing for a moment.

James Joyce

I am a man, and alive. For this reason I am a novelist.

D.H. Lawrence

I’m trying not to wonder because if I wonder too much, doubt may take over and then I’ll never get it done.

Andrea Mauk

Never tell your reader what your story is about. Reading is a participatory sport.

George V. Higgins

Exuberance is beauty.

William Blake

I want to leap into a new future for myself.

Bernice Ellis

Forget absolutely everything you thought you were or are going to do. Just write – whatever – and count the words.

Gabriele Stehle

He was white and shaken, like a dry martini.

P. G. Wodehouse

Love is what you’ve been through with somebody.

James Thurber

It’s about keeping technique from interrupting the creative process.

Kellie Hall

Swallowing All whole, cleansing through Perfection, I hear the grass grow, I am One with the rodent’s heartbeat. In the bliss of Eleven, I die of the roar which lies on the other side of silence, becoming One with that Silence, Om.

Claire Born

Go for dialogue.

Sandra Jensen

Probably morning is best for me.

Jenni Sulkow

I tumble together to a mound, unable to concern myself.

Pirjo Zeylon

Who knows what spawn can spring from such lunatic loins of evil?

Herbunger Vladstaff

A woman is the only thing I am afraid of that I know will not hurt me.

Abraham Lincoln

Think where man’s glory most begins and ends and say my glory was I had such friends.

William Butler Yeats

Standing at the edge of the cliff and helping others leap is easier than leaping.

Michael Swerdloff

It’s like the novel is writing itself.

Jody Strimling-Muchow

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

I am an actor at heart. I just acted out my story and then wrote it down.

Mame Burkett

Can we really heal and forgive if we don’t see both roles in a play as one?

Pirjo Zeylon

How you do anything is how you do everything.

Zen proverb

They just discovered the windshield was covered in butterfly wings.

Leigh-Anne Tyson

Chronology plays no part in what I’ve written to date.

Lindsay McLeod Espinoza

Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money.

Jules Renard

The trade of authorship is a violent and indestructible obsession.

George Sand

One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you’re maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones.

Stephen King

I want my novel.

Bernice Ellis

If I get out of the way, much happens.

Michael Swerdloff

English usage is sometimes more than mere taste, judgment and education – sometimes it’s sheer luck, like getting across the street.

E. B. White

Pot of tea – check. Raining outside – check.

Leigh-Anne Tyson

I’m not surprised that you are falling in love with Mr. Big.

Michelle Bidwell

One word at a time. That’s the only way to write the elephant.

Jody Strimling-Muchow

Keep in mind that the person to write for is yourself. Tell the story that you most desperately want to read.

Susan Isaacs

The rule of the writer is not to say what we can say but what we are unable to say.

Anaïs Nin

I always write a good first line, but I have trouble in writing the others.

Molière

I began to love her in my dreams.

Michelle Bidwell

The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.

Friedrich Nietzsche

If you want to be successful, it’s just this simple. Know what you are doing. Love what you are doing. And believe in what you are doing.

Will Rogers

Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose-petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for an echo.

Don Marquis

A man is a writer if all his words are strung in definite sentence sounds.

Marianne Moore

I have your review in front of me and soon it will be behind me.

George Bernard Shaw

She was drunk and broke her toe.

Sandra Jensen

In America few people will trust you unless you are irreverent.

Norman Mailer

Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Resistance, what are you supporting in me?

Bernice Ellis

Music in the soul can be heard by the universe.

Lao Tzu

When a book leaves your hands, it belongs to God. He may use it to save a few souls or to try a few others, but I think that for the writer to worry is to take over God’s business.

Flannery O’Connor

If 12 is a circle then 13 is the spiral when the circle is opened.

Lindsay McLeod Espinoza

It’s better to write about things you feel than about things you know about.

L. P. Hartley

Give them pleasure. The same pleasure they have when they wake up from a nightmare.

Alfred Hitchcock

I can hardly wait for November to start.

Gabriele Stehle

The reason for evil in the world is that people are not able to tell their stories.

Carl Gustav Jung

To listen with everything that I am
For the low sweet tones
Of the coming night
In the last rays of golden sunlight
My heart wanders in the lines and curves
Of the branches overhead
Among the leaves now opened wide
In this moment’s expression
Leaning against the worn trunk
I watch the deepening sky
Spread out like the palm of my hand
Silence courts the field
Even the birds have found stillness
As the stars emerge with their inky partners
To dance to the moon’s song
I find under the cover of oak and evening
My heart emptied out and cradled
In hopes and dreams just imagined
And I realize I have been holding my breath
Waiting for this moment to become

Leigh-Anne Tyson

What is now proved was once only imagined.

William Blake

Pictures must not be too picturesque.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I love talking about nothing. It is the only thing I know anything about.

Oscar Wilde

The last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the right deed for the wrong reason.

T. S. Eliot

The writing in itself is still literally crap, but I can make it hit like a sledgehammer when I can go back and put all my love and all my heart in.

Pirjo Zeylon

The best method for writing is to do it.

Michael Swerdloff

There is no safety in numbers, or in anything else.

James Thurber

Truly to sing, that is a different breath.

Rainer Maria Rilke

I just wrote.

Leigh-Anne Tyson

Reading is a sort of rewriting.

Jean-Paul Sartre

It’s that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that’s what the poet does.

Allen Ginsberg

So I’ll stick by this fonting thing.

Sandra Jensen

Apple seed learned me something.

Bernice Ellis

You must learn to overcome your very natural and appropriate revulsion for your own work.

William Gibson

My right foot is in a cast for the second time this year...don’t ask.

Jody Strimling-Muchow

Ink on paper is as beautiful to me as flowers on the mountains; God composes, why shouldn’t we?

Audra Foveo-Alba

i never think at all when i write
nobody can do two things at the same time
and do them both well

Archy

Suck it in and live it my love, suck it in and live it. We are writers now and there is no turning back.

Bernice Ellis

I am inclined to think that as I grow older I will come to be infatuated with the art of revision, and there may come a time when I will dread giving up a novel at all.

Joyce Carol Oates

Now I can smell it too, the cunning 50.

Pirjo Zeylon

Sometimes I feel like a writer.

Michael Swerdloff

My work is to shatter the faith of men here, there, and everywhere, faith in affirmation, faith in negation, and faith in abstention from faith, and this for the sake of faith in faith itself.

Miguel de Unamuno

I don’t wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that. Your mind must know it has got to get down to work.

Pearl S. Buck

Are all your stars shining?

J. D. Salinger

You tend to explain too much. You must explain, but your tendency is to distrust your own narrative and dialogue.

Maxwell Perkins

How often we recall, with regret, that Napoleon once shot at a magazine editor and missed him and killed a publisher. But we remember with charity that his intentions were good.

Mark Twain

Motivation is when your dreams put on work clothes.

Benjamin Franklin

I have this day – shall I make it count?

Pirjo Zeylon

Freefall is an extraordinary process, one which has turned many from “I want to be a writer” to being writers.

Sandra Jensen

It has made me the gunman who does not hesitate to draw. I can draw now, anytime.

Pirjo Zeylon

Life can’t ever really defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer’s lover until death – fascinating, cruel, lavish, warm, cold, treacherous, constant.

Edna Ferber

Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life.

Robert Louis Stevenson

Art is not a handicraft. It is the transmission of a feeling which the artist has experienced.

Leo Tolstoy

If you haven’t got an idea, start a story anyway. You can always throw it away, and maybe by the time you get to the fourth page you will have an idea, and you’ll only have to throw away the first three pages.

William Campbell Gault

When you take stuff from one writer, it’s plagiarism; but when you take it from many writers, it’s research.

William Mizner

The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it.

Elizabeth Drew

The big secret is the ability to stay in the room.

Ron Carlson

Things in motion sooner catch the eye than what not stirs.

William Shakespeare

May I die like a dog rather than hasten the ripening of a sentence by a single second.

Gustave Flaubert

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

Edwin Schlossberg

Writing is a crummy profession, but a good hobby.

Paavo Haavikko

In good writing, words become one with things.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Novelty disturbs and repels.

Simone de Beauvoir

To my dear children, without whose constant love and affection this book would have been finished in half the time.

P. G. Wodehouse

That’s one thing literature can do for us. It can say to us: pay attention. Pay closer attention.

Richard Ford

Why do people always expect authors to answer questions? I am an author because I want to ask questions. If I had answers, I’d be a politician.

Eugene Ionesco

Take care of the sounds, and the sense will take care of itself.

Lewis Carroll

Since when was genius found respectable?

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

When I was sitting writing The Shadow of the Glen I got more aid than any learning would have given me, from a chink in the floor that let me hear what was being said by the servant girls in the kitchen.

J. M. Synge

Always do what you are afraid to do.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness.

James Thurber

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams.

Henry David Thoreau

You have to do your own growing no matter how tall your grandfather was.

Abraham Lincoln

I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.

William Blake

In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman.

Sinclair Lewis

The subject of all this is not two camels. There is only one lost camel, but language has difficulty saying that.

Rumi

An old racetrack joke reminds you that your program contains all the winners’ names. I stare at my typewriter keys with the same thought.

Mignon McLaughlin

Writers don’t need love; all they require is money.

John Osborne

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

If you look at anything long enough, say just that wall in front of you – it will come out of that wall.

Anton Chekhov

Remarks are not literature.

Gertrude Stein

Yes there is a meaning; at least for me, there is one thing that matters – to set a chime of words tinkling in the minds of a few fastidious people.

Logan Pearsall Smith

Make the drummer sound good.

Steve Lacy

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

C. S. Lewis

Follow the path of your aroused thought, and you will soon meet this infernal inscription: There is nothing so beautiful as that which does not exist.

Paul Valery

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

My entire soul is a cry, and all my work is a commentary on that cry.

Nikos Kazantzakis

Perspective is key.

Lindsay McLeod Espinoza

From the moment I picked up your book till I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend reading it.

Groucho Marx

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

To write simply is as difficult as to be good.

W. Somerset Maugham

There are two ways of speaking an audience will always like – one is to tell them what they don’t understand; and the other is to tell them what they’re used to.

George Eliot

There’s more of yourself in a book than a play. Ben Jonson murdered people; Marlowe was a spy; Shakespeare just sat in the corner and took notes.

Sir John Mortimer

“That,” I replied cordially, “is what it doesn’t do anything else but.”

P. G. Wodehouse

It takes two to speak the truth: one to speak, and another to hear.

Henry David Thoreau

An economist is a man who knows a hundred ways of making love but doesn’t know any women.

Art Buchwald

Always be ready to speak your mind, and a base man will avoid you.

William Blake

A wounded deer leaps the highest.

Emily Dickinson

Let me walk through the fields of paper, touching with my wand dry stems and stunted butterflies.

Denise Levertov

If I fall asleep with a pen in my hand, don’t remove it – I might be writing in my dreams.

Danzae Pace

My relatives say that they are glad I’m rich, but that they simply cannot read me.

Kurt Vonnegut

For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional sincerity.

George Orwell

No, it’s not a very good story – its author was too busy listening to other voices to listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside.

Stephen King

The ideal view for daily writing, hour for hour, is the blank brick wall of a cold-storage warehouse. Failing this, a stretch of sky will do, cloudless if possible.

Edna Ferber

When you catch an adjective, kill it.

Mark Twain

Love and doubt have never been on speaking terms.

Kahlil Gibran

These critics who crucify me do not guess the littlest part of my sincerity. They must be burned in a blaze. I cannot learn from them.

Zane Grey

Mere literary talent is common; what is rare is endurance, the continuing desire to work hard at writing.

Donald Hall

Teaching writing is a hustle.

Cormac McCarthy

Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books, but lives in our very blood?

Carl Jung

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 Bernstein

Every word written is a victory against death.

Michel Butor

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

George Bernard Shaw

I hope you love birds too. It is economical. It saves going to heaven.

Emily Dickinson

Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.

Natalie Goldberg

Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work.

Carl Sandburg

Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new at all.

Abraham Lincoln

Hope is the thing with feathers, that perches in the soul and sings the tune without words, and never stops at all.

Emily Dickinson

Out of a seeming void and dark-winged sleep
Of dim inconscient infinity
A Power arose from the insentient deep,
A flame-whirl of magician Energy.

Sri Aurobindo

What would there be in a story of happiness? Only what prepares it, only what destroys it can be told.

André Gide

Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.

Salman Rushdie

To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.

Herman Melville

It is personalities not principles that move the age.

Oscar Wilde

You have to know the human heart.

Thom Jones

Rule one of reading other people’s stories is that whenever you say ‘well that’s not convincing’ the author tells you that’s the bit that wasn’t made up.

Neil Gaiman

Better is the enemy of good.

Voltaire

New writers are often told, “Write what you know.” I would broaden that by saying, “Write what you know emotionally.”

Marjorie Franco

One of the few things I know about writing is this: Spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book – give it, give it all, give it now. Some more will arise for later, something better. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.

Annie Dillard

Books are fatal: they are the curse of the human race. Nine-tenths of existing books are nonsense, and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense. The greatest misfortune that ever befell man was the invention of printing.

Benjamin Disraeli

The fool who persists in his folly will become wise.

William Blake

I’m nobody, who are you?

Emily Dickinson

America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up.

Oscar Wilde

I am tired. My arm aches. My head boils. My feet are cold. But I am not aware of any weakness.

Zane Grey

A man of knowledge lives by acting, not by thinking about acting.

Carlos Castaneda

Watch where you dive, there are rocks where you cannot see them, they can bruise and break your bones without warning. They can also shake off the old layers of skin and fat that are not necessary nor supportive of your journey as writer, friend, lover, or human. So dive, and then dive again and again. The waters are healing and fresh. Go ahead and dive with your eyes closed but open. Dive deeper. The force of the river will carry you to your destination clean, scraped, and scrubbed. Dive deeper.

Michael Swerdloff

You possess a fearsome array of skills and abilities, and the most satisfying of these may be completely unknown to you now.

Chris Baty

I have traveled a path and followed a thought and it has all supported me in my unfolding.

Bernice Ellis

Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.

Franz Kafka

Books want to be born: I never make them.

Samuel Butler

A book is one of the few havens remaining where your mind can get both provocation and privacy.

Edward P. Morgan

Work is love made visible.

Kahlil Gibran

When you exclude plot, when you exclude anyone’s wanting anything, you exclude the reader, which is a mean-spirited thing to do.

Kurt Vonnegut

In a good play, everyone is in the right.

Fredrich Hebbel

By writing much, one learns to write well.

Robert Southey

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.

William Wordsworth

The only need is the eye to see.

Willa Cather

One day, we were like this first man in the great, stridulant night of the Oyapock. The skin of the world was very vast. To be a man after rediscovering a million years was mysteriously like being something still other than man, a strange, unfinished possibility that could also be all kinds of other things.

Satprem

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

Elbert Hubbard

“The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.”

Oscar Wilde

Don’t sweat the petty things, and don’t pet the sweaty things.

Groucho Marx

The last words I write of a book are very often the first, so it doesn’t much matter how you start.

Raymond Hill

The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who’ll get me a book I ain’t read.

Abraham Lincoln

I’m normally not a praying man, but if you’re up there, please save me Superman.

Homer Simpson

Remember tonight, for it is the beginning of always.

Dante Alighieri

The central problem of novel-writing is causality.

Jorge Luis Borges

While the laughter of joy is in full harmony with our deeper life, the laughter of amusement should be kept apart from it. The danger is too great of thus learning to look at solemn things in a spirit of mockery, and to seek in them opportunities for exercising wit.

Lewis Carroll

Write a page a day. It will add up.

Herman Wouk

I must go deeper and even stronger into my treasure mine and stint nothing of time, toil, or torture.

Zane Grey

Write from the soul. The market is fickle; the soul is eternal.

Jeffrey A. Carver

There are four stages in a marriage. First there’s the affair, then the marriage, then children and finally the fourth stage, without which you cannot know a woman, the divorce.

Norman Mailer

The only business of the head in the world is to bow a ceaseless obeisance to the heart.

William Butler Yeats

Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests, and mines, and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.

Ezra Pound

I have given up reading books; I find it takes my mind off myself.

Oscar Levant

Dream as if you’ll live forever. Live as if you’ll die today.

James Dean

Dancing in all its forms cannot be excluded from the curriculum of all noble education; dancing with the feet, with ideas, with words, and, need I add that one must also be able to dance with the pen?

Friedrich Nietzsche

What’s the product that is imbued with the most value, and the most meaning, and is the most important thing in the world? Without a doubt, that is books.

Emma Barnes

Self-confidence can be crippling.

Leonard Michaels

All good books will eventually find a publisher if the writer tries hard enough, and a central secret to writing a good book is to write on that which people like you will enjoy. Write what you care about and understand.

Richard North Patterson

No tale tells all.

Alexei Panshin

I always write about my own experiences, whether I’ve had them or not.

Ron Carlson

‘It is only a woman’s cookery, to be sure,’ he said, toying with a chocolate mousse, ‘and I do not know that I should trust her with game, but within these wide limits, how very good it is! She must be a knowing old soul, with great experience, no doubt in excellent service before the Revolution. Perhaps something of a slut: your amiable slut makes the best of cooks.’

Patrick O’Brian

Detail is the lifeblood of fiction.

John Gardner

There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry.

Mark Strand

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

James Baldwin

There fell into my hands a gilded book, very old and large, which cost me only two florins. It was not made of paper or parchment as other books are, but of admirable rinds, as it seemed to me, of young trees. The book contained thrice seven leaves, so numbered at the top of each folio, every seventh leaf having painted images and figures instead of writing. On the first of these seven leaves there was depicted a virgin who was being swallowed by serpents; on the second a Cross upon which a serpent was crucified; on the last a wilderness watered by many fair fountains, out of which came a number of serpents.

Nicholas Flamel

When people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what’s wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.

Neil Gaiman

In brief, I spend half my time trying to learn the secrets of other writers – to apply them to the expression of my own thoughts.

Shirley Ann Grau

The art of fiction is freedom of will for your characters.

Cynthia Ozick

Kids, you tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is, never try.

Homer Simpson

A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.

Henry David Thoreau

Finite to fail, but infinite to venture.

Emily Dickinson

Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer’s role is almost superfluous. He does not need to invent the fiction because it is already there.

J. G. Ballard

The doer alone learneth.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Beauty awakens the soul to act.

Dante Alighieri

No woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It seems so calculating.

Oscar Wilde

Peace goes into the making of a poem as flour goes into the making of bread.

Pablo Neruda

The difference between a bad artist and a good one is: the bad artist seems to copy a great deal; the good one really does.

William Blake

God wasn’t too bad a novelist, except he was a Realist.

John Barth

He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying.

Friedrich Nietzsche

I don’t know exactly how it’s done. I let it alone a good deal.

Saul Bellow

Step off assuredly into the blank of your mind. Something will come to you.

Richard Wilbur

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

Quantity produces quality. If you only write a few things, you’re doomed.

Ray Bradbury

Style, like the human body, is especially beautiful when the veins are not prominent and the bones cannot be counted.

Tacitus

The unconscious mind has a habit of asserting itself in the afternoon.

Anthony Burgess

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

Loafing is the most productive part of a writer’s life.

James Norman Hall

As regards plot I find real life no help at all. Real life seems to have no plots. And as I think a plot desirable and almost necessary, I have this extra grudge against life.

Ivy Compton-Burnett

Poets are interested mostly in death and commas.

Carolyn Kizer

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

George Eliot

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.

Phyllis A. Whitney

Rejection slips, or form letters, however tactfully phrased, are lacerations of the soul, if not quite inventions of the devil – but there is no way around them.

Isaac Asimov

An essential element for good writing is a good ear.

Barbara Tuchman

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

Stephen King

I wrote a few children’s books – not on purpose.

Steven Wright

Death of the Father would deprive literature of many of its pleasures. If there is no longer a Father, why tell stories? Doesn’t every narrative lead back to Oedipus? Isn’t storytelling always a way of searching for one’s origin, speaking one’s conflicts with the Law, entering into the dialectic of tenderness and hatred?

Roland Barthes

No tale is so good but can be spoilt in the telling.

Terence

If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough.

Meister Eckhart

Storytelling reveals meaning without defining it.

Hannah Arendt

There’s a certain Slant of light, Winter Afternoons
That oppresses, like the Heft Of Cathedral Tunes.

Emily Dickinson

Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.

Jorge Luis Borges

Without music, life would be a mistake.

Friedrich Nietzsche

All difficult things have their origin in that which is easy, and great things in that which is small.

Lao Tzu

He that composes himself is wiser than he that composes a book.

Benjamin Franklin

You have no enemy except yourselves.

St. Francis of Assisi

The function of muscle is to pull and not to push, except in the case of the genitals and the tongue.

Leonardo da Vinci

I’ve always wondered if there was a god. And now I know there is – and it’s me.

Homer Simpson

It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.

Lewis Carroll

In a very real sense, the writer writes in order to teach himself, to understand himself, and to satisfy himself; the publishing of his ideas, though it brings satisfactions, is a curious anticlimax.

Alfred Kazin

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.

Henry David Thoreau

Humour is the kindly contemplation of the incongruous.

P. G. Wodehouse

Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Technique alone is never enough. You have to have passion. Technique alone is just an embroidered potholder.

Raymond Chandler

Screenwriters? Schmucks with Underwoods.

Jack Warner

If a man loves the labour of his trade, apart from any question of success or fame, the gods have called him.

Robert Louis Stevenson

Have the courage to write whatever your dream is for yourself.

May Sarton

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man,
Down to a sunless sea.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

If you want to lose your faith, make friends with a priest.

G. I. Gurdjieff

They declaim against the passions without bothering to think that it is from their flame philosophy lights its torch.

Marquis de Sade

Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul.

W. Somerset Maugham

What is a epigram? A dwarfish whole. Its body brevity, and wit its soul.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

There are things known, there are things unknown, in between are doors.

Jim Morrison

Everything popular is wrong.

Oscar Wilde

During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher.

Edgar Allen Poe

Never confuse movement with action.

Ernest Hemingway

To be a well-favoured man is the gift of fortune; but to write and read comes by nature.

William Shakespeare

I have one major rule: everybody is right.

Ken Wilber

A writer needs to be doubtful, questioning. I write out of curiousity and bewilderment.

William Trevor

The human race is the basis on which heaven is founded.

Emanuel Swedenborg

An author, like any other so-called artist, is a man in whom the normal vanity of all men is so vastly exaggerated that he finds it a sheer impossibility to hold it in. His over-powering impulse is to gyrate before his fellow men, flapping his wings and emitting defiant howls. This being forbidden by the police of all civilized nations, he takes it out by putting his howls on paper. Such is the thing called self-expression.

H. L. Mencken

It is meaningless to complain. What’s important from this point on is the strategy of your life.

Carlos Castaneda

Writing is both mask and unveiling.

E. B. White

Every novel is an equal collaboration between the writer and the reader and it is the only place in the world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy.

Paul Auster

Only write from your own passion, your own truth. That’s the only thing you really know about, and anything else leads you away from the pulse.

Marianne Williamson

First, find out what your hero wants, then just follow him!

Ray Bradbury

The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.

Mary Heaton Vorse

Someone who claims to write with emotion recollected in tranquility is a fool and a liar. To understand is to tremble. To recollect is to re-enter and be riven. I admire the authority of being on one’s knees in front of the event.

Harold Brodkey

An author is a fool who, not content with boring those he lives with, insists on boring future generations.

Charles de Montesquieu

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

Ursula K. LeGuin

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

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.

Anaïs Nin

Artists and poets must find the light in which they can find themselves.

Frances Kelly

I try to envision the story as a silent movie before I start adding dialogue.

John Sayles

Character is the very life of fiction. Setting exists so that the character has someplace to stand. Plot exists so the character can discover what he is really like, forcing the character to choice and action. And theme exists only to make the character stand up and be somebody.

John Gardner

If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things.

Henry David Thoreau

It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Will cannot be quenched against its will.

Dante Alighieri

When I do good, I feel good. When I do bad, I feel bad. That’s my religion.

Abraham Lincoln

Words cannot express things;
Speech does not convey the spirit.
Swayed by words, one is lost;
Blocked by phrases, one is bewildered.
The oak tree in the garden.
Once you see it, dreams fade away.

Mumon

The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.

W. Somerset Maugham

The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

They do not grasp how being at variance it agrees with itself, a backward-turning adjustment like that of the bow or lyre.

Heraclitus

“It’s money and adventure and fame! It’s the thrill of a lifetime and a long sea voyage that starts at six o’clock tomorrow!”

James Creelman and Ruth Rose

Unless you enter the tiger’s den, you cannot take the cubs.

Japanese proverb

Why is language most efficacious when it says one thing through meaning another?

Jacques Lacan

abracadabraabracadabra
bracadabraabracadabr
racadabraabracadab
acadabraabracada
cadabraabracad
adabraabraca
dabraabrac
abraabra
braabr
raab
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Unknown

To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.

Anthony Burgess

If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.

William Blake

Trouble shadows the Home Tribe. You hear its call. The land is barren, and someone must go beyond. A figure emerges from the campfire smoke, an elder pointing to you. You have been chosen as Seeker. You will venture your life so the greater life of the Home Tribe may go on.

Christopher Vogler

The “path” comes into existence only when we observe it.

Heisenberg

Goose, n. A bird that supplies quills for writing. These when inked and drawn mechanically across paper by a person called an “author,” there results a very fair and accurate transcript of the fowl’s thought and feeling.

Ambrose Bierce

A writer never has a vacation. For a writer life consists of either writing or thinking about writing.

Eugene Ionesco

A novelist is a person who lives in other people’s skins.

E. L. Doctorow

Every word born of an inner necessity.

Etty Hillesum

Give me books, fruit, French wine and fine weather, and a little music out of doors, played by somebody I do not know.

John Keats

A novel should be an experience and convey an emotional truth rather than arguments.

Joyce Cary

I am irritated by my own writing.

Gustave Flaubert

The secret of successful fiction is a continual slight novelty.

Edmund Gosse

The writer must have a more than ordinary capacity for life.

Paul Engle

Our high respect for a well-read person is praise enough for literature.

T. S. Eliot

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where ox-lips and the nodding violet grows;
Quite o’er-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine:
There sleeps Titania, sometime of the night,
Lulled in these flowers with dances and delight.

William Shakespeare

There’s no such thing beneath the heavens as conditions favorable to art. Art must crash through or perish.

Sylvia Ashton-Warner

The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones.

Joseph Joubert

The fact is that all time is simultaneous. In a simultaneous time, punishment makes no sense. The punishment as an event and the event for which you are being punished exist at once; and since there is no past, present and future, you could just as well say that the punishment came first.

Seth

Humbly receiving death and life, to hell I release all claim, and with new eyes see my eternal love – leaving.

Miguel Angel Ruiz

Plagiarists are always suspicious of being stolen from.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.

Benjamin Franklin

Publication is the auction of the Mind of Man.

Emily Dickinson

People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.

Logan Pearsall Smith

Read a lot, finding out what kind of writing turns you on, in order to develop a criterion for your own writing. And then trust it – and yourself.

Rosemary Daniell

Bring all your intelligence to bear on your beginning.

Elizabeth Bowen

There are some books that refuse to be written. There is only one right form for a story and if you fail to find that form the story will not tell itself.

Mark Twain

Load every rift with ore.

John Keats

Literature is the rediscovery of childhood.

Georges Bataille

The discipline of the writer is to learn to be still and listen to what his subject has to tell him.

Rachel Carson

A man’s work is nothing but the slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.

Albert Camus

Not knowing when the dawn will come I open every door.

Emily Dickinson

Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.

Dr Samuel Johnson

Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Any life is made up of a single moment, the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.

Jorge Luis Borges

He who obtains has little. He who scatters has much.

Lao Tzu

Some of the worst mistakes of my life have been haircuts.

Jim Morrison

One doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.

André Gide

Anyone can tell the truth, but only very few of us can make epigrams.

W. Somerset Maugham

My language is the common prostitute that I turn into a virgin.

Karl Kraus

When you start, the world of publishing seems like a great cathedral citadel of talent, resisting attempts to let you inside. It isn’t like that at all. It may be more difficult now, and take longer than when I started to write, but there’s a great, empty warehouse out there looking for simple talent.

Alan Garner

There are times when quantity is at least as important as quality in learning an art.

Lawrence Watt-Evans

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

Thomas Jefferson

Every story would be another story, and unrecognizable if it took up its characters and plot and happened somewhere else. Fiction depends for its life on place. Place is the crossroads of circumstance, the proving ground of, What happened? Who’s here? Who’s coming?

Eudora Welty

Whether a party can have much success without a woman present I must ask others to decide, but one thing is certain, no party is any fun unless seasoned with folly.

Erasmus

There are worse crimes than burning books. One is not reading them.

Joseph Brodsky

If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud.

Emile Zola

Even though stories abound in my culture, we have no word for fiction. The only way I could get across the Western concept of fiction was to associate fiction with telling lies.

Malidoma Patrick Some

It is always how to write truly and having found what is true, to project it is such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it.

Ernest Hemingway

Energy is eternal delight.

William Blake

You’re only as young as the last time you changed your mind.

Timothy Leary

A full tide and a warm wind,
A wish to set my home,
If freedom dreamed belongs to me,
It sails upon the foam.
Child of the extremes,
You learn the lessons slow,
You cover many traveled turns
And build the unclaimed road.
A path taught to me yesterday
May still inside me glow,
But farther out upon the way
A footstep never shows.

Scott Jeffries

Where we go now is new.

Bernice Ellis

Learning is also important for the warrior in times of peace.

Budoshoshinshu

The brain has a tendency toward chronic blaming.

Dr. Paul Pearsall

If you have men who will exclude any of God’s creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you have men who will deal likewise with their fellow man.

St. Francis of Assisi

Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.

James Joyce

A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Imagine

Create

Become

Leigh-Anne Tyson

Waste my heart on fear no more.

John O’Donohue

It’s a delicious thing to write. To be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating.

Gustave Flaubert

These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves.

Gilbert Highet

Why dance the praise? So the words can be formed in the motion of the body. So the spirit emerges from the very cauldron, the heat and fire of the self. For the reason that some writers always use a pen for various drafts, rather than a machine, the better to feel the physical intimacy of the event of writing.

Deena Metzger

Beliefs may need to be restructured rather than denied.

Jane Roberts

It is written on the arched sky; it looks out from every star. It is the poetry of Nature; it is that which uplifts the spirit within us.

John Ruskin

I would rather be ashes than dust.

Jack London

When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.

Mark Twain

The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected.

W. Somerset Maugham

A man will turn over half a library to make one book.

Samuel Johnson

You have all the scenes. Just go home and word it in.

Samuel Goldwyn

The job of the critic is to report to us his moods.

Oscar Wilde

Good prose is like a windowpane.

George Orwell

What the font?

Leigh-Anne Tyson

The principles of Truth are Seven; he who knows them possesses the magic key before whose touch all doors of the temple fly open.

The Kybalion

Who is more real? Homer or Ulysses? Shakespeare or Hamlet? Burroughs or Tarzan?

Robert A. Heinlein

There’s no secret to success. Did you ever know a successful man who didn’t tell you all about it?

Kin Hubbard

I stake my destiny upon hours of uninterrupted work.

Charles Baudelaire

The pageant of the riverbank had marched steadily along. Purple loosestrife arrived early, shaking luxuriant tangled locks along the edge of the mirror whence its own face laughed back at it. Willow-herb, tender and wistful, like a pink sunset cloud, was not slow to follow. Comfrey, the purple hand-in-hand with the white, crept forth to take its place in the line; and at last one morning the diffident and delaying dog-rose stepped delicately on the stage, and one knew, as if string-music had announced it in stately chords that strayed into a gavotte, that June at last was here. One member of the company was still awaited; the shepherd-boy for the nymphs to woo, the knight for whom the ladies waited at the window, the prince that was to kiss the sleeping summer back to life and love. But when meadow-sweet, debonair and odorous in amber jerkin, moved graciously to his place in the group, then the play was ready to begin.

Kenneth Grahame

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

Aristotle

I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day.

Ernest Hemingway

I had discovered, early in my researches, that their hermetic doctrine was no mere chemical fantasy, but a philosophy they applied to the world, to the elements, and to man himself.

W. B. Yeats

From time immemorial artistic insights have been revealed to artists in their sleep and in dreams, so that at all times they ardently desired them.

Paracelsus

The shot will go smoothly only when it takes the archer himself by surprise.

Eugene Herrigel

Industry need not wish.

Benjamin Franklin

Joking is teaching. Don’t be fooled by the lightness or the vulgarity. Jokes are serious.

Rumi

For once you have tasted flight you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skywards, for there you have been and there you will long to return.

Leonardo da Vinci

Truth may be stranger than fiction, but fiction is truer.

Frederic Raphael

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration.

Ernest Hemingway

One becomes two, two becomes three, and by means of the third and fourth achieves unity; thus two are but one. Invert nature and you will find that what you seek. Join the male and the female, and you will find what is sought.

Maria the Jewess

The constant assertion of belief is an indication of fear.

J. Krishnamurti

You never learn how to write a novel. You just learn how to write the novel that you’re writing.

Gene Wolfe

Where’s your will to be weird?

Jim Morrison

Alchemy is the art of far and near, and I think poetry is alchemy in that way. It’s delightful to distort size, to see something that’s tiny as though it were vast.

Robert Morgan

Writing was like digging coal. I sweat blood. The spell is on me.

Zane Grey

The brain is wider than the sky.

Emily Dickinson

For everything that lives is holy, life delights in life.

William Blake

All my life, I’ve been frightened at the moment I sit down to write.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The ablest writer is only a gardener first, and then a cook.

Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare

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

It would not be better if things happened just as men wish.

Heraclitus

Intense study of the Bible will keep any writer from being vulgar, in point of style.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Marge, don’t discourage the boy! Weaseling out of things is important to learn. It’s what separates us from the animals. Except the weasel.

Homer Simpson

It is a greater joy to see the author’s author, than himself.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Still no response from my editor in New York. Almost two months now since I sent back the manuscript. There are problems, I saw today, but nothing insurmountable. It’s the other thing, this silence, that sits on my chest and crushes the breath out of me.

Bill Barich

Use your imagination. Trust me, your lives are not interesting. Don’t write them down.

W. B. Kinsella

A little knowledge that acts is worth infinitely more than much knowledge that is idle.

Kahlil Gibran

Words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean. Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes.

Theodore Dreiser

Make it new.

Ezra Pound

We are the species that clamors to be lied to.

Joyce Carol Oates

The power of the symbol comes from the nature of perception and thought. The train whistle makes us see the train, the footstep in the hall reminds us of the family relative.

Delmore Schwartz

A novelist is someone who sits around the house all day in his underwear, trying not to smoke.

Scott Spencer

The usual way – through a long series of rejections, revising my manuscripts, and kept trying again and again. Finally I was fortunate enough to find a good agent.

Danielle Steel

There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.

Herman Melville

Comedy has to be based on truth. You take the truth and you put a little curlicue at the end.

Sid Caesar

I heard what was said of the universe, heard it and heard it of several thousand years; it is middling well as far as it goes – but is that all?

Walt Whitman

What I say is that, if a fellow really likes potatoes, he must be a pretty decent sort of fellow.

A. A. Milne

What is really beautiful must always be true.

Stendhal

I couldn’t wait for success, so I went ahead without it.

Jonathan Winters

Know the story before you fall in love with your first sentence. If you don’t know the story before you begin the story, what kind of a storyteller are you? Just an ordinary kind, just a mediocre kind – making it up as you go along, like a common liar.

John Irving

Develop any other skill; turn to any other branch of knowledge; learn how to use your hands. Try woodworking, bird watching, gardening, mushrooming, cooking, fishing, sailing, weaving, pottery, zoology, astronomy, cosmology, take your pick. Whatever activity you engage in as trade or hobby, or field of study, will tone up your body and clear your head. At the very least, it will help you with your metaphors.

Stanley Kunitz

No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader’s intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing.

E. B. White

The proper study of mankind is books.

Aldous Huxley

Diplomats are just as essential to starting a war as soldiers are for finishing it. You take diplomacy out of war, and the thing would fall flat in a week.

Will Rogers

When one eye is fixed upon your destination, there is only one eye left with which to find the way.

Japanese proverb

It is better to create than to learn. Creating is the essence of life.

Julius Caesar

The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything.

Walt Whitman

Every writer at some point must go through an analytical period, but in time he must get his own characteristic solutions into his blood, so that when confronted by a problem in a novel he’s writing he does not consult his literary background. He feels his way to the solution.

John Gardner

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

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

There is no measure or limit to this fever for writing; every one must be an author; some out of vanity to acquire celebrity and raise up a name, others for the sake of filthy lucre and gain.

Martin Luther

In art, economy is always beauty.

Henry James

Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.

E. L. Doctorow

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I can make more generals, but horses cost money.

Abraham Lincoln

A true friend stabs you in the front.

Oscar Wilde

The truth is that we live out our lives putting off all that can be put off; perhaps we all know deep down that we are immortal and that sooner or later all men will do and know all things.

Jorge Luis Borges

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

Friedrich Nietzsche

A man will renounce any pleasures you like but he will not give up his suffering.

Gurdjieff

Have common sense and stick to the point.

W. Somerset Maugham

Truth is in things, and not in words.

Herman Melville

Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes.

Walt Whitman

One can acquire everything in solitude – except character.

Stendhal

The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.

Marcus Aurelius

Transmute yourselves from deadstones into living philosophical stones.

Gerhardt Dorn

You do not chop off a section of your imaginative substance and make a book specifically for children, for – if you are honest – you have no idea where childhood ends and maturity begins. It is all endless and all one.

P. L. Travers

There is no blue without yellow and without orange.

Vincent Van Gogh

Dreaming or awake, we perceive only events that have meaning to us.

Jane Roberts

Bring in the bottled lightning, a clean tumbler, and a corkscrew.

Charles Dickens

If you write well, you don’t have to dress funny.

James Dickey

Then what is writing of quality? To know how to thrust your head into the darkness, know how to leap into the void, and to understand that literature is basically a dangerous calling.

Roberto Bolaño

Weeds are flowers too, once you get to know them.

A. A. Milne

The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.

Walt Whitman

Perhaps there are none more lazy, or more truly ignorant, than your everlasting readers.

Marcus Aurelius

A house is not a home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body.

Benjamin Franklin

Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own blood.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Anybody can be good in the country.

Oscar Wilde

Nature is a temple where living columns
Let slip from time to time uncertain words;
Man finds his way through forests of symbols
Which regard him with familiar gazes.

Charles Baudelaire

Fear is the mind-killer.

Frank Herbert

Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous “I don’t know.”

Wislawa Szymborska

The stories people tell have a way of taking care of them. If the stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive. That is why we put these stories in each other’s memory.

Barry Lopez

All a publisher has to do is write cheques at intervals, while a lot of deserving and industrious chappies rally round and do the real work.

P. G. Wodehouse

A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.

William Strunk

Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes and prism, are all very good words for the lips.

Charles Dickens

In relating the circumstances which have led to my confinement within this refuge for the demented, I am aware that my present position will create a natural doubt of the authenticity of my narrative.

H. P. Lovecraft

I want you to be everything that’s you, deep at the center of your being.

Confucius

Becoming is the mode of activity of the uncreate deity.

Helena P. Blavatsky

The Lord of Delphi neither speaks nor remains silent; but he speaks in symbols.

Heraclitus

Brute animals have the vowel sounds; man only can utter consonants.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Writing is the supreme solace.

W. Somerset Maugham

It is not my mode of thought that has caused my misfortunes, but the mode of thought of others.

Marquis de Sade

Dwell in possibility.

Emily Dickinson

Books can only reveal us to ourselves.

Henry David Thoreau

I cannot start a story or chapter without knowing how it ends. Of course it rarely ends that way.

Kashua Ishigura

That’s the essential goal of the writer: you slice out a piece of yourself and slap it down on the desk in front of you.

Stephen Leigh

The best job that was ever offered to me was to become a landlord in a brothel, the perfect milieu for an artist to work in.

William Faulkner

One sheds one’s sicknesses in books – repeats and presents again one’s emotions, to be master of them.

D. H. Lawrence

Books are like a mirror. If an ass looks in, you can’t expect an angel to look out.

Arthur Schoenhauer

By far the greatest thing is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learned from others. It is a sign of genius, for a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of similarity among dissimilars.

Aristotle

Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.

Vincent Van Gogh

If there is a special Hell for writers it would be in the forced contemplation of their own works.

John Dos Passos

If you want to find Cherry-Tree Lane all you have to do is ask the Policeman at the cross-roads.

P. L. Travers

The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.

Flannery O’Connor

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Herman Melville

Thoughts create a new heaven, a new firmament, a new source of energy, from which new arts flow.

Paracelsus

Water is the driving force of all nature.

Leonardo da Vinci

An ant on the move does more than a dozing ox.

Lao Tzu

Three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write.

Anthony Trollope

Grant me the treasure of sublime poverty.

St. Francis of Assisi

People are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

One writes such a story not out of the leaves of trees still to be observed, nor by means of botany and soil-science; but it grows like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mould of mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps.

J.R.R. Tolkien

Myth hovers in the shadows of fairy tales.

Deena Metzger

A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razorstrap. A thin book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be used to cover a window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy book with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat.

Mark Twain

What things there are to write, if one could only write them! My mind is full of gleaming thought; gay moods and mysterious, moth-like meditations hover in my imagination, fanning their painted wings. But always the rarest, those streaked with azure and the deepest crimson, flutter away beyond my reach.

Logan Pearsall Smith

It’s much more important to write than to be written about.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Never save anything for your next book.

Tam Mossman

I accept Time absolutely.

Walt Whitman

It was such a lovely day I thought it a pity to get up.

W. Somerset Maugham

A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small bundle.

Benjamin Franklin

What would happen next? The novelist droned on, and before the audience guessed what happened next, they either fell asleep or killed him.

E. M. Forster

If the artist does not fling himself, without reflecting, into his work, as Curtis flung himself into the yawning gulf, as the soldier flings himself into the enemy’s trenches, and if, once in this crater, he does not work like a miner on whom the walls of his gallery have fallen in; if he contemplates difficulties instead of overcoming them one by one: he is looking on at the suicide of his own talent.

Honore de Balzac

Inside every fat book is a thin book trying to get out.

Unknown

You must break all the rules of painting, but you must also convince me you’ve had a reason to do so.

Hans Hoffman

God writes a lot of comedy. Trouble is, he’s stuck with so many bad actors who don’t know how to play funny.

Garrison Keillor

I admire anybody who has the guts to write anything at all.

E. B. White

The novel is an event in consciousness. The novelist is inviting readers to watch a performance in their own brain.

George Buchanan

The flower that smells the sweetest is shy and lowly.

William Wordsworth

A stale article, if you dip it in a good, warm, sunny smile, will go off better than a fresh one that you’ve scowled upon.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

We can be knowledgeable with other men’s knowledge, but we cannot be wise with other men’s wisdom.

Michel de Montaigne

To be a king and wear a crown is a thing more glorious to them that see it than it is pleasant to them that bear it.

Elizabeth I

Imagination is the queen of truth, and possibility is one of the regions of truth. She is positively akin to infinity.

Charles Baudelaire

I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.

Vincent Van Gogh

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?

Vita Sackville-West

The road that is walked in hope is more pleasant to the traveler than a road trod in despair, even though they both lead to the same destination.

Marion Zimmer Bradley

I think it’s bad to talk about one’s present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.

Norman Mailer

An observation of the facts of human existence will reveal to those who sneer at the use of coincidence in fiction and drama that life itself is little more than a series of coincidences.

Rafael Sabatini

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

Jean Jacques Rousseau

Maybe, just once, someone will call me ‘Sir’ without adding, ‘You’re making a scene.’

Homer Simpson

If you’re looking for messages, try Western Union.

Ernest Hemingway

You don’t have to be great to get started, but you have to get started to be great.

Les Brown

If you follow your bliss you will find a path laid out before you that has been waiting all along.

Joseph Campbell

People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind.

William Butler Yeats

He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends.

Oscar Wilde

When you are content to be simply yourself and don’t compare or compete, everybody will respect you.

Lao Tzu

Sometimes the guide is as mysterious as the psychopomp Hermes, who leads the souls of the dead into the underworld, or as formidable as Virgil, who led Dante into the realms of hell; sometimes she is a wondrous as the appearance of an angel or as disturbing as the odd creature at the crossroads whom we were lucky enough to befriend and thereby earned a gift – the cloak of invisibility, the magic password, the sleeping potion without which we cannot cross over to or survive on the other side.

Deena Metzger

Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark,
And shares the nature of infinity.

William Wordsworth

Writers would be warm, loyal, and otherwise terrific people – if only they’d stop writing.

Laura Miller

Did it happen? No. Is it true? Yes.

Ron Carlson

Men with minds sensitive to hereditary impulse will always tremble at the thought of the hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life which may pulsate in the gulfs beyond the stars.

H. P. Lovecraft

Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.

Marcus Aurelius

Know the lines that live are turned out of a furrowed brow.

Herman Melville

To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.

Aldous Huxley

I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today.

James Joyce

Dreams are the touchstones of our character.

Henry David Thoreau

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

Samuel Johnson

Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young.

W. Somerset Maugham

I have a theory of my own about what the art of the novel is, and how it came into being. It happens because the storyteller’s own experience has moved him to an emotion so passionate that he can no longer keep it shut up in his heart.

Lady Murasaki

Draw, Antonio, draw and do not waste time.

Michelangelo

When a thing has been said and well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it.

Anatole France

I don’t take drugs, I take books.

Ingeborg Bachmann

A poet who reads his verse in public may have other nasty habits.

Robert Heinlein

My purpose is to entertain myself first and other people secondly.

John D. MacDonald

Poison is in everything, and no thing is without poison. The dosage makes it either a poison or a remedy.

Paracelsus

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

Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.

Will Durant

I hear and I forget; I see and I remember; I write and I understand.

Chinese proverb

Writers have an island, a center of refuge, within themselves. It is the mind’s anchorage, the soul’s Great Good Place.

Wright Morris

In change things rest.

Heraclitus

If I ever get real rich, I hope I’m not mean to poor people, like I am now.

Jack Handy

The Philosopher’s Stone is called the most ancient, secret or unknown, natural, incomprehensible, heavenly, blessed, sacred Stone of the Sages. It is described as being true, more certain than certainty itself, the arcanum of all arcana – the Divine virtue which is hidden from the foolish, the aim and end of all things under heaven, the wonderful epilogue or conclusion of all the labours of the Sages – the perfect essence of all the elements, the indestructible body which no element can injure, the quintessence; the double and living mercury which has in itself the heavenly spirit – the cure for all unsound and imperfect metals – the everlasting light – the panacea for all diseases – the glorious Phœnix – the most precious of treasures – the chief good of Nature – the universal triune Stone, which is naturally composed of three things, and, nevertheless, is but one – nay, is generated and brought forth of one, two, three, four, and five.

The Sophic Hydrolith

The task of the right eye is to peer into the telescope, while the left eye peers into the microscope.

Max Ernst

Any man may be in good spirits and good temper when he’s well dressed. There ain’t much credit in that.

Charles Dickens

And the first rude sketch that the world had seen was joy to his mighty heart, till the Devil whispered behind the leaves “It’s pretty, but is it Art?”

Rudyard Kipling

You cannot open a book without learning something.

Confucius

I felt a cleavage in my mind
As if my brain had split;
I tried to match it, seam by seam,
But could not make them fit.

Emily Dickinson

What is the subconscious to every other person, in its creative aspect becomes, for writers, the muse.

Ray Bradbury

Only he who can be can do.

Gurdjieff

The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.

Flannery O’Connor

The first chapter sells the book; the last chapter sells the next book.

Mickey Spillane

I can’t think of any one film that improved on a good novel, but I can think of many good films that came from very bad novels.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The task of a writer consists of being able to make something out of an idea.

Thomas Mann

Try to be one on whom nothing is lost.

Henry James

Writing is communication, not self-expression.

Richard Peck

For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.

Catherine Drinker Bowen

There is in a word something sacred which forbids us from using it recklessly. To handle a language cunningly is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.

Charles Baudelaire

Never give a sword to a man who can’t dance.

Confucius

Fundamental accuracy is the sole morality of writing.

Ezra Pound

You could tell it was classical music, because the banjo players were leaning back and chewing gum; and in New York restaurants only death or a classical specality can stop banjoists.

P. G. Wodehouse

I sent ‘The World Well Lost’ to one editor who rejected it on sight, and then wrote a letter to every other editor in the field warning them against the story, and urging them to reject it on sight without reading it.

Theodore Sturgeon

The writer who breeds more words than he needs is making a chore for the reader who reads.

Dr Seuss

Nature has not got two voices, you know, one of them condemning all day what the other commands.

Marquis de Sade

There now ensued a series of incidents which transported me to the opposite extremes of ecstasy and horror; incidents which I tremble to recall and dare not seek to interpret.

H. P. Lovecraft

Conviction without experience makes for harshness.

Flannery O’Connor

You can’t stay in your corner of the forest waiting for others to come to you.

A. A. Milne

She was looking more and more like an aunt than anything human.

P. G. Wodehouse

There are strings in the human heart that had better not be vibrated.

Charles Dickens

He is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

My interest has been to convince you that you must assume responsibility for being here, in this marvelous world, in this marvelous desert, in this marvelous time.

Carlos Castaneda

Think no evil, see no evil, hear no evil, and you will never write a best-selling novel.

Dan Bennett

God’s only excuse is that he does not exist.

Stendhal

An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.

Aldous Huxley

It is no use walking anywhere to preach unless our walking is our preaching.

St. Francis of Assisi

One must have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.

Friedrich Nietzsche

I love my work but do not know how I write it.

Zane Grey

Common-looking people are the best in the world. That is the reason the Lord makes so many of them.

Abraham Lincoln

The ideas aren’t that important. Really they aren’t. Everyone’s got an idea for a book, a movie, a story, a TV series.

Neil Gaiman

On most writers, the earmarks of thrift, if not outright povery, are evident.

Joyce Thompson

And as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.

William Shakespeare

There will come a time when you believe everything is finished. Yet that will be the beginning.

Louis L’Amour

To study the abnormal is the best way of understanding the normal.

William James

The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be.

The Necronomicon

He said true things, but called them by the wrong names.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

People can die of mere imagination.

Geoffrey Chaucer

When night darkens the streets, then wander forth the sons of Belial, flown with insolence and wine.

John Milton

Let your discourse with men of business be short and comprehensive.

George Washington

The modern artist is working with space and time, and expressing his feelings rather than illustrating.

Jackson Pollock

For several days after my first book was published, I carried it about in my pocket and took surreptitious peeps at it to make sure the ink had not faded.

James M. Barrie

He ate and drank the precious words,
His spirit grew robust;
He knew no more that he was poor,
Nor that his frame was dust.
He danced along the dingy days,
And this bequest of wings
Was but a book. What liberty
A loosened spirit brings!

Emily Dickinson

We are trying to create a world in the imagination from which to draw the kinds of experiences we need in order to realize our possibilities.

Deena Metzger

I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly.

Michel de Montaigne

Basically, fiction is people. You can’t write fiction about ideas.

Theodore Sturgeon

The best way to know God is to love many things.

Vincent Van Gogh

Speak ill of no man, but speak all the good you know of everybody.

Benjamin Franklin

Nature is not human-hearted.

Lao Tzu

One who has not had a good father must create one.

Friedrich Nietzsche

What is the price of experience? It is bought with the price of all a man hath, his house, his wife, his children.

William Blake

Every burned book enlightens the world.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I know not, sir, whether Bacon wrote the works of Shakespeare, but if he did not, it seems to me that he missed the opportunity of his life.

James M. Barrie

To begin, begin.

William Wordsworth

Learning is the ally, not the adversary of genius. He who reads in a proper spirit, can scarcely read too much.

William Godwin

Even if what you’re working on doesn’t go anywhere, it will help you with the next thing you’re doing. Make yourself available for something to happen. Give it a shot.

Cormac McCarthy

No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.

Confucius

Some of us awake in the night with strange phantasms of enchanted hills and gardens, of fountains that sing in the sun, of golden cliffs overhanging murmuring seas, of plains that stretch down to sleeping cities of bronze and stone, and of shadowy companies of heroes that ride caparisoned white horses along the edges of thick forests; and then we know that we have looked back through the ivory gates into that world of wonder which was ours before we were wise and unhappy.

H. P. Lovecraft

The Southerner is usually tolerant of those weaknesses that proceed from innocence.

Flannery O’Connor

Ideas are but approximations. To the gods, our ideas are children’s toys.

Heraclitus

If you could get up the courage to begin, you have the courage to succeed.

David Viscott

I do not ask the wounded person how he feels. I myself become the wounded person.

Walt Whitman

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

Ken MacLeod

I must go home periodically to renew my sense of horror.

Carson McCullers

The book should act as a window to the word.

Harry Duncan

Why should we think upon things that are lovely? Because thinking determines life.

William James

Awake, arise, or be forever fallen!

John Milton

When you’re painting out of your unconscious, figures are bound to emerge.

Jackson Pollock

Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

I feel I’ve certainly been lucky to find a publisher who seems so interested generally in his authors.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

O son, how many bodies have we to pass through, how many bands of demons, through how many series of repetitions and cycles of the stars, before we hasten to the One alone?

Hermes Trismegistus

While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.

Leonardo da Vinci

If thou art a writer, write as if thy time were short, for it is.

Henry David Thoreau

Pessimist: one who, when he has a choice between two evils, chooses both.

Oscar Wilde

Actually if a writer needs a dictionary he should not write. He should have read the dictionary at least three times from beginning to end.

Ernest Hemingway

Because I could not stop for Death
He kindly stopped for me.
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.

Emily Dickinson

Screenplays are not works of art. They are invitations to others to collaborate on a work of art.

Paul Schrader

You have to have that feeling of “I’ll show them.” If you don’t have it, don’t become a writer. It’s part of the animal, it’s primitive, but if you don’t want to rise above the crowd, forget it.

Leon Uris

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

Thomas Mann

The act of putting pen to paper encourages pause for thought, this in turn makes us think more deeply about life.

Norbet Platt

A writer: a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right.

John K. Hutchens

What I don’t write is as important as what I write.

Jamaica Kincaid

He who believes is strong; he who doubts is weak.

Louisa May Alcott

For one who reads, there is no limit to the number of lives that may be lived, for fiction, biography, and history offer an inexhaustible number of lives in many parts of the world, in all periods of time.

Louis L’Amour

He lives most life whoever breathes most air.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

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.

J. B. Priestley

I don’t sing because I’m happy; I’m happy because I sing.

William James

I have a great mind to believe in Christianity for the mere pleasure of fancying I may be damned.

Lord Byron

There must be room in love for hate.

Molly Peacock

Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.

Cicero

Really, in the end, the only thing that can make you a writer is the person that you are, the intensity of your feeling, the honesty of your vision, the unsentimental acknowledgment of the endless interest of the life around and within you.

Santha Rama Rau

To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.

Lord Byron

With an eye made quiet by the power of harmony and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things.

William Wordsworth

A boy’s story is the best that is ever told.

Charles Dickens

People who make history know nothing about history. You can see that in the sort of history they make.

G. K. Chesterton

When a man undertakes to create something, he establishes a new heaven, as it were, and from it the work that he desires to create flows into him.

Paracelsus

Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do.

Benjamin Franklin

Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.

Henry David Thoreau

Though men may be deep, mentally they are slow.

Camille Paglia

Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.

Max Ernst

Ah, good taste! What a dreadful thing! Taste is the enemy of creativeness.

Pablo Picasso

The man of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Those with “something to fall back on” invariably fall back on it. They intended to all along. That is why they provided themselves with it.

David Mamet

At painful times, when composition is impossible and reading is not enough, grammars and dictionaries are excellent for distraction.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery.

Nelson Algren

Fiction is an act of revenge.

John Hawkes

Any ordinary man can surround himself with two thousand books, and thenceforward have at least one place in the world in which it is possible to be happy.

Nelson Algren

To imagine yourself inside another person is what a story writer does in every piece of work. It is his first step, and his last too.

Eudora Welty

If you really want to hurt your parents and don’t have nerve enough to be homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts.

Kurt Vonnegut

Education, properly understood, is that which teaches discernment.

Joseph Roux

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

Only one thing matters, one thing; to be able to dare!

Fyodor Dostoevsky

When a man’s knowledge is not in order, the more of it he has the greater will be his confusion.

Herbert Spencer

The only way to become a better writer is to become a better person.

Brenda Ueland

From reading too much, and sleeping too little, his brain dried up on him and he lost his judgment.

Miguel de Cervantes

A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.

Ayn Rand

Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.

Aldous Huxley

The more laws and order are made prominent, the more thieves and robbers there will be.

Lao Tzu

Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.

Gore Vidal

Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. Most believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist knows how difficult it is.

Willa Cather

Among all men on the earth bards have a share of honor and reverence, because the muse has taught them songs and loves the race of bards.

Homer

Everything stinks till it’s finished.

Dr Seuss

Every truth has four corners: as a teacher I give you one corner, and it is for you to find the other three.

Confucius

That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you’ve understood all your life, but in a new way.

Doris Lessing

I wish they would only take me as I am.

Vincent Van Gogh

And I will show that nothing can happen more beautiful than death.

Walt Whitman

The abdomen is the reason why man does not readily take himself to be a god.

Friedrich Nietzsche

I’m not a teacher, but an awakener.

Robert Frost

Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.

William Zinsser

Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.

Oscar Wilde

Everything that suffers is sensible; everything that is sensible, suffereth.

The Divine Pymander

I am not discouraged because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward.

Thomas Edison

Without a gentle contempt for education, no man’s education is complete.

G. K. Chesterton

Leaving sex to the feminists is like letting your dog vacation at the taxidermist.

Camille Paglia

Most English-speaking people, for instance, will admit that cellar door is ‘beautiful’, especially if dissociated from its sense and spelling. More beautiful than, say, sky, and far more beautiful than beautiful.

J.R.R. Tolkien

There is a wisdom of the head, and a wisdom of the heart.

Charles Dickens

Write injuries in dust, benefits in marble.

Benjamin Franklin

Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.

Abraham Lincoln

The novel is likely, if the best literary brains cannot be induced to return to it, to survive in some perfunctory, despised and hopelessly degenerate form, like modern tombstones, or the Punch and Judy show.

George Orwell

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He don’t know why they choose him and he’s usually too busy to wonder why.

William Faulkner

Who are you going to believe – me, or your own eyes?

Groucho Marx

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.

Henry Ward Beecher

No time for poetry but exactly what is.

Jack Kerouac

It takes a great deal of experience to become natural.

Willa Cather

Having imagination, it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that, if you were unimaginative, would take you only a minute.

Franklin P. Adams

Any story takes place in the landscape of the imagination.

Stef Penney

Editors never buy manuscripts that are left on the closet shelf at home.

John Campbell

To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself.

Mark Twain

You have a good many little gifts and virtues, but there is no need of parading them. The great charm of all power is modesty.

Louisa May Alcott

There’s only one person who needs a glass of water oftener than a small child tucked in for the night, and that’s a writer sitting down to write.

Mignon McLaughlin

A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.

William James

The last thing one knows in constructing a work is what to put first.

Blaise Pascal

The naming of what is there is what is important.

Ian McEwan

Never ascribe to an opponent motives meaner than your own.

James M. Barrie

The Principle of Rhythm embodies this truth: that in everything there is manifested a measured motion; a to-and-from movement; a flow and inflow; a swing forward and backward; a pendulum-like movement between opposing energies.

The Kybalion

Words ought to be a little wild for they are the assaults of thought on the unthinking.

John Maynard Keynes

To feel within my body that I was pushing out to new areas of feeling, strange landmarks of emotion, tramping upon foreign soil, compounding new relationships of perception, making new and unheard-of effects with words. That is writing as I feel it, a kind of significant living.

Richard Wright

It is not inspiration; it is expiration.

Jean Cocteau

Close the door.

Barbara Kingsolver

Plausibility is the morality of fiction.

Edith Mirrilees

Be bold, be bold, and everywhere be bold.

Herbert Spencer

I don’t like work, but I like what is in the work – the chance to find yourself.

Joseph Conrad

Slowly but inexorably crawling upon my consciousness and rising above every other impression, came a dizzying fear of the unknown; a fear all the greater because I could not analyse it, and seeming to concern a stealthily approaching menace; not death, but some nameless, unheard-of thing inexpressibly more ghastly and abhorrent.

H. P. Lovecraft

The object of art is to give life a shape.

William Shakespeare

America is essentially a woman’s country – why shouldn’t the leading novelists be women?

Henry Miller

All things on earth point home in old October; sailors to sea, travellers to walls and fences, hunters to field and hollow and the long voice of the hounds, the lover to the love he has forsaken.

Thomas Wolfe

The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.

Eleanor Roosevelt

Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.

Nadine Gordimer

You cannot fight against the future. Time is on our side.

William E. Gladstone

When we sit down each day and do our work. The Muse takes note of our dedication. She approves. We have earned favor in her sight. we become like a magnetized rod that attracts iron filings.

Steven Pressfield

Realists do not fear the results of their study.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

God has entrusted me with myself.

Epictetus

The love of learning, the sequestered nooks, and all the sweet serenity of books.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

To me a book is a message from the gods to mankind; or, if not, should never be published at all.

Aleister Crowley

A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool.

William Shakespeare

Every man is the son of his own works.

Miguel de Cervantes

When I think about all the crap I learned in high school it’s a wonder I can think at all.

Paul Simon

The old lemon throbbed fiercely. I got an idea.

P. G. Wodehouse

All loose things seem to drift down to the sea, and so did I.

Louis L’Amour

Excessive sorrow laughs. Excessive joy weeps.

William Blake

Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality.

Beatrix Potter

A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged, it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.

Tom Wolfe

My argument is that War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading.

Thomas Hardy

Beauty ought to look a little surprised: it is the emotion that best suits her face. The beauty who does not look surprised, who accepts her position as her due – she reminds us too much of a prima donna.

E. M. Forster

Nothing is proved, all is permitted.

Theodore Dreiser

Horse sense is the thing a horse has which keeps it from betting on people.

W. C. Fields

To be energetic and authentic, a national literature includes dialogues with the despised. Equally, our own writing wants to be infused with the dark light from our underworlds.

Deena Metzger

Without change, something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken.

Frank Herbert

In every battle there comes a time when both sides consider themselves beaten, then he who continues the attack wins.

Ulysses S. Grant

Once you ‘got’ Pop, you could never see a sign again the same way again. And once you thought Pop, you could never see America the same way again.

Andy Warhol

It is not necessary that you leave the house. Remain at your table and listen. Do not even listen, only wait. Do not even wait, be wholly still and alone. The world will present itself to you for its unmasking. It can do no other. In ecstasy it will writhe at your feet.

Franz Kafka

I write to escape; to escape poverty.

Edgar Rice Burroughs

The imagination needs moodling – long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering.

Brenda Ueland

Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.

William James

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

Theodore Roosevelt

It is easy to finish things. Nothing is simpler. Never does one lie so cleverly as then.

Toulouse Lautrec

We work in the dark. We do what we can. We give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.

Henry James

I’m not funny. What I am is brave.

Lucille Ball

He who is only just is cruel.

Lord Byron

A troop of porcupines is milling about on a cold winter’s day. In order to keep from freezing, the animals move closer together. Just as they are close enough to huddle, however, they start to poke each other with their quills. In order to stop the pain, they spread out, lose the advantage of commingling, and begin to shiver. This sends them back in search of each other, and the cycle repeats as they struggle to find a comfortable distance between entanglement and freezing.

Arthur Schopenhauer

It is only when we forget all our learning that we begin to know.

Henry David Thoreau

Let us not make arbitrary conjectures about the greatest matters.

Heraclitus

I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is more than living, for it is being conscious of living.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

You can have anything in life if you will sacrifice everything else for it.

James M. Barrie

Every man must define his identity against his mother. If he does not, he just falls back into her and is swallowed up.

Camille Paglia

The more particular, the more specific you are, the more universal you are.

Nancy Hale

I wake up every morning determined both to change the world and have one hell of a good time. Sometimes this makes planning the day a little difficult.

E. B. White

I slept with faith and found a corpse in my arms on awakening; I drank and danced all night with doubt and found her a virgin in the morning.

Aleister Crowley

My aim is to put down what I see in the best and simplest way.

Ernest Hemingway

If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.

Epictetus

A single conversation across the table with a wise man is better than ten years mere study of books.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

When the green woods laugh with the voice of joy,
And the dimpling stream runs laughing by;
When the air does laugh with our merry wit,
And the green hill laughs with the noise of it.

Lord Byron

Always carry a flagon of whiskey in case of snakebite and furthermore always carry a small snake.

W. C. Fields

The work of art assumes the existence of the perfect spectator, and is indifferent to the fact that no such person exists.

E. M. Forster

There is a condition worse than blindness, and that is seeing something that isn’t there.

Thomas Hardy

I had ambition not only to go farther than any man had ever been before, but as far as it was possible for a man to go.

Joseph Conrad

You want in all cases for the story to get through the writing.

Alice Munro

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

T. S. Eliot

Readers, after all, are making the world with you. You give them the materials, but it’s the readers who build that world in their own minds.

Ursula Le Guin

Don’t say the old lady screamed – bring her on and let her scream.

Mark Twain

If a secret history of books could be written, and the author’s private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!

William Makepeace Thackeray

Attitude is more important than the past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than what people do or say. It is more important than appearance, giftedness, or skill.

W. C. Fields

Why don’t you come into my garden? I would like my roses to see you.

Richard Brinsley Sheridan

I’m a holy man minus the holiness.

E. M. Forster

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

John Steinbeck

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The only thing I can say that is not bullshit is that you do have to learn to write in a way that you would learn to play the violin. Everybody seems to think that you should be able to turn on the faucet one day and out will come the novel. I think for most people it’s just practice, practice, practice, that sense of just learning your instrument until – when you have an idea on the violin, you don’t have to translate it into violin-speak anymore – the language is your own. It’s not something you can think your way into, or outsmart. you’ve just got to do it.

Kevin Canty

When I’m writing, the darkness is always there. I go where the pain is.

Anne Rice

Doubt is a pain too lonely to know that faith is his twin.

Kahlil Gibran

Writing well is at one and the same time good thinking, good feeling and good expression; it is having wit, soul and taste, all together.

George-Louis Leclerc

Nothing can come of nothing.

William Shakespeare

The bones connected by joints are at once one and several. To agree is to differ, the harmony is the discord. From the particulars come oneness, from oneness the particulars.

Heraclitus

There is no royal path to good writing; and such paths as do exist do not lead through neat critical gardens, but through the jungles of self, the world, and of craft.

Jessamyn West

If you wish to be a writer, write.

Epictetus

It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.

Arthur Conan Doyle

Do not be in a hurry to succeed. What would you have to live for afterwards? Better make the horizon your goal; it will always be ahead of you.

William Makepeace Thackeray

Being a woman is a terribly difficult task, since it consists principally in dealing with men.

Joseph Conrad

Not every man can see the truth, but he can be it.

Franz Kafka

The most exciting attractions are between two opposites that never meet.

Andy Warhol

Writing for adults, you have to keep reminding them of what is going on. Children you only need to tell things to once.

Diana Wynne Jones

The sort of poetry I seek resides in objects man can’t touch.

E. M. Forster

If we could read the secret history of our enemies we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what he would perhaps never have seen in himself.

Marcel Proust

God gave us memory so we might have roses in December.

James M. Barrie

I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream.

Vincent Van Gogh

Modesty, tis a virtue not often found among poets, for almost every one of them thinks himself the greatest in the world.

Miguel De Cervantes

If you want a quality, act as if you already had it.

William James

When I say artist I mean the man who is building things. It’s all a big game of construction – some with a brush – some with a shovel – some choose a pen.

Jackson Pollock

It is a tremendous act of violence to begin anything. I am not able to begin. I simply skip what should be the beginning.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Your writing is trying to tell you something.

Joanne Greenberg

The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.

Robert Benchley

The virtue of books is to be readable.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

No matter what the subject, the subject is always love.

Ingrid Bengis

Everybody has won, and all must have prizes.

Lewis Carroll

Selfishness must always be forgiven you know, because there is no hope of a cure.

Jane Austen

They said this mystery never shall cease:
The priest promotes war, and the soldier peace.

William Blake

A room without books is like a body without a soul.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

Writing is good, thinking is better. Cleverness is good, patience is better.

Herman Hesse

To tell the truth is a very difficult thing; and young people are rarely capable of it.

Leo Tolstoy

If a person feels he can’t communicate, the least he can do is shut up about it.

Tom Lehrer

If there is on earth a house with many mansions, it is the house of words.

E. M. Forster

Love is life’s reward, rewarded in rewarding.

Herbert Spencer

Any fool can take a bad line out of a poem; it takes a real pro to throw out a good line.

Theodore Roethke

Bring my goat.

Porgy

Words derive their power from the original word.

Meister Eckhart

Books are not meant to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn’t ask ourselves what it says but what it means.

Umberto Eco

Many that live deserve death and many that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be so quick to deal out death and judgement, for even the very wise cannot see all ends.

J.R.R. Tolkien

Don Quixote’s misfortune is not his imagination, but Sancho Panza.

Franz Kafka

Carpe per diem – seize the check.

Robin Williams

I have tried to do what is true and not ideal.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

The energy of divine fire shines forth voluntarily and in common, and being self-invoked and self-energetic, energizes through all things with invariable sameness, both through the natures which impart and those that are able to receive its light. This mode of solution, therefore, is far superior, which does not suppose that divine works are effected through contrariety, or discrepance, in the way in which generated natures are usually produced; but asserts that every such work is rightly accomplished through sameness, union, and consent.

Iamblichus On The Mysteries

The poet shall shall know that the ground is always ready-ploughed and manured. Others may not know it but he shall. He shall go directly to the creation. His trust shall master the trust of everything he touches and shall master all attachment.

Walt Whitman

Practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect.

Vince Lombardi

Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb.

Umberto Eco

When I walk with you I feel as if I had a flower in my buttonhole.

William Makepeace Thackeray

If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go.

James Baldwin

Tis now the very witching time of night, when churchyards yawn.

William Shakespeare

I deny nothing, but doubt everything.

Lord Byron

He who wants to persuade should put his trust not in the right argument, but in the right word. The power of sound has always been greater than the power of sense.

Joseph Conrad

When I got my first television set, I stopped caring so much about having close relationships.

Andy Warhol

If you would hit the mark, you must aim a little above it.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Inspiration is the act of drawing up a chair to the writing desk.

Unknown

Art, it seems to me, should simplify, so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader’s consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.

Willa Cather

I left nearly all my business to an agent. I am still encumbered with his slovenly and disadvantageous agreements.

H. G. Wells

It is my contention that a really great novel is made with a knife and not a pen, to cut out even the most brilliant passage so long as it doesn’t advance the story.

Frank Yerby

The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.

Samuel Johnson

Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of a void, but out of chaos; the materials must in the first place be afforded; it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself.

Mary Shelley

Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart.

Rainer Maria Rilke

In the middle of my life’s walk
I found myself in a dark wood,
For the straight road was lost.

Dante Alighieri

Humorists can never start to take themselves seriously. It’s literary suicide.

Erma Bombeck

Why? leads inexorably to paradox. How? traps you in a universe of cause and effect. Both deny the infinite.

Frank Herbert

There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy.

E. M. Forster

No man ever became great or good except through many and great mistakes.

William E. Gladstone

The fishermen know that the sea is dangerous and the storm terrible, but they have never found these dangers sufficient reason for remaining ashore.

Vincent Van Gogh

Every great writer is a writer of history, let him treat on almost any subject he may.

Walter Savage Landor

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality.

T. S. Eliot

Nothing is as peevish and pedantic as men’s judgments of one another.

Erasmus

No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

All our heroes, all our great stories are about failure.

Peter Carey

Tobacco had nowhere been forbidden in the Bible, but then it had not yet been discovered, and had probably only escaped proscription for this reason.

Samuel Butler

Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.

William James

Dreams must be heeded and accepted. For a great many of them come true.

Paracelsus

My painting does not come from the easel.

Jackson Pollock

Biography lends to death a new terror.

Oscar Wilde

The writer’s intention hasn’t anything to do with what he achieves. The intent to earn money or the intent to be famous or the intent to be great doesn’t matter in the end. Just what comes out.

Lillian Hellman

I have learned a great deal from listening carefully.

Ernest Hemingway

There is no try. There is only do or do not.

Yoda

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

It’s under Edit.

Claire Born

Only the hand that erases can write the true thing.

Meister Eckhart

To sit patiently with a yearning that has not yet been fulfilled, and to trust fulfillment will come, is quite possibly one of the most powerful "magic skills" that human beings are capable of.

Elizabeth Gilbert

A writer without sympathy for the foibles of his fellow man is not conceivable as a writer.

Joseph Conrad

Dare and the world yields.

William Makepeace Thackeray

It ain’t what they call you, it’s what you answer to.

W. C. Fields

One of the things that happens to careers out here is that people destroy themselves because they begin to think they’re wonderful. They begin to think they know what they’re doing, and the minute that happens, it’s over.

William Goldman

Jests that give pain are no jests.

Miguel de Cervantes

Do not ever say that the desire to do good by force is a good motive.

Ayn Rand

A smile is the chosen vehicle of all ambiguities.

Herman Melville

Thunderbolt is at the helm.

Heraclitus

A learned blockhead is a greater blockhead than an ignorant one.

Benjamin Franklin

Soundbite and slogan, strapline and headline, at every turn we meet hyperbole. The soaring inflation of the English language is more urgently in need of control than the economic variety.

Trevor Nunn

Somewhere in his journals Dostoyevsky remarks that a writer can begin anywhere, at the most commonplace thing, scratch around in it long enough, pray and dig away long enough, and lo! soon he will hit upon the marvelous.

Saul Bellow

Sure, it’s simple, writing for kids. Just as simple as bringing them up.

Ursula K. LeGuin

From two waters make one, whereby seek to make the sun and moon. Prepare to drink the wine of the antagonists. And you shall see with the Dead. Thereupon, make watery earth. And multiply the stone.

The Splendor Solis

Be a fool on the page. Step off the cliff.

Deena Metzger

Talent can’t be taught, but it can be awakened.

Wallace Stegner

I paint things as they are. I don’t comment.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Nothing clears up a case so much as stating it to another person.

Arthur Conan Doyle

The greatest discovery of any generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitude.

William James

‘Twas brillig and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gymbal in the wabe:
All mimsey were the borogroves,
And the momes rath outgrabe.

Lewis Carrol

Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.

Rachel Carson

The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.

Geoffrey Chaucer

I don’t exactly know what I mean by that, but I mean it.

J. D. Salinger

You’re only given a little spark of madness. You mustn’t lose it.

Robin Williams

Where there is mystery, it is generally suspected there must also be evil.

Lord Byron

At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.

E. M. Forster

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, are of imagination all compact.

William Shakespeare

There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice.

Nadine Gordimer

The world nourishes bodies, the spirit nourishes souls.

Hermes Trismegistus

In order to attain the impossible, one must attempt the absurd.

Miguel de Cervantes

Heaven help the American-born boy with a talent for ballet.

Camille Paglia

Considering how foolishly people act and how pleasantly they prattle, perhaps it would be better for the world if they talked more and did less.

W. Somerset Maugham

Really to pray, one must want nothing.

Meister Eckhart

The simpler you say it, the more eloquent it is.

August Wilson

A rich man is nothing but a poor man with money.

W. C. Fields

If a man has talent and can’t use it, he’s failed. If he uses only half of it, he has partly failed. If he uses the whole of it, he has succeeded, and won a satisfaction and triumph few men ever know.

Thomas Wolfe

Do the things you know, and you shall learn the truth you need to know.

Louisa May Alcott

Belief creates the actual fact.

William James

When I am in my painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing.

Jackson Pollock

It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.

Confucius

It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.

Oscar Wilde

You contain enough, why don’t you let it out then?

Walt Whitman

By a route obscure and lonely,
Haunted by ill angels only,
Where an Eidolon named Night
On a black throne reigns upright,
I have reached these lands but newly
From an ultimate dim Thule,
From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime,
Out of Space – out of Time.

Edgar Allen Poe

A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things.

Herman Melville

The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

T. S. Eliot

I’m not saying all publishers have to be literary, but some interest in books would help.

A. N. Wilson

Write your first draft with your heart. Rewrite with your head.

Mike Rich

Writing is just having a sheet of paper, a pen and not a shadow of an idea of what you are going to say.

Francoise Sagan

The decisive moment in human evolution is perpetual. That is why the revolutionary spiritual movements that declare all former things worthless are in the right, for nothing has yet happened.

Franz Kafka

The eternal mistake of mankind is to set up an attainable ideal.

Aleister Crowley

If you want to reveal something, you need to hide it properly first.

Colin Greenland

It is impossible to begin to learn that which one thinks one already knows.

Epictetus

Revision, once well done, becomes a sort of automatic itch which you scratch in the next work without thinking about it.

Romulus Linney

Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Of course one should not drink much, but often.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

I write for no other purpose than to add to the beauty that now belongs to me.

Jack London

Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you’re a mile away and you have their shoes.

Jack Handy

To stand at the edge of the sea, to sense the ebb and flow of the tides, to feel the breath of a mist moving over a great salt marsh, to watch the flight of shore birds that have swept up and down the surf lines of the continents for untold thousands of years, to see the running of the old eels and the young shad to the sea, is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be.

Rachel Carson

Therefore trust to thy heart, and to what the world calls illusions.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be.

Jane Austen

The human spirit is so great a thing that no man can express it; could we rightly comprehend the mind of man nothing would be impossible to us upon the earth.

Paracelcus

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Anita Brookner

Gentiles are people who eat mayonnaise for no reason.

Robin Williams

I try to work every day, even when I’m not motivated.

Mel Ramos

The main question to a novel is – did it amuse? It is only meant to please; and it must do that or it does nothing.

Sydney Smith

If I were a girl, I should be still in my first innocence. If I were a woman, I should always be giving birth in my soul to the eternal word. If I were a husband, I should put up a stiff resistance to all evil. If I were a wife, I should keep faith with my dear one, whom I married. If I were a widow, I should be always longing for the one I loved. If I were a virgin, I should be reverently devout. If I were a servant maid, in humility I should count myself lower than God or any creature; and if I were a manservant, I should be hard at work, always serving my Lord with my whole heart. But since of all these I am neither one, I am just a something among somethings, and so I go.

Meister Eckhart

I don’t care what anybody says about me as long as it isn’t true.

Dorothy Parker

Tap into what you don’t want to say. Tap into that secret place, despite the agony, despite the personal pain, over and above the fatigue.

Arthur Penn

None of the writing is easy, but I no longer refuse to do it for fear that I’ll fail to get it right. It can never be right, I know; it can only be done.

Nancy Mairs

His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge.

Arthur Conan Doyle

To forget one’s purpose is the commonest form of stupidity.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Being an author is having angels whisper in your ear, and devils, too.

Graycie Harmon

The more you say, the less people remember.

Francois Fenelon

You know how it is in the kid’s book world; it’s just bunny eat bunny.

Unknown

In any art form, generalities are useless.

Zubin Mehta

Writing is far too hard work to say what someone else wants me to.

Jane Rule

There are two kinds of sacrifices: the ordinary kind, and those performed by men who have first purified themselves.

Heraclitus

In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.

Oscar Wilde

Scientific people are always curious, and I am going to be scientific. I keep saying to myself: What is it? What is it? It’s something. It can’t be nothing! I don’t know its name, so I call it Magic. I have never seen the sun rise, but Mary and Dickon have, and from what they tell me I am sure that is Magic too. Something pushes it up and draws it. Sometimes since I’ve been in the garden I’ve looked up through the trees at the sky and I have had a strange feeling of being happy as if something were pushing and drawing in my chest and making me breathe fast. Magic is always pushing and drawing and making things out of nothing. Everything is made out of Magic: leaves and trees, flowers and birds, badgers and foxes and squirrels and people. So it must be all around us.

Frances Hodgson Burnett

Fiction writing is great. You can make up almost anything.

Ivana Trump

Art can’t hurt you.

Fred Babb

Whenever you read a good book, it’s like the author is right there, in the room talking to you, which is why I don’t like to read good books.

Jack Handy

But are not the dreams of poets and the tales of travellers notoriously false?

H. P. Lovecraft

Is there no way out of the mind?

Sylvia Plath

Truth of a modest sort I can promise you, and also sincerity.

Joseph Conrad

No man ever got very high by pulling other people down. The intelligent merchant does not knock his competitors. The sensible worker does not work those who work with him. Don’t knock your friends. Don’t knock your enemies. Don’t knock yourself.

Alfred Lord Tennyson

The structure of myth exists in the mind and needs only be tapped.

Deena Metzger

‘So have I,’ said the stranger, ‘a strong poetic turn. Epic poem – ten thousand lines – revolution of July – composed it on the spot – Mars by day, Apollo by night – bang the field-piece, twang the lyre.’

Charles Dickens

Adversity is the first path to truth.

Lord Byron

Ah, the patter of little feet around the house. There’s nothing like having a midget for a butler.

W. C. Fields

Be soft, even if you stand to get squashed.

E. M. Forster

A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul.

Franz Kafka

All fiction is for me a kind of magic and trickery – a confidence trick, trying to make people believe something is true.

Angus Wilson

Life always spills over the rim of every cup.

Boris Pasternak

One who is caught in thought loses his original nature. All he knows are words and descriptions. When he sees the actual thing, he fails to perceive it.

Dalai Lama

I write because I like to write.

Paddy Chayefsky

The task of a writer consists in being able to make something out of an idea.

Thomas Mann

I have just been to a city in the West, a city full of poets, a city they have made safe for poets. The whole city is so lovely that you do not have to write it up to make it poetry; it is ready-made for you. But, I don’t know – the poetry written in that city might not seem like poetry if read outside of the city. It would be like the jokes made when you were drunk; you have to get drunk again to appreciate them.

Robert Frost

Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone.

Dorothy Parker

Where so many hours have been spent in convincing myself that I am right, is there not some reason to fear I may be wrong?

Jane Austen

One cannot violate the promptings of one’s nature without having that nature recoil upon itself.

Jack London

The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.

William James

I’m youth, I’m joy, I’m a little bird that has broken out of the egg.

James M. Barrie

One must work and dare if one really wants to live.

Vincent Van Gogh

The words of the scholar are to be understood. The words of the master are not to be understood. They are to be listened to as one listens to the wind in the trees and the sound of the river and the song of the bird. They will awaken something within the heart that is beyond all knowledge.

Anthony de Mello

Speak clearly, if you speak at all; carve every word before you let it fall.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Kiss me and you will see how important I am.

Sylvia Plath

In the world of words imagination is one of the forces of nature.

Wallace Stevens

It’s funny that pirates were always going around searching for treasure, and never realized that the real treasure was the fond memories they were creating.

Jack Handy

This is where I begin to live my life, knowing that nothing matters, nothing ever matters like the love you receive and the love you give.

Bernice Ellis

Success is going from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm.

Sir Winston Churchill

For my own private satisfaction, I had rather be master of my own time than wear a diadem.

Bishop Berkeley

Any fool can make a rule. And every fool will mind it.

Henry David Thoreau

No one can read with profit that which he cannot learn to read with pleasure.

Thomas Hardy

I have only got down on to paper, really, three types of people: the person I think I am, the people who irritate me, and the people I’d like to be.

E. M. Forster

Words, words, mere words, no matter from the heart.

William Shakespeare

That’s something I think is growing on me as I get older: happy endings.

Alice Munro

Every author really wants to have letters printed in the papers. Unable to make the grade, he drops down a rung of the ladder and writes novels.

P. G. Wodehouse

To have great poets, there must be great audiences.

Walt Whitman

If you would have a faithful servant, and one that you like, serve yourself.

Benjamin Franklin

He who worships a punishing God becomes a surrogate punisher.

Hermaptios

Successful writers are not the ones who write the best sentences. They are the ones who keep writing. They are the ones who discover what is most important and strangest and most pleasurable in themselves, and keep believing in the value of their work, despite the difficulties.

Bonnie Friedman

And as to experience – well, think how little some good poets have had, or how much some bad ones have.

Elizabeth Bishop

There are men that will make you books and turn them loose into the world with as much dispatch as they would a dish of fritters.

Miguel de Cervantes

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

Joan Didion

Put the argument into a concrete shape, into an image, some hard phrase, round and solid as a ball, which they can see and handle and carry home with them, and the cause is half won.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

They must often change, who would be constant in happiness or wisdom.

Confucius

I respect a man who knows how to spell a word more than one way.

Mark Twain

A good aphorism is too hard for the tooth of time, and is not worn away by all the centuries, although it serves as food for every epoch.

Friedrich Nietzsche

For the cat is cryptic, and close to Aegyptus, and bearer of tales from forgotten cities in Meroë and Ophir. He is the kin of the jungle’s lords, and heir to the secrets of hoary and sinister Africa. The Sphinx is his cousin, and he speaks her language; but he is more ancient than the Sphinx, and remembers that which she hath forgotten.

H. P. Lovecraft

Beware of the need to be literal, for this often shrouds deeper knowledge.

Deena Metzger

The knower and the known are one.

Meister Eckhart

Despair is perfectly compatible with a good dinner, I promise you.

William Makepeace Thackeray

The great art of life is sensation: to feel that we exist, even in pain.

Lord Byron

Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.

Joseph Conrad

The world turns aside to let any man pass who knows where he is going.

Epictetus

It takes a heap of loafing to write a book.

Gertrude Stein

I do believe it is possible to create, even without ever writing a word or painting a picture, by simply molding one’s inner life. And that too is a deed.

Etty Hillesum

Men and words are ready made, and you, O Painter, if you do not know how to make your figures move, are like an orator who knows not how to use his words.

Leonardo da Vinci

Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.

Carl Jung

All the choir of heaven and furniture of earth have not any subsistence without a mind.

Bishop Berkeley

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

Words, like nature, half reveal and half conceal the soul within.

Alfred Lord Tennyson

If you ever catch on fire, try to avoid looking in a mirror, because I bet that will really throw you into a panic.

Jack Handy

Do exactly what you would do if you felt most secure.

Meister Eckhart

A proverb is a short sentence based on long experience.

Miguel de Cervantes

Love is the ultimate expression of the will to live.

Thomas Wolf

When you describe the miserable and unfortunate, and want to make the reader feel pity, try to be somewhat colder – that seems to give a kind of background to another’s grief, against which it stands out more clearly. Whereas in your story the characters cry and you sigh. Yes, be more cold. The more objective you are, the stronger will be the impression you make.

Anton Chekhov

I write to find out what I’m thinking about.

Edward Albee

The brotherhood of man is no mere poet’s fancy; it is a most depressing and humiliating reality.

Oscar Wilde

An onion can make people cry, but there’s never been a vegetable that can make people laugh.

Will Rogers

The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.

Carl Jung

Teatime – trying to write – God! I have a brain like a peanut. “Found a peanut, found a peanut,” echoes in my head the insane song.

John Dos Passos

The best way to send information is to wrap it up in a person.

Robert Oppenheimer

Get up very early and get going at once. In fact, work first and wash afterwards.

W. H. Auden

A writer’s inspiration is not just to create. He must eat three times a day.

Pierre Beaumarchais

Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Have you ever asked what is the root of all money?

Ayn Rand

Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from our insane passion for the truth.

Umberto Eco

In character, in manner, in style, in all things, the supreme excellence is simplicity.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Tediousness is the most fatal of all faults.

Samuel Johnson

When I want to read a novel, I write one.

Benjamin Disraeli

People fear the unkown; what they should fear is the known.

Deepak Chopra

The least of things with meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.

Carl Jung

At ebb tide I wrote a line upon the sand, and gave it all my heart and all my soul. At flood tide I returned to read what I had inscribed and found my ignorance upon the shore.

Kahlil Gibran

Would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of bar-room vernacular, that is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed but attentive.

Raymond Chandler

What we don’t know, rather than what we know, can be the very core of story.

Deena Metzger

The most beautiful thing about capitalism is the incompetence of dishonesty.

John Wall

Our free will is fate.

Oswald Spengler

To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.

George Santayana

Without darkness, there is no dream.

John Ruskin

Good writers are almost never dangerous.

John Gardner

Writing is not a genteel profession; it’s quite nasty and tough and kind of dirty.

Rosemary Mahoney

Flowers wither not the Spring;
Fathers perish not their love.
Spirit gambols in the flesh
Until what’s mortal cannot dance.
All that’s good in you shall live,
Survives the falling of the mask,
And if God asks me who you are,
I’ll say that part that did not die.

W. Hamnet Wall

I am not very scrupulous, I own, when I have a good idea, how I came into possession of it.

Lord Byron

From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.

Franz Kafka

Reminds me of my safari in Africa. Somebody forgot the corkscrew and for several days we had to live on nothing but food and water.

W. C. Fields

To make dictionaries is dull work.

Samuel Johnson

You’ve really got to start hitting the books because it’s no joke out here.

Harper Lee

The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves.

William Haxlitt

The measure of a man is what he does with power.

Pittacus

Conscience makes egoists of us all.

Oscar Wilde

The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

Proust

Children need encouragement. If a kid gets an answer right, tell him it was a lucky guess. That way he develops a good, lucky feeling.

Jack Handy

Forget all the rules. Forget about being published. Write for yourself and celebrate writing.

Melinda Haynes

Remember, a word is an invention, a symbol for an idea. Written text began as an artistic representation of a thought or event.

Edward J. Fraughton

At the root of our lives is a question, a series of questions, a quest, some fundamental concerns or obsessions; the mystery, the story, and the meaning of our lives reside there. A story also has a question at the core of it, and the question leads to the mystery within the story. The deeper one goes into the story, the more one learns, the more things are revealed, the deeper the mystery. Perhaps the story has no other function than to ask this question or to deepen the mystery.

Deena Metzger

Those blessings that I have to give, I give you freely, and those I do not have to give, you are seeking on your own.

Seth

At the side of the everlasting why, is a yes, and a yes, and a yes.

E. M. Forster

Art is the stored honey of the human soul, gathered on wings of misery and travail.

Theodore Dreiser

Where there is no imagination there is no horror.

Arthur Conan Doyle

The wheel is come full circle.

William Shakespeare

The facts are always less than what really happened.

Nadine Gordimer

I always write with a Ticonderoga #2 pencil. I started out with it, and I’ll go to that Great Bookstore in the Sky with one of those in my hand.

Robert Ludlum

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

Clarence Budington Kelland

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

Ursula K. LeGuin

Here’s to alcohol, the cause of – and solution to – all life’s problems.

Homer Simpson

Virtue is more to be feared than vice, because its excesses are not subject to the regulation of conscience.

Adam Smith

Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober.

James Thurber

Life is the childhood of immortality.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Democrats never agree on anything, that’s why they’re Democrats. If they agreed with each other, they would be Republicans.

Will Rogers

Knowledge rests not upon truth alone, but upon error also.

Carl Jung

A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.

E. M. Forster

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

William Faulkner

One great use of words is to hide our thoughts.

Voltaire

Whether it is done quickly or slowly, however splendid the results, the process of writing fiction is inherently, inevitably, indistinguishable from wasting time.

Deborah Eisenberg

Your body is the church where Nature asks to be reverenced.

Marquis de Sade

Those rituals of getting ready to write produce a kind of trance state.

John Barth

There is no happiness in love except at the end of an English novel.

Anthony Trollope

It’s sad that a family can be torn apart by something as simple as a pack of wild dogs.

Jack Handy

The world is a looking glass and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face.

William Makepeace Thackeray

This magnificent butterfly finds a little heap of dirt and sits still on it; but man will never on his heap of mud keep still.

Joseph Conrad

Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state.

William James

A proverb is much matter distilled into few words.

Buckminster Fuller

If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed to trap them before they escape.

Ray Bradbury

It’s hard to be aggressive when you’re confused.

Vince Lombardi

Dogs are philosophers. They soon forget.

P. G. Wodehouse

There is no substitute for craft. Art begins with craft, and there is no art until craft has been mastered.

Anthony Burgess

The poet produces the beautiful by fixing his attention on something real.

Simone Weil

That which is not good for the bee-hive cannot be good for the bees.

Marcus Aurelius

There is one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath.

Herman Melville

To Zeus all things are good, fair and just.

Heraclitus

My work is about emotions for which I have no words.

Robert Sturman

Nothing is easier than saying words. Nothing is harder than living them day after day.

Arthur Gordon

You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.

William Blake

Every stink that fights the ventilator thinks it is Don Quixote.

Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

It is also true that, in some instances, trauma, in the shape of early separation or bereavement, has steered the potentially creative person toward developing aspects of his personality which can find fulfillment in comparative isolation. But this does not mean that solitary, creative pursuits are themselves pathological.

Anthony Storr

When you are thwarted, it is your own attitude that is out of order.

Meister Eckhart

When in doubt, go for the dick joke.

Robin Williams

Love is when the desire to be desired takes you so badly that you feel you could die of it.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

What a writer wants to do is not what he does.

Jorge Luis Borges

The writer’s genetic inheritance and her or his experiences shape the writer into a unique individual, and it is this uniqueness that is the writer’s only stuff for sale.

James Gunn

The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.

John Steinbeck

Be thankful we’re not getting all the government we’re paying for.

Will Rogers

The work was like peeling an onion. The outer skin came off with difficulty, but in no time you’d be down to its innards, tears streaming from your eyes as more and more beautiful reductions became possible.

Edward Blishen

Few people have the imagination for reality.

Goethe

Of writing well the source and fountainhead is wise thinking.

Horace

Take one part Mercurii Solis, the preparation of which I have already taught in another place by its proper process. Draw off its airy water so that it becomes a subtle dust and calx. Then take two parts of our blessed oil, and pour the oil very slowly, drop by drop onto the dust of the Mercurii Solis, until everything has become absorbed. Put it in a vial, well sealed, into a heat of the first degree of the oven of secrets, and let it remain there for ten days and nights. You will then see your powder and oil quite dry, such that it has become a single piece of dust of a blackish grey colour. After ten days give it the second degree of heat, and the grey and black colour will slowly change into a whiteness so that it becomes more or less white. And at the end of these ten days, the matter will take on a beautiful rose white. But this may be ignored. For this colour is only due to the Mercurio Solis, that has swallowed up our blessed oil, and now covers it with the innermost part of its body. But by the power of the fire, our oil will again subdue such Mercurium Solis, and throw it into its innermost. And the oil with its very bright red colour will rule over it and remain on the outside. Therefore it is time, when twenty days have passed, that you open the window of the third degree. The external white colour and force will then completely recede inwardly, and the internal red colour will, by the force of the fire, become external. Keep also this degree of fire for ten days, without increase or decrease. You will then see your powder, that was previously white, now become very red. But for the time being this redness may be ignored, for it is still unfixed and volatile; and at the end of these ten days, when the thirtieth day has passed, you should open the last window of the fourth degree of fire, Let it stay in this degree for another ten days, and this very bright red powder will begin to melt. Let it stay in flux for these ten days. And when you take it out you will find on the bottom a very bright red and transparent stone, ruby colored.

Roger Bacon

Writing is hard work and bad for the health.

E. B. White

What can we writers learn from lizards, lift from birds?

Ray Bradbury

I still read everything aloud. I have a fundamental conviction that if a sentence cannot be read aloud with sincerity, conviction, and communicable emphasis, it’s not a good sentence. Good writing requires good rhythms and good words.

Richard Marius

A ray of imagination or of wisdom may enlighten the universe, and glow into remotest centuries.

Bishop Berkeley

Life isn’t fair. It’s just fairer than death, that’s all.

William Goldman

To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it’s about, but the music the words make.

Truman Capote

It is a fact that cannot be denied: the wickedness of others becomes our own wickedness because it kindles something evil in our own hearts.

Carl Jung

i do not put Collers what do not Belong. I Think it spoils The pictures. There have Been a lot of paintins spoiled By putin Collers where They do not Blong.

Alfred Wallis

Shape your heart to front the hour, but dream not that the hours will last.

Alfred Lord Tennyson

I have no pretensions whatever to that kind of elegance which consists in tormenting a respectable man.

Jane Austen

If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children, I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life.

Rachel Carson

Shouldn’t the philosopher be able to rise above a faith in grammar?

Friedrich Nietzsche

I have great hopes that we shall love each other all our lives as much as if we had never married at all.

Lord Byron

Let us never accept the point of view that mysteries are written by hacks. The poorest of us shed our blood over every chapter. The best of us start from scratch with every new book.

Raymond Chandler

I finished my play today. Three acts, six scenes, a masterpiece completed in a few weeks. The play only exists as a tiny scrawl in my notebooks – things I carry about in my pockets.

George Bernard Shaw

Give the people a new word and they think they have a new fact.

Willa Cather

I am not young enough to know everything.

James M. Barrie

Television is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.

T. S. Eliot

Come forth into the light of things, let nature be your teacher.

William Wordsworth

It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.

Jonathan Swift

If you are not discouraged about your writing on a regular basis, you may not be trying hard enough. Any challenging pursuit will encounter frequent patches of frustration. Writing is nothing if not challenging.

Maxwell Perkins

The one thing that don’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.

Harper Lee

The most attractive sentences are not perhaps the wisest, but the surest and soundest.

Henry David Thoreau

There’s the wretched business of getting from lunch to supper.

Virginia Woolf

To achieve the essence of real externality, whether of time or space or dimension, one must forget that such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such local attributes of a negligible and temporary race called mankind, have any existence at all. Only the human scenes and characters must have human qualities. These must be handled with unsparing realism, but when we cross the line to the boundless and hideous unknown – the shadow-haunted Outside – we must remember to leave our humanity and terrestrialism at the threshold.

H. P. Lovecraft

Writing only leads to more writing.

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

A powerful agent is the right word. Whenever we come upon one of those intensely right words in a book or newspaper the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt.

Mark Twain

Ignorance is like a delicate flower: touch it and the bloom is gone.

Oscar Wilde

You must be prepared to work always without applause.

Ernest Hemingway

Resist the temptation to try to use dazzling style to conceal weakness of substance.

Stanley Schmidt

A prince who is not himself wise cannot be well advised.

Machiavelli

Too many words spoil the poem.

John McEnulty

Only the educated are free.

Epictetus

As vast as this space without is the tiny space within your heart: heaven and earth are found in it, fire and air, sun and moon, lightning and the constellations, whatever belongs to you here below and all that doesn’t, all this is gathered in the tiny space within your heart.

Chandogya Upanishad

A text cannot say everything. It can only go as far as all words can go. Beyond them begins another zone, a zone of mystery, of silence, which one calls the atmosphere.

Gaston Baty

I discovered that if I trusted my subconscious, or imagination, whatever you want to call it, and if I made the characters as real and honest as I could, then no matter how complex the pattern being woven, my subconscious would find ways to tie it together.

Tad Williams

Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy, the process of setting man free from men.

Ayn Rand

Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Consider the daffodil. And while you’re doing that, I’ll be over here, looking through your stuff.

Jack Handy

Definitions would be good things if we did not use words to make them.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.

Carl Jung

Do the best you can, and don’t take life too serious.

Will Rogers

In the dark time, the eye begins to see.

Theodore Roethke

I write, therefore, I am.

Samuel Johnson

By writing much, one learns to write well.

Robert Southey

Duty is what one expects from others, it is not what one does oneself.

Oscar Wilde

Women are naturally secretive, and they like to do their own secreting.

Arthur Conan Doyle

Nonsense and beauty have close connections.

E. M. Forster

From the top of the mountain, you cannot see the mountain.

Frank Herbert

The rapture of pursuing is the prize the vanquished gain.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Fools are my theme, let satire be my song.

Lord Byron

Today was good. Today was fun. Tomorrow is another one.

Dr Seuss

If there are frontiers between the civilized and barbaric, between the meaningful and the unmeaning, they are not lines on a map nor are they regions of the earth. They are boundaries of the mind alone.

Ursula K. LeGuin

Pen names are masks that allow us to unmask ourselves.

C. Astrid Weber

The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel is that it be interesting.

Henry James

Prose wanders around with a lantern and laboriously schedules and verifies the details and particulars of a valley and its frame of crags and peaks, then poetry comes and lays bare the whole landscape with a single splendid flash.

Mark Twain

The judgement of the intellect is only part of the truth.

Carl Jung

We are alike in pickiness but not in the subject matter we are picking about.

Rhonda Burtz

The ego is the enemy because it is against love. When I look at myself, I don’t love others. When I want to occupy for myself what is yours, I become the killer of my brother, like Cain killed Abel. When I want to satisfy myself, this satisfaction is gained through sacrificing the freedom of the other. Then my ego becomes my lord, my god, and there is no stronger temptation than this. Because to us, this ego may seem like a diamond. It has a shine like gold. But whatever is shining is not gold. The ego is just like a fire without light, a fire without warmth, a fire without life. It seems that it has many sides and many possibilities – but what is this possibility? What is ego? Only the means by which I protect myself as if I were in a battle, as if every other person is my enemy, and the only thing I care about is winning the victory.

Archimandrite Dionysios

Greatness means going on, going on means going far, and going far means turning back.

Lao Tzu

A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare.

Henry David Thoreau

Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure only death can stop it.

Ernest Hemingway

Virtue would not go to such lengths if vanity did not keep her company.

La Rouchefaucauld

Live dangerously and you live right.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Make a point ever so clear, it is great odds that any man whose habits and the bent of whose mind lie a contrary way, shall be unable to comprehend it. So weak a thing is reason in competition with inclination.

Bishop Berkeley

When I say beautiful things, I’m not necessarily living them; when I live them, the beautiful thing is that words aren’t necessary.

Brock Tully

I never want to see anyone, and I never want to go anywhere or do anything. I just want to write.

P. G. Wodehouse

Everyone has one good poem in his hidden head.

Don Welch

Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams?

Alfred Lord Tennyson

I suppose publishers are untrustworthy. They certainly look it.

Oscar Wilde

The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.

Meister Eckhart

The praise that comes from love does not make us vain, but more humble.

James M. Barrie

To live happily is an inward power of the soul.

Marcus Aurelius

Every moment of light and dark is a miracle.

Walt Whitman

Language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.

Gustave Flaubert

I am a verb.

Ulysses S. Grant

I believe I hear the philosophers protesting that it can only be misery to live in folly, illusion, deception, and ignorance, but it isn’t – it’s human.

Erasmus

It is impossible to discourage the real writers – they don’t give a damn what you say, they’re going to write.

Sinclair Lewis

Crime is terribly revealing. Try and vary your methods as you will, your tastes, your habits, your attitude of mind, and your soul is revealed by your actions.

Agatha Christie

I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble. They can never be solved but only outgrown.

Carl Jung

Art is utterance.

Asterio Tecson

Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes, playing a poor hand well.

Jack London

A fool and his money are soon elected.

Will Rogers

The arts are not decorative. They are essential to our comprehension of consciousness and ourselves.

Edward Albee

Characterization is an accident that flows out of action and dialogue.

Jack Woodford

Follow your honest convictions and be strong.

William Makepeace Thackeray

Those who think to win the world
by doing something to it,
I see them come to grief.
For the world is a sacred object.
Nothing is to be done to it.
To do anything is to damage it.
To seize it is to lose it.

Lao Tzu

He suffered occasionally from a rush of words to the head.

Herbert Samuel

The adjective is the banana peel of the parts of speech.

Clifton Fadiman

God: a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man’s power to conceive.

Ayn Rand

He reproduced himself with humble objectivity, with the unquestioning matter-of-fact interest of a dog who sees himself in a mirror and thinks: there’s another dog.

Rainer Maria Rilke

There is nothing so strong or safe in an emergency of life as the simple truth.

Charles Dickens

I too love theories. They are so much more concrete than reality.

P. Q. Wall

There are two kinds of writer: those that make you think, and those that make you wonder.

Brian Aldiss

Poetry creates the myth, the prose writer draws its portrait.

Jean-Paul Sartre

All human beings have an innate need to hear and tell stories and to have a story to live by. Religion, whatever else it has done, has provided one of the main ways of meeting this abiding need.

Harvey Cox

Happiness is your birthright. It shouldn’t depend upon you achieving something.

Steve Chandler

When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet. I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

Virginia Woolf

It is the tortured who turn into torturers.

Carl Jung

The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Each paragraph is good in itself and there are some pages that are perfect, I feel certain. But just because of this, it isn’t getting on. It’s a series of well-turned, ordered paragraphs which do not flow on from each other. I shall have to unscrew them, loosen the joints, as one does with the masts of a ship when one wants the sail to take more wind.

Gustave Flaubert

When you see the same thing over and over again your brain expends less and less energy. Your mind already knows what it’s seeing, so it doesn’t make the effort to process the event again.

Dr. Gregory Berns

Death is only a larger kind of going abroad.

Samuel Butler

Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

To create something you must be something.

Goethe

I once had a rose named after me and was very flattered. But I was not so pleased to read the description in the catalogue: “No good in a bed, but fine up against a wall.”

Eleanor Roosevelt

Just because you’re a perfectionist doesn’t mean you’re perfect.

Jack Nicholson

How can the lord of ten thousand chariots let his own person weigh less in the balance than his land?

Lao Tzu

Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself. She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance. She is a veil, rather than a mirror. She has flowers that no forests know of, birds that no woodland possesses. She makes and unmakes many worlds, and can draw the moon from heaven with a scarlet thread.

Oscar Wilde

If you could be freed from self, then you would have the nature of the highest angels as completely as you now have your own.

Meister Eckhart

Art is a step from what is obvious and well-known toward what is arcane and concealed.

Kahlil Gibran

The two most beautiful words in the English language are Check Enclosed.

Dorothy Parker

I think the mistake a lot of us make is thinking the state-appointed shrink is our friend.

Jack Handy

It is only hope which is real, and reality is a bitterness and a deceit.

William Makepeace Thackeray

Why wouldn’t you write to escape yourself as much as you might write to express yourself? It’s far more interesting to write about others.

Susan Sontag

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head, and as you get older you become more skillful casting them.

Gore Vidal

I have just read your lousy review. You sound like a frustrated old man who never made a success, an eight ulcer man on a four ulcer job. I have never met you but if I do, you’ll need a new nose.

Harry S. Truman

Your work is to discover your world and then with your all your heart give yourself to it.

Buddha

My crown is called content; a crown it is that seldom kings enjoy.

William Shakespeare

The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.

Robert Frost

Between two worlds life hovers like a star, twixt night and morn, upon the horizon’s verge.

Lord Byron

One is certain of nothing but the truth of one’s own emotions.

E. M. Forster

The bible says to love your enemies. Just for practice, why don’t you try it out on your friends?

Will Rogers

If the public likes you, you’re good.

Mickey Spillane

Dancing is poetry with arms and legs.

Charles Baudelaire

Andy Warhol is the only genius I’ve ever known with an I.Q. of 60.

Gore Vidal

Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile.

Sinclair Lewis

I hate books; they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about.

Jean Jacques Rousseau

You gotta have swine to show you where the truffles are.

Edward Albee

Keep me away from the wisdom which does not cry, the philosophy which does not laugh, and the greatness which does not bow before children.

Kahlil Gibran

One’s feelings waste themselves in words. They ought all to be distilled into actions and into actions which bring results.

Florence Nightingale

Earth’s crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God. But only he who sees takes off his shoes.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Destruction perfects that which is good; for the good cannot appear on account of that which conceals it.

Paracelcus

Go to your bosom: knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know.

William Shakespeare

Any man who does not accept the conditions of life sells his soul.

Charles Baudelaire

Overcome fear, behold wonder.

Richard Bach

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

Jean Jacques Rousseau

The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.

Carl Jung

When an idea strikes, you drop everything and when your work bell tolls, you answer it.

Eric Maisel

The price of inaction is far greater than the cost of making a mistake.

Meister Eckhart

Never underestimate something born in a manger.

Katrina Kern

The wound is the resource.

Brugh Joy

I have to use words to say it. Words that violate and betray what they seem to be making possible. Words, in other words, that are sadly not to be trusted.

Selima Hill

The nineteenth century, as we know it, is largely an invention of Balzac.

Oscar Wilde

Every heart has its secret sorrows which the world knows not, and oftentimes we call a man cold, when he is only sad.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

In argument, similes are like songs in love; they describe much, but prove nothing.

Franz Kafka

We have first raised a dust and then complain we cannot see.

Bishop Berkeley

How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book!

Jane Austen

The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.

William James

Perfect Bodies as Sol and Luna are endued with a perfect seed; and therefore under the hard crust of the perfect Metals the Perfect Seed lies hid. And he that knows how to take it out by the Philosophers’ Solution, hath entered upon the royal highway; for in Gold the seeds of Gold doth lie, though buried in Obscurity.

The Hermetic Arcanum

There are few more impressive sights in the world than a Scotsman on the make.

James M. Barrie

Whatever becomes of the work, the occupation of writing has been a real boon to me. It took me out of dark and desolate reality into an unreal but happier region.

Charlotte Bronte

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

Tom Stoppard

Who is the wisest man? He who neither knows or wishes for anything else than what happens.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Loss is nothing but change, and change is Nature’s delight.

Marcus Aurelius

That’s very nice if they want to publish you, but don’t pay too much attention to it. Just continue to write.

Natalie Goldberg

The writer who cannot sometimes throw away a thought about which another man would have written dissertations, without worry whether or not the reader will find it, will never become a great writer.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Give light, and the darkness will disappear of itself.

Erasmus

Never assume the obvious is true.

William Safire

I rise to taste the dawn, and find that love alone will shine today.

Ken Wilber

There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.

William Shakespeare

Who would dare assign to art the sterile function of imitating nature?

Charles Baudelaire

A narcissist is someone better-looking than you are.

Gore Vidal

One must let the play happen to one; one must let the mind loose to respond as it will, to receive impressions, to sense rather than know, to gather rather than immediately understand.

Edward Albee

All our words are but crumbs that fall down from the feast of the mind.

Kahlil Gibran

Being a hero is about the shortest-lived profession on earth.

Will Rogers

You don’t talk about paintings, you look at them.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind.

Wolcott Gibbs

It takes a big man to cry, but it takes a bigger man to laugh at that man.

Jack Handy

I do detest everything which is not perfectly mutual.

Lord Byron

Make the best use of what is in your power, and take the rest as it happens.

Epictetus

Looking foolish does the spirit good. The need not to look foolish is one of youth’s many burdens; as we get older we are exempted it from more and more, and float upward in our heedlessness, singing Gratia Dei sum quod sum.

John Updike

He that will believe only what he can fully comprehend must have a long head or a very short creed.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

The desire to write grows with writing.

Erasmus

The writer who cares more about words than about story – characters, action, setting, atmosphere – is unlikely to create a vivid and continuous dream.

John Gardner

To listen to some devout people, one would imagine that God never laughs.

Sri Aurobindo

Some days I’m a particle, some days I’m a wave.

David Kern

Every beast is driven to pasture by a blow.

Heraclitus

It’s nothing until I call it.

The Umpire

The artist’s only responsibility is his art. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate. Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies.

William Faulkner

Beware of self-indulgence. If you believe you can make a living as a writer, you already have enough ego.

David Brin

Jade is praised as precious, but its strength is being stone.

Lao Tzu

Is sloppiness in speech caused by ignorance or apathy? I don’t know and I don’t care.

William Safire

Winter is not a season, it’s an occupation.

Sinclair Lewis

Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.

Gore Vidal

Sweet are the uses of adversity.

William Shakespeare

Trust in dreams, for in them is hidden the gate to eternity.

Kahlil Gibran

The Vessel of Hermes which the Stoicks have concealed is not a Necromantical Vessel, but it is the Measure of your Fire.

Mary the Prophetess

It’s no disgrace to, in the end, restore order. And punish the wicked and, in some way, reward the righteous.

John Updike

Always be a poet, even in prose.

Charles Baudelaire

All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination?

Carl Jung

Something unpleasant is coming when men are anxious to tell the truth.

Benjamin Disraeli

You really ought to read more books – you know, those things that look like blocks but come apart on one side.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Every book should have its own voice – what you hear in your head as you read to yourself.

Mary Lee Settle

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

Marcel Marceau

Nature hath framed strange fellows in her time.

William Shakespeare

Plant and your spouse plants with you; weed and you weed alone.

Jean Jacques Rousseau

Grace is not a stationary thing; it is always found in a Becoming.

Meister Eckhart

I fear those big words which make us so unhappy.

James Joyce

Nobody of any real culture, for instance, ever talks nowadays about the beauty of a sunset. Sunsets are quite old-fashioned.

Oscar Wilde

A man’s most open actions have a secret side to them.

Joseph Conrad

Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things.

William James

Hence Hermes calls fire the father of the whole world, because it is the Sun of our Art, and air, Moon, and water ascend from it. The earth is the nurse of the Stone. When the earth receives the rays of the Sun and Moon, a new body is born, like a new foetus in the mother’s womb. The earth receives and digests the light of Sun and Moon, and imparts food to its foetus day by day, till it becomes great and strong, and puts off its blackness and defilement, and is changed to a different colour. This, child, which is called our daughter, represents our Stone, which is born anew of the Sun and Moon, when the spirit, or the water that ascended, is gradually transmuted into the body, and the body is born anew, and grows and increases in size like the foetus in the mother’s womb. Thus the Stone is generated from the first substance, which contains the four elements; it is brought forth by two things, the body and the spirit; the wind bears it in its womb, for it carries the Stone upward from earth to heaven, and down again from heaven to earth. Thus the Stone receives increase from above and from below, and is born a second time, just as every other foetus is generated in the maternal womb; as all created things bring forth their young, even so does the air, or wind, bring forth our Stone.

Unknown

Where words fail, music speaks.

Hans Christian Andersen

There are some people who live in a dream world, and there are some who face reality; and then there are those who turn one into the other.

Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus

A writer never reads his work. For him, it is the unreadable, a secret, and he cannot remain face to face with it. A secret, because he is separated from it.

Maurice Blanchot

Being a real writer means being able to do the work on a bad day.

Norman Mailer

If you only knock long enough and loud enough at the gate, you are sure to wake up somebody.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Hope is the struggle of the soul, breaking loose from what is perishable, and attesting her eternity.

Herman Melville

Like stones, words are laborious and unforgiving, and the fitting of them together, like the fitting of stones, demands great patience and strength of purpose and particular skill.

Edmund Morrison

Nurture your mind with great thoughts. To believe in the heroic makes heroes.

Benjamin Disraeli

I can’t stand cheap people. It makes me real mad when someone says something like, “Hey, when are you going to pay me that $100 you owe me?” or “Do you have that 50 bucks you borrowed?” Man, quit being so cheap!

Jack Handy

Words make love with one another.

Andre Breton

There is one reason, and one reason only, that readers get excited about a novel: great storytelling.

Donald Maass

Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression. The chasm is never completely bridged. We all have the conviction, perhaps illusory, that we have much more to say than appears on the paper.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

Art is the poetry of how we all might live, and economics the prose of how we do.

James Wall Sr.

It is harder to hide feelings we have than to feign those we lack.

La Rouchefaucauld

Seeing much, suffering much, and studying much, are the three pillars of learning.

Benjamin Disraeli

A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people’s patience.

John Updike

Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven’t committed.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

The water and the air will ascend first, and afterwards the element of fire, which expert artists recognise.

Paracelsus

Give me a condor’s quill! Give me Vesuvius’ crater for an inkstand!

Herman Melville

Words were medicine; they were magic and invisible. They came from nothing into sound and meaning. They were beyond price; they could neither be bought nor sold.

Navarre Scott Momaday

He looked like a halibut which had been asked by another halibut to lend it a couple of quid till next Wednesday.

P. G. Wodehouse

There’s luck in art. There’s the gift. You can’t earn that. But you can learn skill, you can earn it. You can learn to deserve your gift.

Ursula K. Le Guin

It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.

Leonardo da Vinci

Beware the hobby that eats.

Benjamin Franklin

Fear is the mother of morality.

Friedrich Nietzsche

No matter how much cats fight, there always seem to be plenty of kittens.

Abraham Lincoln

Write about what really interests you, whether it is real things or imaginary things, and nothing else.

C. S. Lewis

The great square has no corners.
The great vessel is never finished.
The great tone is barely heard.
The great thought can’t be thought.

Lao Tzu

And this, our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.

William Shakespeare

Pain and foolishness lead to great bliss and complete knowledge, for Eternal Wisdom created nothing under the sun in vain.

Kahlil Gibran

You must be unintimidated by your own thoughts.

Nikki Giovanni

Gardens are not made by singing “Oh, how beautiful,” and sitting in the shade.

Rudyard Kipling

Great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion.

Robert Burton

Those people who recognize that imagination is reality’s master we call sages, and those who act upon it we call artists or lunatics.

Tom Robbins

If a writer wrote merely for his time, I would have to break my pen and throw it away.

Victor Hugo

Once we choose hope, everything is possible.

Christopher Reeve

Tension is wonderful for making people laugh.

John Cleese

The meaning of being only becomes apparent in events.

Alvin Kernan

To be a writer is to sit down at one’s desk in the chill portion of every day, and to write; not waiting for the little jet of the blue flame of genius to start from the breastbone – just plain going at it.

John Hersey

There are certain words which are nearer and dearer to a man than any others.

Nikolai Gogol

Mistakes are the portals of discovery.

James Joyce

He must be very ignorant for he answers every question he is asked.

Voltaire

My God, do you know what poems like that cost? They’re not written vicariously: they come out of actual suffering, real madness.

Theodore Roethke

The silliest woman can manage a clever man; but it needs a very clever woman to manage a fool.

Rudyard Kipling

Skill in writing frees you to write what you want to write.

Ursula K. Le Guin

If you keep thinking about what you want to do or what you hope will happen, you don’t do it, and it won’t happen.

Erasmus

I have treated many hundreds of patients. Among those in the second half of life – that is to say, over 35 – there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life.

Carl Jung

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.

Voltaire

The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.

Rudyard Kipling

Craft enables art.

Ursula K. Le Guin

Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.

John Updike

Where every something, being blent together, turns to a wild of nothing.

William Shakespeare

Prohibition is better than no liquor at all.

Will Rogers

Every knave is a thorough knave, and a thorough knave is a knave throughout.

Bishop Berkeley

Perhaps the most important word in success and happiness is the word ask.

Brian Tracy

I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read on the train.

Oscar Wilde

If you want to write it your own way, that’s the chance you take.

Marchette Chute

Happiness is not a possession to be prized, it is a quality of thought.

Daphne DuMaurier

I have always had the ability to attach my demons to my chariot.

Ingmar Bergman

Everything we feel is made of Time. All the beauties of life are shaped by it.

Peter Shaffer

Listen to what you know instead of what you fear.

Richard Bach

I am a part of all I have read.

John Kieran

As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.

Seneca

To live till you die is to live long enough.

Lao Tzu

There are moments when an object, a person, a living creature is utterly present and naked, is utterly itself, and this startling moment can only be called beauty. This presents a dilemma. Is the tree showing itself to me, or am I allowing myself to see?

Deena Metzger

I’m not alone when I’m writing – the language itself, like a kind of trampoline, is there helping me.

Sir Edward William Stafford

So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another, only a look and a voice; then darkness again and a silence.

Longfellow

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

Gustav Mahler

Words in prose ought to express the intended meaning: if they attract attention to themselves, it is a fault. In the very best styles you read page after page without noticing the medium.

Samuel Tayler Coleridge

Everyone is more or less mad on one point.

Rudyard Kipling

It is the chiefest point of happiness that a man is willing to be what he is.

Erasmus

There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem.

Gore Vidal

Good work in language presupposes and depends on a real knowledge of things.

Anne Sullivan

Soon or late love is his own avenger.

Lord Byron

For the Creator, there is no poverty.

Rainer Maria Rilke

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

Tapani Bagge

There lives the dearest freshness, deep down things.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

The presence of beauty heals.

Deena Metzger

All that is, isn’t. All that isn’t, is.

Scott Jeffries

All evil comes from the old. They grow fat on ideas and young men die of them.

Jean Anouilh

Authorship is not a trade, it is an inspiration; its habitation is all out under the sky, and everywhere the winds are blowing and the sun is shining and the creatures of God are free.

Mark Twain

We are all full of weakness and errors; let us mutually pardon each other our follies – it is the first law of nature.

Voltaire

The men who succeed are the few who have the ambition and willpower to develop themselves.

Robert Burton

The great way is low and plain, but people like shortcuts over the mountains.

Lao Tzu

Reading, solitude, idleness, a soft and sedentary life, intercourse with women and young people, these are perilous paths for a young man, and lead him constantly into danger.

Jean Jacques Rousseau

The earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.

Kahlil Gibran

History is not another name for the past. It is the name for stories about the past.

Alan John Percivale Taylor

Art never expresses anything but itself.

Oscar Wilde

I am not afraid of storms for I am learning how to sail my ship.

Louisa May Alcott

Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.

William James

Jazz is not dead, it just smells funny.

Frank Zappa

Getting even is one reason for writing.

William Gass

Look if you like, but you will have to leap.

W. H. Auden

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men’s writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.

Socrates

The fool wonders, the wise man asks.

Benjamin Disraeli

Things are beautiful if you love them.

Jean Anouilh

It is remarkable how closely the history of the apple tree is connected with that of man.

Henry David Thoreau

I even shower with my pen, in case any ideas drip out of the waterhead.

Graycie Harmon

Short words are best and the old words when short are best of all.

Winston Churchill

It is no use to blame the looking glass if your face is awry.

Nikolai Gogol

He hath never fed of the dainties that are bred in a book; he hath not eat paper; he hath not drunk ink; his intellect is not replenished.

William Shakespeare

Coincidences are most striking when they have an air of design.

Aristotle

When I use a word, it means what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.

Humpty Dumpty

Common sense tells us that the things of the earth exist only a little, and that true reality is only in dreams.

Charles Baudelaire

There is no rule more invariable than that we are paid for our suspicions by finding what we suspect.

Henry David Thoreau

Happiness is no vague dream. Of that I now feel certain.

George Sand

The most intense conflicts, if overcome, leave behind a sense of security and calm that is not easily disturbed. It is just these intense conflicts and their conflagration which are needed to produce valuable and lasting results.

Carl Jung

Art is either plagarism or revolution.

Paul Gaugain

It is not study alone that produces a writer; it is intensity.

Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton

Must eyes be all in all, the tongue and ear nothing?

William Wordsworth

The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when someone asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.

Henry David Thoreau

It is of interest to note that while some dolphins are reported to have learned up to 50 words of English, no human has been reported to have learned dolphinese.

Carl Sagan

Better not take a dog on the space shuttle, because if he sticks his head out when you’re coming home his face might burn up.

Jack Handy

Women desire six things: They want their husbands to be brave, wise, rich, generous, obedient to wife, and lively in bed.

Geoffrey Chaucer

Literature takes shape and life in the body, in the wombs of the mother tongue: always: and the Fathers of Culture get anxious about paternity. They start talking about legitimacy. They steal the baby. They ensure by every means that the artist, the writer, is male. This involves intellectual abortion by centuries of women artists, infanticide of works by women writers, and a whole medical corps of sterilizing critics working to purify the Canon, to reduce the subject matter and style of literature to something Ernest Hemingway could have understood.

Ursula K. Le Guin

The fibers of all things have their tension and are strained like the strings of an instrument.

Henry David Thoreau

Everybody wants to be somebody; nobody wants to grow.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Have you noticed that life, with murders and catastrophes and fabulous inheritances, happens almost exclusively in newspapers?

Jean Anouilh

The true epicure in the terrible, to whom a new thrill of unutterable ghastliness is the chief end and justification of existence, esteems most of all the ancient, lonely farmhouses of backwoods New England; for there the dark elements of strength, solitude, grotesqueness, and ignorance combine to form the perfection of the hideous.

H. P. Lovecraft

Look in my face; my name is Might-Have-Been. I am also called No-More, Too-Late, Farewell.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Tragedy, for me, is not a conflict between right and wrong, but between two different kinds of right.

Peter Shaffer

Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.

Henry David Thoreau

Pick today’s fruits, not relying on the future in the slightest.

Horace

Don’t use metaphors in fantasy; your readers will take them literally.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden

A good name is seldom got by giving it to oneself.

William Wycherly

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time, and all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death.

William Shakespeare

To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.

Henry David Thoreau

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

Edwin Schlossberg

In this country it is a good thing to kill an admiral from time to time to encourage the others.

Voltaire

Nature doesn’t make long speeches.

Lao Tzu

Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism.

John Updike

Literature doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is money and getting your teeth fixed!

Delmore Schwartz

I spend half my time trying to learn the secrets of other writers – to apply them to the expression of my own thoughts.

Shirley Ann Grau

We shall see but a little way if we require to understand what we see.

Henry David Thoreau

Learning is not compulsory. Neither is survival.

W. Edwards Deming

O Thou with whom are all treasures of wisdom and knowledge, out of whose infinite mind this universal frame sprang forth in a moment of time, grant unto me grace to know Thy blessedness and Thy goodness. In no other way shall I come to the knowledge of the Blessed Stone.

George Ripley

Women want love to be a novel, men a short story.

Daphne du Maurier

A good portion of speaking will consist in knowing how to lie.

Erasmus

I think we all have a need to know what we do not need to know.

William Safire

All that spirits desire, spirits attain.

Kahlil Gibran

The mystery story is two stories in one: the story of what happened and the story of what appeared to happen.

Mary Roberts Rinehart

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

Pat Schneider

Only that day dawns to which we are awake.

Henry David Thoreau

The ear is the avenue to the heart.

Voltaire

Read something luminous at night.

Edmund Wilson

More energy, less taste! Remember, keep moving!

Robert Frank

Use the fewest words to sing your song.

Rowland Hill

Story is change.

Ursula K. Le Guin

The crux of a weird tale is something which could not possibly happen.

H. P. Lovecraft

We are energy beings.

Jill Bolte Taylor

It is not enough merely to love literature, if one wishes to spend one’s life as a writer. It is a dangerous undertaking on the most primitive level. For, it seems to me, the act of writing with serious intent involves enormous personal risk. It entails the ongoing courage for self-discovery. It means one will walk forever on the tightrope, with each new step presenting the possibility of learning a truth about oneself that is too terrible to bear.

Harlan Ellison

One should examine oneself for a very long time before thinking of condemming others.

Molière

These poems, with all their crudities, doubts, and confusions, are written for the love of Man and in praise of God, and I’d be a damn fool if they weren’t.

Dylan Thomas

Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.

William Butler Yeats

The hand is an instrument for using instruments; and the mind is a form for using forms.

Aristotle

The sky above the port was the color of television.

William Gibson

If suffer we must, let us suffer on the heights.

Victor Hugo

I’d rather be a could-be if I cannot be an are; because a could-be is a maybe who is reaching for a star. I’d rather be a has-been than a might-have-been by far; for a might-have-been has never been, but a has-been was once an are.

Milton Berle

The best kind of writing, and the biggest thrill in writing, is to suddenly read a line from your typewriter that you didn’t know was in you.

Larry L. King

The brain that doesn’t feed itself, eats itself.

Gore Vidal

It might seem that the writer needs the gift of mimicry, like an impersonator, to achieve this variety of voices. But it isn’t that. It’s more like what a serious actor does, sinking self in character-self. It’s a willingness to be the characters, letting what they think and say rise from inside them. It’s a willingness to share control with one’s creation.

Ursula K. Le Guin

Stupidity is no excuse for not thinking.

Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

T. S. Eliot

My imagination is a monastery and I am its monk.

John Keats

He that writes to himself writes to an eternal public.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Satire is tragedy plus time.

Lenny Bruce

Live your life, do your work, then take your hat.

Henry David Thoreau

A notepad by the bedside accounts for half the earnings of my livelihood.

Ever Garrison

Don’t explain why it works; explain how you use it.

Steven Brust

Pride is still aiming at the best abodes,
Men would be angels, angels would be gods.
Aspiring to be gods, if angels fell;
Aspiring to be angels men rebel.

Alexander Pope

The most effective effort is continuing effort, which patience makes possible.

Unknown

Protest crying is very hard to soothe.

Dr. Judith K. Nelson

To say yes, you have to sweat and roll up your sleeves and plunge both hands into life up to the elbows. It is easy to say no, even if saying no means death.

Jean Anouilh

Illusion is the first of all pleasures.

Voltaire

The main thing is to take a blank sheet of paper and write the first sentence. From that first sentence springs the second, by some miracle, and then the subject emerges – what the critics call the basic concept or the conception of the work.

Valentin Katayev

Think you’re escaping and run into yourself.

James Joyce

An ounce of mother is worth a pound of clergy.

Rudyard Kipling

Sometimes a person has to go a very long distance out of his way to come back a short distance correctly.

Edward Albee

Once I unlocked the mystery of the alphabet that led to words, a multitude of words connecting me to the world, there was no stopping me.

Gloria Naylor

Writing itself is an act of faith, and nothing else.

E. B. White

Living people are soft and tender. Corpses are hard and stiff.

Lao Tzu

Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony.

Charles Baudelaire

The obvious is that which is never seen until someone expresses it simply.

Kahlil Gibran

Silence is the mother of truth.

Benjamin Disraeli

Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

All nature is but art unknown to thee.

Alexander Pope

The innocent and the beautiful have no enemy but time.

William Butler Yeats

To make something well is to give yourself to it, to seek wholeness, to follow spirit. To learn to make something well can take your whole life.

Ursula K. Le Guin

The oldest, shortest words – yes and no – are those which require the most thought.

Pythagoras

I always write the end of everything first. Then I go back to the beginning. I mean, it’s always nice to know where you’re going, is my theory.

Truman Capote

Stories have a beginning, a middle and an end. But not necessarily in that order.

Robert Silverberg

There is no “what should be,” there is only what is.

Lenny Bruce

No great artist ever sees things as they really are.

Oscar Wilde

Sometimes I think I’d be better off dead. No, wait, not me, you.

Jack Handy

I never started from ideas but always from character.

Ivan Turgenev

Name names. Make your writing physical. Use lots of exact nouns. Food is an idea; black-bean soup is a thing. Naming not only makes the writing more visceral, it makes the reader trust you. And use your own expertise, whatever insider information you have. Use words like soffit, draw shave, spit valve.

David Long

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

John Keats

When one is writing a novel in the first person, one must be that person.

Daphne du Maurier

And in fact, I think one of the best guides to telling you who you are, and I think children use it all the time for this purpose, is fantasy.

Peter Shaffer

It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.

Charles Dickens

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

Leonardo da Vinci

I am two fools I know, for loving and for saying so.

John Donne

Let thy speech be better than silence, or be silent.

Dionysius the Elder

The whole object of the Prophets and the Sages was to declare that a limit is set to human reason where it must halt.

Maimonides

Speaking openly is the gift we give each other.

Deena Metzger

Things are not only what they are. They are, in very important respects, what they seem to be.

Hubert Humphrey

God’s finger touched him, and he slept.

Alfred Lord Tennyson

It is better to be alone than in bad company.

George Washington

Love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is done well.

Vincent Van Gogh

It is books that are a key to the wide world; if you can’t do anything else, read all that you can.

Jane Hamilton

Write with no one looking over your shoulder.

Barbara Kingsolver

Fantasy doesn’t have to be fantastic.

Terry Pratchett

I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

Walt Whitman

Some nights, I just want to pour out my soul into a glass and drink it.

Don Kraus

A man may as well expect to grow stronger by always eating as wiser by always reading.

Jeremy Collier

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.

Alexander Pope

When one burns one’s bridges, what a very nice fire it makes.

Dylan Thomas

Fictional characters soon take on a life of their own. They run with the bit between their teeth.

Jay Parini

The vague is more dangerous than the arid.

Theodore Roethke

For I have neither wit, nor words, nor worth, action, nor utterance, nor the power of speech to stir men’s blood; I only speak right on.

William Shakespeare

If writing seems hard, it’s because it is hard.

William Zinsser

Let’s have some new cliches.

Samuel Goldwyn

The mind I love must have wild places, a tangled orchard where dark damsons drop in the heavy grass, an overgrown little wood, the chance of a snake or two, a pool that nobody’s fathomed the depth of, and paths threaded with flowers planted by the mind.

Katherine Mansfield

I pay no attention whatever to anybody’s praise or blame. I simply follow my own feelings.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

In the exploration of the unconscious we come upon very strange things, from which a rationalist turns away in horror, claiming afterward that he did not see anything.

Carl Jung

Temper is a weapon we hold by the blade.

James M. Barrie

In a good story, all the necessary elements are present and all the extraneous elements have been removed – nothing is forced or arbitrary; it has an organic form.

Deena Metzger

In our wisdom let us not forget, it is the pause that creates the music.

Kathleen Arnason

Mu.

Joshu

Never does nature say one thing and wisdom another.

Juvenal

We don’t come into this world, we grow out of it.

Wayne Dyer

I cannot help it – in spite of myself, infinity torments me.

Alfred de Musset

The poetry of words is quite as beautiful as that of sentences. Bring me the finest simile from the whole range of imaginative writing, and I will show you a single word which conveys a more profound, a more accurate, and a more eloquent analogy.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr

We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal, and then leap in the dark to our success.

Henry David Thoreau

Advertising is the art of convincing people to spend money they don’t have for something they don’t need.

Will Rogers

God, to me, it seems, is a verb not a noun.

Buckminster Fuller

Children tell little more than animals, for what comes to them they accept as eternally established.

Rudyard Kipling

I can tell you, honest friend, what to believe: believe in life.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

If you reveal your secrets to the wind, you should not blame the wind for revealing them to the trees.

Kahlil Gibran

In Heaven there is no religion, thank God.

Mahatma Gandhi

The ideal artist is he who knows everything, feels everything, experiences everything, and retains his experience in a spirit of wonder and feeds upon it with creative lust.

George Bellows

Anyone who has got a library and a garden wants for nothing.

Cicero

It is always good when one has two irons in the fire.

Francis Beaumont

It appears to me that almost any man may like the spider spin from his own inwards his own airy citadel.

John Keats

The heart is forever inexperienced.

Henry David Thoreau

Every production of genius must be the production of enthusiasm.

Benjamin Disraeli

No blame.

I Ching

Too much verbal stimulation causes the work to suffer.

Gene Black

If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason.

Jack Handy

Your words are the greatest power you have. The words you choose and their use establish the life you experience.

Sonia Croquette

All experience is an arch wherethrough gleams that untravelled world whose margin fades for ever and forever when I move.

Alfred Lord Tennyson

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

Mark Twain

Every man is a damned fool for at least five minutes every day.

Elbert Hubbard

Every word has two existences, as a spoken word and a written. A word exists as truly for the eye as for the ear.

Richard Chenevix Trench

So suddenly have you cleared your brows, and with so frolic and hearty a laughter given me your applause, that in truth as many of you as I behold on every side of me seem no less than Homer’s gods drunk with nectar and nepenthe; whereas before, you sat as lumpish and pensive as if you had come from consulting an oracle.

Erasmus

When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.

Audre Lorde

He who has never made a mistake never made a discovery.

Samuel Smiles

There is only one position for an artist anywhere; and that is upright.

Dylan Thomas

A noble metaphor, when it is placed to an advantage, casts a kind of glory round it, and darts a luster through a whole sentence.

Joseph Addison

In not wanting is stillness. In stillness all under heaven rests.

Lao Tzu

A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.

Charles Baudelaire

Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.

Carl Jung

I write the story that nobody reads. Someday, I’m going to write it in German to see if anyone notices.

Rick Reilly

The comic is the perception of the opposite; humor is the feeling of it.

Umberto Eco

In extremis, things reveal their nature and become visible.

Paracelcus

The bold and discerning writer who, recognizing the truth that language must grow by innovation if it grow at all, makes new words and uses the old in an unfamiliar sense has no following and is tartly reminded that it isn’t in the dictionary – although down to the time of the first lexicographer (Heaven forgive him!) no author ever had used a word that was in the dictionary.

Ambrose Bierce

A great rock is not disturbed by the wind.

Dalai Lama

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

H. L. Mencken

Madness is not the result of uncertainty, but certainty.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Art for my sake.

D. H. Lawrence

Civilisation’s greatest single invention is the sentence.

John Banville

Only the most foolish of mice would hide in a cat’s ear, but only the wisest of cats would think to look there.

Andrew Mercer

Along the way, there are the pitfalls of self-disgust, boredom, disorientation and a lingering sense of inadequacy, occasionally alternating with episodes of hysterical self-congratulation as you fleetingly believe you’ve nailed that particular sentence and are surely destined to join the ranks of the immortals, only to be confronted the next morning with an appalling farrago of clichés that no sane human could read without vomiting. But when you’re in the zone, spinning words like plates, there’s a deep sense of satisfaction.

Hari Kunzru

The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity. The believing man is the original man; whatsoever he believes, he believes it for himself, not for another.

Thomas Carlyle

The future has already arrived. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.

William Gibson

The soul’s joy lies in doing.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Never apologize for showing feeling. When you do so, you apologize for the truth.

Benjamin Disraeli

People with low self-esteem ought to be ashamed of themselves.

Bill Wall

I gain nothing but pleasure from writing fiction.

Will Self

The weak can never forgive.

Mahatma Gandhi

Calmness of mind is one of the beautiful jewels of wisdom.

James Allen

Straightforward words seem paradoxical.

Lao Tzu

These artists must practice a particular discipline, that of allowing the idea to express itself in communication with their hands in such a direct way that deliberation cannot interfere.

Bill Evans

Words are a form of action, capable of influencing change.

Ingrid Bengis

Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.

Henry David Thoreau

The most positive men are the most credulous.

Alexander Pope

Poetry should appear almost a remembrance.

John Keats

It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.

Henry David Thoreau

I have lived a long life and had many troubles, most of which never happened.

Mark Twain

We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them.

Kahlil Gibran

There is but one art, to omit!

Robert Louis Stevenson

I am not yet so lost in lexicography as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven. Language is only the instrument of science and words are but the signs of ideas.

Samuel Johnson

Is anyone so wise as to learn by the experience of others?

Voltaire

Everyone’s life is a fairy tale written by God’s fingers.

Hans Christian Andersen

We cannot live in a world that is not our own, in a world that is interpreted for us by others. An interpreted world is not a home. Part of the terror is to take back our own listening, to use our own voice, to see our own light.

Hildegard von Bingen

In Modernism, reality used to validate media. In Postmodernism, the media validate reality. If you don’t believe this, just think how many times you’ve described some real event as being ‘just like a movie.’

Brad Holland

Most of the people who will walk after me will be children, so make the beat keep time with short steps.

Hans Christian Andersen

What we wish, we readily believe.

Demosthenes

I never knew a writer who took the smallest pains with his style and was at the same time readable.

Samuel Butler

Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not.

Thomas Henry Huxley

As death, when we come to consider it closely, is the true goal of our existence, I have formed during the last few years such close relations with this best and truest friend of mankind, that his image is not only no longer terrifying to me, but is indeed very soothing and consoling. And I thank my God for graciously granting me the opportunity of learning that death is the key which unlocks the door to our true happiness.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

There’s a great power in words, if you don’t hitch too many of them together.

Josh Billings

Listen, young man. Forget all about your books and machine-made current associations.

H. P. Lovecraft

San Francisco is a mad city – inhabited for the most part by perfectly insane people whose women are of a remarkable beauty.

Rudyard Kipling

To endure is the first thing that a child ought to learn, and that which he will have the most need to know.

Jean Jacques Rousseau

It’s easy to sit there and say you’d like to have more money. And I guess that’s what I like about it. It’s easy. Just sitting there, rocking back and forth, wanting that money.

Jack Handy

Life is neither good or evil, but only a place for good and evil.

Marcus Aurelius

The Seven Principles of Huna:

Ike: The world is what you think it is.
Makia: Energy flows where attention goes.
Aloha: To love is to be happy with.
Manava: Now is the moment of power.
Mana: All power comes from within.
Kala: All is limitless.
Pono: Effectiveness is the measure of truth.

Unknown

Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?

John Keats

Man: a being in search of meaning.

Plato

Writing is not primarily escape, but use.

Demosthenes

I have revered always not crude verbosity, but holy simplicity.

Saint Jerome

Clean underwear is a waste.

Ford Anderson

Postmodernism cost literature its audience.

Scott Turow

It is unwise to be too sure of one’s own wisdom.

Mahatma Gandhi

Men are born to succeed, not to fail.

Henry David Thoreau

Bring down that which is above by means of the light. To ascend take from darkness into light that which is below by means of light. This will transform the spiritual energy as it flows from the source and integrates all the islands, giving peace. This will affect you profoundly, and change your life bringing illumination, and you will feel the delightful supreme fire.

Kahuna Kapihe

Almost in every kingdom the most ancient families have been at first princes’ bastards.

Robert Burton

If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money.

John Updike

There is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to the church as a human being.

James Joyce

All your dreams can come true if you have the courage to pursue them.

Walt Disney

People are only doing the best they can with the resources they have available.

NLP saying

Most marvelous and enviable is that fecundity of fancy which can adorn whatever it touches, which can invest naked fact and dry reasoning with unlooked-for beauty, make flowers bloom even on the edge of the precipice.

Margaret Fuller

Men have been chained to hideous walls and other strange anchors but few have known such suffering and bitterness as those who have been bound to pens.

Charles Dickens

Pride, the never-failing vice of fools.

Alexander Pope

Just as a cautious businessman avoids tying up all his capital in one concern, so, perhaps, worldly wisdom will advise us not to look for the whole of our satisfaction from a single aspiration.

Sigmund Freud

Are you in earnest? Seize this very minute! Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Only engage, and then the mind grows heated. Begin, and then the work will be completed.

Jean Anouilh

Your library is your paradise.

Erasmus

Just living is not enough. One must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower.

Hans Christian Andersen

How often misused words generate misleading thoughts.

Herbert Spencer

It is useless to tell one not to reason but to believe – you might as well tell a man not to wake but sleep.

Lord Byron

To the man who loves art for its own sake, it is frequently in its least important and lowliest manifestations that the keenest pleasure is to be derived.

Arthur Conan Doyle

Your battles inspired me – not the obvious material battles but those that were fought and won behind your forehead.

James Joyce

A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

When one’s thoughts are neither frivolous nor flippant, when one’s thoughts are neither stiff-necked nor stupid, but rather, are harmonious – they habitually render physical calm and deep insight.

Hildegard von Bingen

To remind a man of the good turns you have done him is very much like a reproach.

Demosthenes

When the gods created man they allotted to him death, but life they retained in their own keeping.

Gilgamesh

The part I enjoy is the re-writing. Increasingly, I enjoy the dullest, most clerical stages of the process. Having said that, there always comes a point, after I’ve amassed enough material and can start knocking it into shape, when I begin looking forward to working on something.

Geoff Dyer

The greatest instrument of moral good is the imagination.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

The squirrel you kill in jest dies in earnest.

Henry David Thoreau

Be faithful to that which exists nowhere but in yourself.

André Gide

In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The problems of the human heart in conflict with itself alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the sweat and the agony.

William Faulkner

I have never thought of myself as a good writer. Anyone who wants reassurance of that should read one of my first drafts. But I’m one of the world’s great rewriters.

James A. Michener

Life is God’s novel. Let him write it.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

What is your original face, the face you had before your parents were born?

Zen koan

Language is to the mind more than light is to the eye.

William Gibson

Nothing of him doth fade but doth suffer a sea-change into something rich and strange.

William Shakespeare

We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.

Anaïs Nin

The greatest crimes are caused by surfeit not by want. Men do not become tyrants so as not to suffer cold.

Aristotle

I can only gesture at what makes a story good.

Leonard Michaels

If you are attacked as regards your style, never reply; it is for your work alone to make answer.

Voltaire

Well done is better than well said.

Benjamin Franklin

Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together, but do so with all your heart.

Marcus Aurelius

Concerning the true and First Matter of Metals: the first matter of metals is twofold, and one without the other cannot create a metal. The first and principal substance is the moisture of air mingled with warmth. This substance the Sages have called Mercury, and in the philosophical sea it is governed by the rays of the Sun and the Moon. The second substance is the dry heat of the earth, which is called Sulphur. But as this substance has always been kept a great mystery, let us declare it more fully, and especially its weight.

Michael Sendivogius

Art is the lie that tells the truth.

Pablo Picasso

Fame was like a drug, but what was even more like a drug were the drugs.

Homer Simpson

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

Mark Twain

Do not consider it proof just because it is written in books, for a liar who will deceive with his tongue will not hesitate to do the same with his pen.

Maimonides

Write for the most intelligent, wittiest, wisest audience in the universe: Write to please yourself.

Harlan Ellison

The bluebird carries the sky on his back.

Henry David Thoreau

First you have to get up and then you have to keep on going.

Cameron Hughes

Show, don’t tell.

Henry James

A stiff apology is a second insult.

G. K. Chesterton

The style of an author should be the image of his mind, but the choice and command of language is the fruit of exercise.

Edward Gibbon

My new song must float like a feather on the breath of God.

Hildegard von Bingen

Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.

Mahatma Gandhi

About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgement.

Henry Wheeler Shaw

Originality is nothing but judicious imitation.

Voltaire

Much of your pain is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self.

Kahlil Gibran

As a poet and writer, I deeply love and I deeply hate words.

June Jordan

I believe in making the world safe for our children, but not our children’s children, because I don’t think children should be having sex.

Jack Handy

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Art is never finished, only abandoned.

Leonardo da Vinci

Fear doesn’t go away. The warrior and the artist live by the same code of necessity, which dictates that the battle must be fought anew every day.

Steven Pressfield

For those who are willing to make an effort, great miracles and wonderful treasures are in store.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

Poetry is an expression, through human language restored to it essential rhythm, of the mysteriousness of existence.

Stéphane Mallarmé

To live in the world of creation – to get into it and stay in it – to frequent and haunt it – to think intensely and fruitfully – to woo combinations and inspirations into being by a depth and continuity of attention and meditations – this is the only thing.

Henry James

The Creatures in the School:
Do not worry them.
Do not vex them.
Do not bother them.

Sumerian signpost

All things entail rising and falling timing. You must be able to discern this.

Miyamoto Musashi

Those who are easily shocked should be shocked more often.

Mae West

Fear not for the future, weep not for the past.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are.

Henry David Thoreau

You can’t imagine how stupid the whole world has grown nowadays.

Nikolai Gogol

Something is missing in my heart tonight
That has made made my eyes so soft
And my voice so tender
And my need of God so absolutely clear.

Hafiz of Persia

I remember Glenn Miller coming to me once, before he had his own band, saying, “How do you do it? How do you get started? It’s so difficult.” I told him, I don’t know but whatever you do don’t stop. Just keep on going.

Benny Goodman

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

John Keats

Silence is the mother of truth.

Benjamin Disraeli

We take in the words and move on, but are somehow changed by them.

Karen Phinney

Pornography is man’s refuge from sex.

Bill Wall

At times I think and at times I am.

Paul Valery

The meaning of life is that it stops.

Franz Kafka

We know what we are, but know not what we may be.

William Shakespeare

When I realize that every task can be an act of worship, even the tasks I despise take on new value.

Norman Prather

Poetry is nothing but healthy speech.

Henry David Thoreau

Rehearsing a play is making the word flesh. Publishing a play is reversing the process.

Peter Shaffer

Be the valley of the world.

Lao Tzu

She danced the dance of flames and fire, she danced the dance of swords and spears, she danced the dance of stars and the dance of space, and then she danced the dance of flowers in the wind.

Khalil Gibran

I used to be Snow White, but I drifted.

Mae West

I cannot live without books.

Thomas Jefferson

One has to live a life that creates a writer.

Erno Paasilinna

Before you use a fancy word, make room for it.

Joseph Joubert

Don’t take life so serious. It ain’t no-hows permanent.

Walt Kelly

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

The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts.

Marcus Aurelius

He said, “You have pigs in this poem; pigs are not poetic.” I got up and walked out of that class and never went back.

Carolyn Kizer

You have to know the human heart.

Thom Jones

Even Napoleon had his Watergate.

Yogi Berra

We’re fools whether we dance or not, so we might as well dance.

Japanese proverb

But you know, where did the Brontes go to college? Where did George Eliot go to college? Where did Thomas Paine or Thomas Jefferson or George Washington go? Did George Washington go to college? This idea which we now have that people ought to have these credentials is really ridiculous. Where did Homer go to college?

Jamaica Kincaid

Mystery is the basic element of all works of art.

Luis Buñuel

Make the reader think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications.

Henry James

Nothing leads so straight to futility as literary ambitions without systematic knowledge.

H.G. Wells

If God did not intend for us to eat animals, then why did he make them out of meat?

John Cleese

Trying to be fascinating is an asinine position to be in.

Katharine Hepburn

A stream cannot rise about its source.

African proverb

One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.

G. K. Chesterton

Sometimes when you start losing detail, whether it’s in music or in life, something as small as failing to be polite, you start to lose substance.

Benny Goodman

I wish I could show you when you are lonely or in darkness the astonishing light of your own being.

Hafiz of Persia

I always picture myself as that person at a cocktail party standing in the corner and watching.

Neil Simon

Be not a slave of words.

Thomas Carlyle

Fairy tale brings a larger dimension into our lives, but myth takes us beyond ourselves.

Deena Metzger

The last of the human freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.

Victor Frankl

There are many reasons for this unease. One of them is a fundamental discomfort with narrative itself, and involves admitting to yourself that you derive your basic pleasure not from knowing what happens next, but from arrested time or eventlessness.

Amit Chaudhuri

Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

When man is able to comprehend certain things, it does not follow that he must be able to comprehend everything.

Maimonides

Why shouldn’t we give our teachers a license to obtain software, all software, any software, for nothing?

William Gibson

Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.

Henry David Thoreau

I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy.

Charles Baudelaire

In America, the race goes to the loud, the solemn, the hustler. If you think you’re a great writer, you must say that you are.

Gore Vidal

If the sex scene doesn’t make you want to do it – whatever it is they’re doing – it hasn’t been written right.

Sloan Wilson

It is my contention that a really great novel is made with a knife and not a pen. A novelist must have the intestinal fortitude to cut out even the most brilliant passage so long as it doesn’t advance the story.

Frank Yerby

I wish I would have a real tragic love affair and get so bummed out that I’d just quit my job and become a bum for a few years, because I was thinking about doing that anyway.

Jack Handy

No object is stuck with its name so irrevocably that one cannot find another which suits it better.

René Magritte

A ceremony is a book in which a great deal is written. Anyone who understands can read it. One rite often contains more than a hundred books.

G. I. Gurdjieff

Sigh. So much to do. So few people to do it for me.

Paula Brett

The voice of God, if you must know, is Aretha Franklin’s.

Marianne Faithfull

Perceive that which cannot be seen by the eye.

Miyamoto Musashi

Originality is not seen in single words or even in sentences. Originality is the sum total of a man’s thinking or his writing.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

Take mineral Cinnabar and prepare it in the following manner. Cook it with rain water in a stone vessel for three hours. Then purify it carefully, and dissolve it in Aqua Regis, which is composed of equal parts of vitriol, nitre, and sal ammoniac. Another formula is vitriol, saltpetre, alum, and common salt. Distil this in an alembic. Pour it on again, and separate carefully the pure from the impure thus. Let it putrefy for a month in horse-dung; then separate the elements in the following manner. If it puts forth its signal, commence the distillation by means of an alembic with a fire of the first degree. The water and the air will ascend; the fire and the earth will remain at the bottom. Afterwards join them again, and gradually treat with the ashes. So the water and the air will again ascend first, and afterwards the element of fire, which expert artists recognise. The earth will remain in the bottom of the vessel. This collect there. It is what many seek after and few find.

Paracelcus

The best protection for the people is not necessarily to believe everything people tell them.

Demosthenes

If a man’s character is to be abused, there’s nobody like a relative to do the business.

Alexander Pope

The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.

Henry David Thoreau

What wound did ever heal but by degrees?

William Shakespeare

Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.

Kahlil Gibran

This is the most autobiographical song I’ve ever written. I’m thankful I had the presence of mind never to put any words to it.

Bennett Williams

A critic is a man who knows the way but can’t drive the car.

Kenneth Tynan

No performer should attempt to bite off red-hot iron unless he has a good set of teeth.

Harry Houdini

The chief beginning of evil is goodness in excess.

Menander

The man who views the world at fifty the same as he did at twenty has wasted thirty years of his life.

Muhammad Ali

I believe in censorship. I made a fortune out of it.

Mae West

Life itself is the most wonderful fairy tale.

Hans Christian Andersen

To me, who has written for most of her adult life, in a number of genres and with wildly varying degrees of “enjoyment” and/or “misery”, it’s likely that writing is a conscious variant of a deep-motivated unconscious activity, like dreaming.

Joyce Carol Oates

Soul meets soul on lovers’ lips.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.

Henry David Thoreau

I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offence.

George Eliot

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

Marcell Marceau

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

T. S. Eliot

Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them.

Carlos Fuentes

My eyes glaze over at a writer solving tiny problems.

Doris Grumbach

He never gave utterance in words to his feelings of the glories of nature. Words were not his instruments of expression – colour was the only medium open to him.

J. M. MacCallum

The justification of a character in a novel is not that other persons are what they are, but that the author is what he is. Otherwise the novel is not a work of art.

Oscar Wilde

If there is anything that we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves.

Carl Jung

Write as often as possible, not with the idea at once of getting into print, but as if you were learning an instrument.

J. B. Priestley

The poet is a man who lives by watching his moods. An old poet comes at last to watch his moods as narrowly as a cat does a mouse.

Henry David Thoreau

The great artist is the simplifier.

Henri Frederic Amiel

Our power is patience. We have discovered that writing allows even a stupid person to seem halfway intelligent, if only that person will write the same thought over and over again, improving it just a little bit each time. It is a lot like inflating a blimp with a bicycle pump. Anybody can do it. All it takes is time.

Kurt Vonnegut

I came to understand that the words executive and corporate never belong next to the word chef.

Thomas Keller

He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I ever met.

Abraham Lincoln

Exaggeration is truth that has lost its temper.

Kahlil Gibran

Being is born of nothing.

Lao Tzu

A woman’s guess is much more accurate than a man’s certainty.

Rudyard Kipling

He ne’er is crowned with immortality who fears to follow where airy voices lead.

John Keats

On the neck of a young man sparkles no gem so gracious as enterprise.

Hafiz of Persia

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it’s time to pause and reflect.

Mark Twain

Norris said she never wrote a story unless it was fun to do. I understand Ferber whistles at her typewriter. And there was that poor sucker Flaubert rolling around on his floor for three days looking for the right word.

Dorothy Parker

Psyche creating itself, entering the labyrinth of the inner world, confronting good and evil, sexuality, encountering the lost feminine, and reconciling the opposites, life and death, dark and light, male and female, upper world and underworld, barrenness and creativity – these are the central focuses of the Eleusinian Mysteries, and they are the quintessential concerns of the larger story.

Deena Metzger

All pitchers are liars or crybabies.

Yogi Berra

As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The mind loves the unknown. It loves images whose meaning is unknown, since the meaning of the mind itself is unknown.

René Magritte

No performer should attempt to bite off red-hot iron unless he has a good set of teeth.

Harry Houdini

Even God lends a hand to honest boldness.

Menander

People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing. That’s why we recommend it daily.

Zig Ziglar

Nothing is as sacred as the integrity of your own mind.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The worst government is often the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.

H. L. Mencken

Generous people are rarely mentally ill.

Karl Menninger

Always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.

P. J. O’Rourke

This life is yours. Take the power to choose what you want to do and do it well. Take the power to love what you want in life and love it honestly. Take the power to walk in the forest and be a part of nature. Take the power to control your own life. No one else can do it for you. Take the power to make your life happy.

Susan Polis Schutz

A quiet mind is more important than a positive mind.

Deepak Chopra

I never realized until lately that women were supposed to be the inferior sex.

Katharine Hepburn

A novel is a narrative of a certain length with something wrong with it.

Randall Jarrell

Ever more people today have the means to live, but no meaning to live for.

Viktor E. Frankl

When they tell you to grow up, they mean stop growing.

Tom Robbins

Whenever we condemn, we cloak the world in pain.

Hugh Prather

To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.

Unknown

The point of a notebook is to jumpstart the mind.

John Gregory Dunne

Cross out as many adjectives and adverbs as you can. It is comprehensible when I write: “The man sat on the grass,” because it is clear and does not detain one’s attention. On the other hand, it is difficult to figure out and hard on the brain if I write: “The tall, narrow-chested man of medium height and with a red beard sat down on the green grass that had already been trampled down by the pedestrians, sat down silently, looking around timidly and fearfully.” The brain can’t grasp all that at once, and art must be grasped at once, instantaneously.

Anton Chekhov

There’s hardly anywhere in literature where you don’t find a triangle.

Leonard Michaels

Most writers can write books faster than publishers can write checks.

Richard Curtis

Grief is the agony of an instant, the indulgence of grief the blunder of a life.

Benjamin Disraeli

I hate women because they always know where things are.

Voltaire

Charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul.

Alexander Pope

Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you’ve got to say, and say it hot.

D. H. Lawrence

I discovered that rejections are not altogether a bad thing. They teach a writer to rely on his own judgment and to say in his heart of hearts, “To hell with you.”

Saul Bellow

Being born is like being kidnapped and then sold into slavery.

William Shakespeare

Whether they find life there or not, I think Jupiter should be called an enemy planet.

Jack Handy

Oaths are but words, and words are but wind.

Samuel Butler

Language is fossil poetry.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is no mystery about art. Do the things that you can see, they will show you those that you cannot see. By doing what you can you will gradually get to know what it is that you want to do and cannot do, and so be able to do it.

Samuel Butler

Follow the accident, fear the fixed plan – that is the rule.

John Fowles

The only reason I didn’t kill myself after I read the reviews of my first book was because we have two rivers in New York and I couldn’t decide which one to jump into.

Wilfrid Sheed

Taste is the good sense of genius; without taste, genius is only sublime folly.

Alexander Pope

All speech is vain and empty unless it be accompanied by action.

Demosthenes

Generally speaking, the Way of the Warrior is resolute acceptance of death.

Miyamoto Musashi

Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before.

Mae West

Our knowledge is a tiny island in a great ocean of nonknowledge.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

I’m an excellent housekeeper. Every time I get a divorce, I keep the house.

Zsa Zsa Gabor

May you live all the days of your life.

Jonathan Swift

None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.

Henry David Thoreau

The man who makes no mistakes usually does not make anything.

Edward John Phelps

The words that love inspires outlive their utterance.

Horace

Neither man nor nation can exist without a sublime idea.

Dostoevsky

A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.

Mahatma Gandhi

When an author is too meticulous about his style, you may presume that his mind is frivolous and his content flimsy.

Seneca

He wrapped himself in quotations as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of Emperors.

Rudyard Kipling

Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.

John Updike

I have always said and felt that true enjoyment cannot be described.

Jean Jacques Rousseau

When you go to the dark place you must come back singing.

Deena Metzger

Behind every great man is a woman rolling her eyes.

Paula Brett

Only thought can resemble. It resembles by being what it sees, hears, or knows; it becomes what the world offers it.

René Magritte

You must do the very thing you think you cannot do.

Eleanor Roosevelt

As for doing good; that is one of the professions which is full.

Henry David Thoreau

If it’s never our fault, we can’t take responsibility for it. If we can’t take responsibility for it, we’ll always be its victim.

Richard Bach

Traditional words are just babbling in that presence, and babbling is a substitute for sight.

Rumi

In the long years liker they must grow; the man be more of woman, she of man.

Alfred Lord Tennyson

You may be disappointed if you fail, but you are doomed if you don’t try.

Beverly Sills

Art has an obligation to offend.

Edward Albee

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

Anaïs Nin

Allow the president to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such a purpose – and you allow him to make war at pleasure.

Abraham Lincoln

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

Get black on white.

Guy de Maupassant

When writing a novel, that’s pretty much entirely what life turns into: ‘House burned down. Car stolen. Cat exploded. Did 1500 easy words, so all in all it was a pretty good day.’

Neil Gaiman

Who am I? What will I be? Why am I here? Where am I going?

Constantin Stanislavski

There are nine-and-sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, and every single one of them is right.

Rudyard Kipling

Let good people sin. Give virtue to rotters.

John L’Heureux

Be like a duck, my mother used to tell me. Remain calm on the surface and paddle like hell underneath.

Michael Caine

I believe that it is my job not only to write books but to have them published. A book is like a child. You have to defend the life of a child.

George Konrád

Think in the morning. Act in the noon. Eat in the evening. Sleep in the night.

William Blake

Attention is Key. Pay attention to anything long enough or correctly the first time, and you will understand.

Dr. Suderland Vildenstroff

Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.

Friedrich Nietzsche

All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and brutal.

Flannery O’Connor

Genius means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.

William James

People can only hear you when they are moving toward you, and they are not likely to when your words are pursuing them.

Edwin H. Friedman

It is the greatest mistake to think that man is always one and the same. A man is never the same for long. He is continually changing. He seldom remains the same even for half an hour.

G. I. Gurdjieff

Let us not pray to be sheltered from dangers but to be fearless when facing them.

Rabindranath Tagore

Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.

Voltaire

Alexander Hamilton started the U.S. Treasury with nothing, and that was the closest our country has ever been to being even.

Will Rogers

Language has created the word “loneliness” to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word “solitude” to express the glory of being alone.

Paul Tillich

There is no mistaking the dismay on the face of a writer who has just heard that his brain child is a deformed idiot.

L. Sprague de Camp

To know one thing, you must know the opposite.

Henry Moore

I’m afraid of coaching, of writer’s classes, of writer’s magazines, of books on how to write. They give me centipede trouble – you know the yarn about the centipede who was asked how he managed all his feet? He tried to answer, stopped to think about it, and was never able to walk another step.

Robert A. Heinlein

Fuck the plot.

Edna O’Brien

Almost anyone can be an author; the business is to collect money from this state of being.

A. A. Milne

What we think, we become.

Buddha

I don’t have a moral plan. I’m a Canadian.

David Cronenberg

I recommend that the Statue of Liberty be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the west coast.

Viktor E. Frankl

In the most basic sense, the purpose of life is being – as opposed to not being.

Seth

Facts are many, but the truth is one.

Rabindranath Tagore

Culture makes all men gentle.

Menander

The air around us is charged with the storyteller’s presence. We are inside a magic circle, and no harm can befall us until the tale is done.

Victor Perera

The fingers must be educated, the thumb is born knowing.

Marc Chagall

Anything worth doing is worth doing slowly.

Mae West

Behind or within our cultures are individual lives. And behind or within them are stories. Behind these stories are archetypal tales. Behind these tales are strange forces that combine and recombine to reveal and create the world.

Deena Metzger

If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.

Henry David Thoreau

Where love reigns, there is no will to power; and where the will to power is paramount, love is lacking. The one is but the shadow of the other.

Carl Jung

Words form the thread on which we string our experiences.

Aldous Huxley

Work is a four-letter word; art and fun have but three.

Hap Hagood

This suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.

Oscar Wilde

The act of writing is an act of optimism. You would not take the trouble to do it if you felt that it didn’t matter.

Edward Albee

The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.

W. B. Yeats

Cthulhu still lives, I suppose, again in that chasm of stone which has shielded him since the sun was young. His accursed city is sunken once more; but his ministers on earth still bellow and prance and slay around idol-capped monoliths in lonely places.

H. P. Lovecraft

Let the odour of the eye of Horus adhere to thee.

The Pyramid Inscriptions

This place where you are right now, God circled on a map for you.

Hafiz of Persia

I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.

Henry David Thoreau

I should like one of these days to be so well known, so popular, so celebrated, so famous, that it would permit me to break wind in society, and society would think it a most natural thing.

Honoré de Balzac

Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honored by posterity because he was the last to discover America.

James Joyce

You can make a better living in this world as a soothsayer than as a truth-sayer.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.

Kahlil Gibran

Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else.

James M. Barrie

The most wasted of all days is that on which one has not laughed.

Nicholas-Sébastien Chamfort

Whatever is done for love always occurs beyond good and evil.

Friedrich Nietzsche

I cringe when critics say I’m a master of the popular novel. What’s an unpopular novel?

Irwin Shaw

Poetry is language surprised in the act of changing into meaning.

Stanley Kunitz

Why is it that reality, when set down untransposed in a book, sounds false?

Simone Weil

Imagination is a good horse to carry you over the ground – not a flying carpet to set you free from probability.

Robertson Davies

I’ve never quite believed that one chance is all I get. Writing is my way of making other chances.

Anne Tyler

Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

Virginia Woolf

Eighty percent of success is showing up.

Woody Allen

One of the greatest gifts you can get as a writer is to be born into an unhappy family.

Pat Conroy

I want to make your flesh creep.

Charles Dickens

If a true artist were born in a pigpen and raised in a sty, he would still find plenty of inspiration for his work.

Willa Cather

To regret deeply is to live afresh.

Henry David Thoreau

If you ever reach total enlightenment while drinking beer, I bet you could shoot beer out your nose.

Jack Handy

Except for the young or very happy, I can’t say I am sorry for anyone who dies.

William Makepeace Thackeray

Who knows the secret? who proclaimed it here? Whence, whence this manifold creation sprang? The Gods themselves came later into being – Who knows from whence this great creation sprang?

H. P. Blavatsky

Live or die but don’t poison everything.

Saul Bellow

Summertime
And the livin’ is easy,
Fish are jumpin’
And the cotton is high.
Oh yo’ daddy’s rich
An’ yo’ ma is good lookin’
So hush, little baby,
Don’t you cry.

One of these mornin’s,
You’s gonna rise up singin’
Then you’ll spread yo’ wings
An’ you’ll take to the sky.
But till that mornin’,
There’s ain’t nothin’ can harm you
With your Daddy an’ Mummy
Standin’ by.

Cole Porter

A man is a poor creature compared to a woman.

Honoré de Balzac

A happy childhood has spoiled many a promising life.

Robertson Davies

The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.

G. K. Chesterton

In Europe, a writer is supposed to improve up until he’s about 75.

Irwin Shaw

Let your life lightly dance on the edges of Time like dew on the tip of a leaf.

Rabindranath Tagore

Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.

Gustave Flaubert

Writing is communication, not self-expression. Nobody in this world wants to read your diary except your mother.

Richard Peck

There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper.

Camille Paglia

I feel it now: there’s a power in me to grasp and give shape to my world. I know that nothing has ever been real without my beholding it. All becoming has needed me.

Rainer Maria Rilke

I felt early on I wasn’t going to be a respectable citizen.

Cormac McCarthy

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

The only way to avoid being miserable is not to have enough leisure to wonder whether you are happy or not.

George Bernard Shaw

Character gives us qualities, but it is in actions – what we do – that we are happy or the reverse.

Aristotle

Never be sincere – sincerity is the death of writing.

Gordon Lish

Express yourself in a plain, easy manner, in well-chosen, significant, and decent terms, and give an harmonious and pleasing turn to your periods.

Cervantes

Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.

Friedrich Nietzsche

My crown is in my heart, not on my head.

William Shakespeare

Suffering avoided leads to emptiness.

Oswald Spengler

Man’s conscience is the oracle of God.

Lord Byron

So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.

Benjamin Franklin

A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man’s life as in a book. Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe.

Henry David Thoreau

To be angry is to revenge the faults of others on ourselves.

Alexander Pope

A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.

Salman Rushdie

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

T. S. Eliot

Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.

Neil Gaiman

You may all go to Hell, and I will go to Texas.

Davy Crockett

Expansion, that is the idea the novelist must cling to, not completion, not rounding off, but opening out.

E. M. Forster

Remember that in every word there is a magical influence, and that each word is in itself the breath of the internal and moving spirit. A word of love, of comfort, of promise, is able to strengthen the timid, the weak, or the physically ill; but words of hatred, censure, enmity, or menace, lower our confidence and self-reliance.

Edmund Goldsmid

Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see.

René Magritte

It isn’t what I do, but how I do it. It isn’t what I say, but how I say it – and how I look when I do it and say it.

Mae West

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

Henry David Thoreau

The wisdom of the wise and the experience of the ages are perpetuated by quotations.

Benjamin Disraeli

What the writer needs is an empty day ahead.

Catherine Drinker Bowen

The difference between perseverance and obstinacy is that one comes from a strong will, and the other comes from a strong won’t.

Henry Ward Beecher

Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal.

Henry Ford

No one ever committed suicide while reading a good book, but many have tried while trying to write one.

Robert Byrne

Fire has always been the most terrible of the elements.

Harry Houdini

A man may fulfill the object of his existence by asking a question he cannot answer, and attempting a task he cannot achieve.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

The very existence of flame-throwers proves that some time, somewhere, someone said to themselves, You know, I want to set those people over there on fire, but I’m just not close enough to get the job done.

George Carlin

In our life there is a single color, as on an artist’s palette, which provides the meaning of life and art. It is the color of love.

Marc Chagall

What you write is the truest thing that can be said of you.

Arabic proverb

The captive prince conquered in Italy will pass Genoa by sea as far as Marseilles: Through great exertion by the foreigners overcome, safe from gunshot, barrel of bee’s liquor.

Nostradamus

A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it.

Rabindranath Tagore

The longer we dwell on our misfortunes, the greater is their power to harm us.

Voltaire

Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp – or what’s a heaven for?

Robert Browning

Little minds are interested in the extraordinary; great minds the commonplace.

Elbert Hubbard

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

T. S. Eliot

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.

Ernest Hemingway

Why does my muse only speak when she is unhappy? She does not, I only listen when I am unhappy.

Stevie Smith

Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.

Jessamyn West

Discover and explore how we as individuals and as writers and as a part of community can best serve the world with our lives, with who we are, with our art – take a look at the patterns of our personal ‘story’ and see how it relates to to something larger than ourselves, how it informs us – why we are here, what is our calling.

Sandra Jensen

The small truth has words which are clear; the great truth has great silence.

Rabindranath Tagore

The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he’s written it.

William Golding

A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.

Willa Cather

A man paints with his brains and not with his hands.

Michelangelo

Let the beauty of what you love be what you do.

Rumi

Life is a wonderful thing to talk about, or to read about in history books – but it is terrible when one has to live it.

Jean Anouilh

And each man stands with his face in the light of his own drawn sword, ready to do what a hero can.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Write how you want, the critic shall show the world you could have written better.

Oliver Goldsmith

Carving is easy, you just go down to the skin and stop.

Michelangelo

In times like these, it helps to recall that there have always been times like these.

Paul Harvey

My job is not all that difficult, but I do have to know the entire alphabet.

Vanna White

Let the readers do some of the work themselves.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us.

Albert Schweitzer

Saying thank you is more than good manners. It is good spirituality.

Alfred Painter

Let us rise up and be thankful, for if we didn’t learn a lot today, at least we learned a little, and if we didn’t learn a little, at least we didn’t get sick, and if we got sick, at least we didn’t die; so, let us all be thankful.

Buddha

Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.

Cicero

Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with gratitude.

Denis Waitley

The Pilgrims made seven times more graves than huts. No Americans have been more impoverished than these who, nevertheless, set aside a day of thanksgiving.

H. U. Westermayer

Gratitude is the fairest blossom which springs from the soul.

Henry Ward Beecher

There is nothing better than the encouragement of a good friend.

Jean Jacques Rousseau

To speak gratitude is courteous and pleasant, to enact gratitude is generous and noble, but to live gratitude is to touch Heaven.

Johannes A. Gaertner

To those who followed Columbus and Cortez, the New World truly seemed incredible because of the natural endowments. The land often announced itself with a heavy scent miles out into the ocean. Giovanni di Verrazano in 1524 smelled the cedars of the East Coast a hundred leagues out. The men of Henry Hudson’s Half Moon were temporarily disarmed by the fragrance of the New Jersey shore, while ships running farther up the coast occasionally swam through large beds of floating flowers. Wherever they came inland they found a rich riot of color and sound, of game and luxuriant vegetation. Had they been other than they were, they might have written a new mythology here. As it was, they took inventory.

Frederick Turner

Don’t pray when it rains if you don’t pray when the sun shines.

Satchel Paige

Appreciation can make a day, even change a life.

Margaret Cousins

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.

Marcel Proust

Conservatism makes no poetry, breathes no prayer, has no invention; it is all memory. Reform has no gratitude, no prudence, no husbandry.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ethics is gratitude.

Thomas Erskine

The deepest craving of human nature is the need to be appreciated.

William James

The only people with whom you should try to get even are those who have helped you.

John E. Southard

If you have lived, take thankfully the past.

John Dryden

As each day comes to us refreshed and anew, so does my gratitude renew itself daily. The breaking of the sun over the horizon is my grateful heart dawning upon a blessed world.

Adabella Radici

Gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.

G. K. Chesterton

If a fellow isn’t thankful for what he’s got, he isn’t likely to be thankful for what he’s going to get.

Frank A. Clark

The unthankful heart discovers no mercies; but let the thankful heart sweep through the day and, as the magnet finds the iron, so it will find, in every hour, some heavenly blessings.

Henry Ward Beecher

Grace isn’t a little prayer you chant before receiving a meal. It’s a way to live.

Jacqueline Winspear

Praise the bridge that carried you over.

George Colman

If you count all your assets, you always show a profit.

Robert Quillen

He is a wise man who does not grieve for the things which he has not, but rejoices in those he has.

Epictetus

You’re living in clover, only the clover isn’t good enough.

Bertolt Brecht

Not what we say about our blessings, but how we use them, is the true measure of our thanksgiving.

W. T. Purkiser

Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity: it must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all.

William Faulkner

If you want to turn your life around, try thankfulness.

Gerald Good

Gratitude is the least of the virtues, but ingratitude the worst of vices.

Thomas Fuller

Nothing is more honorable than a grateful heart.

Seneca

There is no greater difference between men than between grateful and ungrateful people.

R. H. Blyth

Courtesies of a small and trivial character are the ones which strike deepest in the grateful and appreciating heart.

Henry Clay

Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow.

Melody Beattie

Thou hast given so much to me, give one thing more – a grateful heart.

George Herbert

Only a stomach that rarely feels hungry scorns common things.

Horace

Most human beings have an infinite capacity for taking things for granted.

Aldous Huxley

In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.

H. L. Mencken

When our perils are past, shall our gratitude sleep?

George Canning

Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it.

William Arthur Ward

There is a calmness to a life lived in gratitude, a quiet joy.

Ralph H. Blum

You simply will not be the same person two months from now after consciously giving thanks each day for the abundance that exists in your life. And you will have set in motion an ancient spiritual law: the more you have and are grateful for, the more will be given you.

Sarah Ban Breathnach

A contented mind is the greatest blessing a man can enjoy in this world.

Joseph Addison

The more I worked, the more I saw; the more I saw, the further away it drifted from my grasp. Perhaps that is in the nature of every masterpiece. But more than that, the Chaconne seemed to exude shadows over its grandeur and artful design. Exactly what was hidden there I could not say, but I would lose myself for long stretches of time exploring the work’s repeating four-bar phrases, which rose and fell and marched solemnly forward in ever-changing patterns.

Arnold Steinhardt

Be eccentric now. Don’t wait for old age to wear purple.

Regina Brett

Write when you need to say something, rather than just saying something when you need to write.

Tina Cruz

What is this life if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare?

W. H. Davies

Be passionate for God, not for belief systems.

David R. Hawkins

Girls like to be played with, and rumpled a little too, sometimes.

Oliver Goldsmith

My soul can find no staircase to Heaven unless it be through Earth’s loveliness.

Michelangelo

Not only do I not know what’s going on, I wouldn’t know what to do about it if I did.

George Carlin

Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprung up.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Study lends a kind of enchantment to all our surroundings.

Honoré de Balzac

The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep.

Marc Chagall

The novelist daily at his desk eats ashes, and if occasionally he encounters a diamond he is likely to break a tooth on it.

John Banville

The perception of beauty is a moral test.

Henry David Thoreau

You are meant to understand the nature of your inner self, and to manifest it outward.

Seth

As scarce as truth is, supply has always exceeded demand.

Ned B. Johnson

God answers sharp and sudden on some prayers, and thrusts the thing we have prayed for in our face, a gauntlet with a gift in it.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination.

Willa Cather

Literature is all, or mostly, about sex.

Anthony Burgess

Uncommon things must be said in common words.

Coventry Patmore

My spelling is Wobbly. It’s good spelling, but it Wobbles, and the letters get in the wrong places.

Winnie the Pooh

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

Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

Nighttime is really the best time to work. All the ideas are there to be yours because everyone else is asleep.

Catherine O’Hara

Man is a gregarious animal, and much more so in his mind than in his body. He may like to go alone for a walk, but he hates to stand alone in his opinions.

George Santayana

He who commits injustice is ever made more wretched than he who suffers it.

Plato

Fanaticism is overcompensation for doubt.

Robertson Davies

A writer has to live with a sense of honor.

Irwin Shaw

Faith is the bird that feels the light when the dawn is still dark.

Rabindranath Tagore

He who labors diligently need never despair; for all things are accomplished by diligence and labor.

Menander

If the dream is a translation of waking life, waking life is also a translation of the dream.

René Magritte

Man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked.

Viktor E. Frankl

To sum it all up, if you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life.You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in glorious fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. 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. I wish for you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories – science fiction and otherwise. Which finally means, maybe you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And, out of that love, remake a world.

Ray Bradbury

When rewriting, move quickly. It’s a little like cutting your own hair.

Robert Stone

For mad scientists who keep brains in jars, here’s a tip: why not add a slice of lemon to each jar, for freshness?

Jack Handy

It is our attitude at the beginning of a difficult undertaking which, more than anything else, will determine its outcome.

William James

If you pretend to be good, the world takes you very seriously. If you pretend to be bad, it doesn’t.

Oscar Wilde

Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings – always darker, emptier and simpler.

Friedrich Nietzsche

In Hollywood the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can’t read. If they could read their stuff, they’d stop writing.

Will Rogers

The past is not only that which happened but also that which could have happened but did not.

Tess Gallagher

Let your tongue speak what your heart thinks.

Davy Crockett

What Nature cannot perfect in a very long space of time, that we compleat in a short space by our artifice; for Art can in many things supply the defect of Nature.

Pseudo-Geber

Forgive everyone everything.

Regina Brett

I work in whatever medium likes me at the moment.

Marc Chagall

He has indeed read a certain amount, more than most of his kind, but late reading, useless as a foundation; he is convinced that no one else has ever done so, and he is a fountain of gratuitous instruction.

Patrick O’Brian

You were born because you had the impulse to be. The universe exists because it had the impulse to be.

Seth

You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.

G. K. Chesterton

Nothing wilts faster than laurels that have been rested upon.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Making a book is a craft, like making a clock: it needs more than native wit to make an author.

Jean de La Bruyere

Study the past if you would divine the future.

Confucius

By thought I embrace the universal.

Blaise Pascal

The language of friendship is not words but meanings.

Henry David Thoreau

The exit is usually where the entrance was.

Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.

George Santayana

A perfect method for adding drama to life is to wait until the deadline looms large.

Alyce P. Cornyn-Selby

Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things.

Ray Bradbury

The lust for comfort, that stealthy thing that enters the house a guest, and then becomes a host, and then a master.

Kahlil Gibran

Do not say a little in many words but a great deal in a few.

Pythagoras

He who would be serene and pure needs but one thing, detachment.

Meister Eckhart

As the character is, such is the speech.

Aelius Aristides

I am too much of a skeptic to deny the possibility of anything.

T. H. Hardy

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

The high note is not the only thing.

Placido Domingo

A talent for drama is not a talent for writing, but is an ability to articulate human relationships.

Gore Vidal

Creativity is really the structuring of magic.

Anne Kent Rush

When Water is put to Earth, it strives to dissolve the Earth, by its virtue, property, and moisture, making it softer than it was before, bringing it to be like itself, for the Water was more thin than the Earth. And thus does the Soul work in the Body, and after the same manner is the Water thickened with the Earth and becomes like the Earth in thickness, for the Earth was more thick than the Water.

Khalid Ibn Yazid

Do spin doctors take a Hypocritic oath?

Ned B. Johnson

Being forced to work, and forced to do your best, will breed in you a hundred virtues which the idle never know.

Charles Kingsley

The best way to make your audience laugh is to start laughing yourself.

Oliver Goldsmith

There are nights when the wolves are silent and only the moon howls.

George Carlin

Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.

George Santayana

Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.

Salman Rushdie

Fresh activity is the only means of overcoming adversity.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I’m against a homogenized society because I want the cream to rise.

Robert Frost

A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.

Anthony Trollope

Suddenly, as rare things will, it vanished.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

To be a book-collector is to combine the worst characteristics of a dope fiend with those of a miser.

Robertson Davies

Writing is finally play, and there’s no reason why you should get paid for playing.

Irwin Shaw

Love is the only reality and it is not a mere sentiment. It is the ultimate truth that lies at the heart of creation.

Rabindranath Tagore

The score never interested me, only the game.

Mae West

If you keep saying things are going to be bad, you have a good chance of being a prophet.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale, vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man.

William Shakespeare

Language is the only homeland.

Czeslaw Milosz

I shall state silences more competently than ever a better man spangled the butterflies of vertigo.

Samuel Beckett

There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.

Harold Pinter

The highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them.

John F. Kennedy

A woman knows the face of the man she loves as a sailor knows the open sea.

Honoré de Balzac

Neither man nor God is going to tell me what to write.

James T. Farrell

Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.

Henry David Thoreau

What we want is to enter the story.

Deena Metzger

The subject is the discourse of the other.

Jacques Lacan

Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better.

Thomas Carlyle

The Seven Hermetic Principles:

1. Mentalism
2. Correspondence
3. Vibration
4. Polarity
5. Rhythm
6. Cause and Effect
7. Gender

The Kybalion

Sit down to write what you have thought, and not to think about what you shall write.

William Cobbett

Start at once a bedside library and spend the last half hour of each day in communion with the saints of humanity.

Sir William Osler

The fact that I was a girl never damaged my ambitions to be a pope or an emperor.

Willa Cather

Men speak in words because they are tongue-tied in symbols.

W. Hamnet Wall

We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.

Thornton Wilder

I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.

Bill Cosby

Hardly anybody ever writes anything nice about introverts. Extroverts rule. This is rather odd when you realise that about nineteen writers out of twenty are introverts. We are been taught to be ashamed of not being ‘outgoing’. But a writer’s job is ingoing.

Ursula K. LeGuin

You can’t be afraid to deal with your demons. You’ve got to go there to be able to write.

Lucinda Williams

There is no waste of time in life like that of making explanations.

Benjamin Disraeli

Why should the way I feel depend on the thoughts in someone else’s head?

Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is the highest impertinence and presumption, therefore, in kings and ministers, to pretend to watch over the economy of private people. If their own extravagance does not ruin the state, that of their subjects never will.

Adam Smith

The drunkard would not give money to sober people. He said they would only eat it, and buy clothes and send their children to school with it.

Thomas Carlyle

There are some good rules and there are some lousy rules.

Harold Pinter

Virtue cannot separate itself from reality without becoming a principle of evil.

Albert Camus

No bird flies too high if he soars on his own wings.

William Blake

The gladness of all standard belies accusation.

Orwald Himpfelder

The hand of little employment hath the dantier sense.

William Shakespeare

Be virtuous and you will be vicious.

Samuel Butler

Great thoughts and a pure heart, that is what we should ask from God.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.

George Bernard Shaw

The creative process is a cocktail of instinct, skill, culture, and a highly creative feverishness. It is a particular state when everything happens very quickly, a mixture of consciousness and unconsciousness, of fear and pleasure; it’s a little like making love, the physical act of love.

Francis Bacon

The artist produces for the liberation of his soul. It is his nature to create as it is the nature of water to run down the hill.

W. Somerset Maugham

All writers learn from the dead. As long as you continue to write, you continue to explore the work of writers who have preceded you; you also feel judged and held to account by them. But you don’t learn only from writers – you can learn from ancestors in all their forms. Because the dead control the past, they control the stories, and also certain kinds of truth.

Margaret Atwood

Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that.

Samuel Beckett

The amount of sleep required by the average person is five minutes more.

Wilson Mizener

When people laugh at me, they’re laughing at themselves.

W. C. Fields

The love of all-inclusiveness is as dangerous in philosophy as in art.

George Santayana

God may not play dice but he enjoys a good round of Trivial Pursuit every now and again.

Federico Fellini

If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth: only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.

C. S. Lewis

Narrative is linear, but action has breadth and depth as well as height and is solid.

Thomas Carlyle

What garlic is to salad, insanity is to art.

Augustus Saint-Gaudens

The pencil should take a walk.

Paul Klee

What’s a man’s first duty? The answer’s brief: To be himself.

Henrik Ibsen

What I aspired to be and was not, comforts me.

Robert Browning

Our bodies are our gardens, to which our wills are gardeners.

William Shakespeare

Resolve to be thyself: and know that he who finds himself, loses his misery.

Matthew Arnold

We need a spirituality that emerges out of a reality deeper than ourselves, even deeper than life, a spirituality that is as deep as the earth process itself, a spirituality born out of the solar system and even out of the heavens beyond the solar system. There in the stars is where the primordial elements take shape in both their physical and psychic aspects.

Thomas Berry

To write a good love letter you ought to begin without knowing what you mean to say, and to finish without knowing what you have written.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

All I ever know is the first line, the first sentence, the first page.

Erskine Caldwell

I always have a roomful of company.

Tennessee Williams

I’ve been forty years discovering that the Queen of all colors is black.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

A work of art should be like a well-planned crime.

Constantin Brancusi

The distinction between children and adults, while probably useful for some purposes, is at bottom a specious one. There are only individual egos, crazy for love.

Niccolo Machiavelli

Birth was the death of him.

Samuel Beckett

What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy.

Salman Rushdie

You have to have a lot of patience to learn patience.

Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

Detail makes the difference between boring and terrific writing. As a writer, words are your paint. Use all the colors.

Rhys Alexander

Words are chameleons, which reflect the color of their environment.

Learned Hand

Faith in oneself is the best and safest course.

Michelangelo

I’ve again and again grown like grass.
I have experienced seven hundred and seventy moulds.
I died from minerality and became vegetable,
And from vegetativeness I died and became animal.
I died from animality and became man.

Then why fear disappearance through death?
Next time I shall die
Bringing forth wings and feathers like angels,
After that soaring higher than angels
What you cannot imagine I shall be that.

Rumi

Whether to believe or disbelieve, it is a wicked thing to take away men’s hope.

Winston Churchill

In the dark time will there also be singing? Yes, there will be singing about the dark time.

Bertolt Brecht

The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy.

George Santayana

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

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

Joan Cocteau

Sincerity is technique.

W. H. Auden

Always do whatever’s next.

George Carlin

Every time I paint, I throw myself into the water in order to learn how to swim.

Édouard Manet

Humor has justly been regarded as the finest perfection of poetic genius.

Thomas Carlyle

There is no way to happiness, happiness is the way.

Buddha

I succeeded in simply attending at the birth of all my works.

Max Ernst

The past is what you remember, imagine you remember, convince yourself you remember, or pretend you remember.

Harold Pinter

Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by children.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

The love of truth lies at the root of much humor.

Robertson Davies

Go on thinking that you don’t need to be read and you’ll find that it may become quite true.

Dylan Thomas

It is not sufficient to see and to know the beauty of a work. We must feel and be affected by it.

Voltaire

Misogynist: A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.

H. L. Mencken

The greatest gift you can give another is the purity of your attention.

Richard Moss

It should be noted that the games of children are not games, and must be considered as their most serious actions.

Michele de Montaigne

I live in fear of not being misunderstood.

Oscar Wilde

The best political, social, and spiritual work we can do is to withdraw the projection of our shadow onto others.

Carl Jung

The only war that matters is the war against the imagination.

Diane DiPrima

If you define things, you limit them.

Taoist precept

I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day.

Vincent van Gogh

A book is like a man – clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly. For every flowering thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy mongrel, and for every looping flight a tap on the wing and a reminder that wax cannot hold the feathers firm too near the sun.

John Steinbeck

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

Friedrich Dürrenmatt

The friends that have I do it wrong
Whenever I remake a song,
Should know what issue is at stake:
It is myself that I remake.

William Butler Yeats

The best way to teach people is by telling a story.

Ken Blanchard

Nietzsche claimed that his genius was in his nostrils and I think that is a very excellent place for it to be.

Federico Fellini

If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing.

Marc Chagall

First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do.

Epictetus

I created Nora Jane but I have to wait on her to make up her mind before I can finish the title story of my new book. This is a fiction writer’s life.

Ellen Gilchrist

Everything which is good in me should be credited to books.

Maxim Gorky

I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.

Groucho Marx

A short saying often contains much wisdom.

Sophocles

Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.

Winston Churchill

Great wisdom is generous; petty wisdom is contentious.

Zhuangzi

I dream for a living.

Steven Spielberg

My play was a complete success. The audience was a failure.

Ashleigh Brilliant

Considering how dangerous everything is, nothing is really very frightening.

Gertrude Stein

You can’t just be a good egg forever; you must hatch or go bad.

C. S. Lewis

The fearful unbelief is unbelief in yourself.

Thomas Carlyle

A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence.

Leopold Stokowski

Nothing is worth more than this day.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together. Now, it’s your turn. Jump!

Ray Bradbury

Anyone who says he wants to be a writer and isn’t writing, doesn’t.

Ernest Hemingway

All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think, we become.

Buddha

We know how fatal the pursuit of liveliness may be: it may result in tiresome acrobatics. When virtuosity gets the upper hand of your theme, or is better than your idea, it is time to quit.

Katherine Anne Porter

The way to get good ideas is to get lots of ideas, and throw the bad ones away.

Dr. Linus Pauling

You have to have an idea of what you are going to do, but it should be a vague idea.

Pablo Picasso

In the book of life, the answers aren’t in the back.

Charlie Brown

Love is friendship set on fire.

Jeremy Irons

Art is the only way to run away without leaving home.

Twyla Tharp

Find your original swing.

Shivas Irons

Greatness is a spiritual condition.

Matthew Arnold

If you do not love me I shall not be loved. If I do not love you I shall not love.

Samuel Beckett

Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of facts.

George Santayana

I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.

Rabindranath Tagore

Let your measure be with a gentle fire such as is the Measure of the heat of the Sun in the Month of June or July, and stay by your Vessel and behold it with care how it grows black, grows red, and grows white in less than three hours of the day, and the fume will penetrate the body, and the Spirit will be bound up, and they will be like milk, incerating, and liquefying and penetrating: and that is the secret.

Mary the Prophetess

I would rather wake up in the middle of nowhere than in any city on earth.

Steve McQueen

Always drink upstream from the herd.

Will Rogers

The liberty of speaking and writing guards our other liberties.

Thomas Jefferson

None of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone.

Thomas Carlyle

The artist is the only one who can make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.

Walter Kuhn

The real price of everything is the toil and trouble of acquiring it.

Adam Smith

The wise man does at once what the fool does finally.

Niccolo Machiavelli

Cancer cells are those which have forgotten how to die.

Harold Pinter

Have faith and pursue the unknown end.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

There are truths which are not for all men, nor for all times.

Voltaire

Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me.

Sigmund Freud

Simplify. Then complicate all over again.

Paul West

A basic law: the more you practice the art of thankfulness, the more you have to be thankful for.

Norman Vincent Peale

Bad writers are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones.

George Orwell

The greenhorn is the ultimate victor in everything; it is he that gets the most out of life.

G. K. Chesterton

Life is a battle between faith and reason in which each feeds upon the other, drawing sustenance from it and destroying it.

Reinhold Niebuhr

Happiness is the absence of the striving for happiness.

Zhuangzi

Let your hook always be cast; in the stream where you least expect it, there will be a fish.

Ovid

I don’t believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.

Joseph Campbell

Endless conflicts. Endless misunderstanding. All life is that. Great and little cannot understand one another.

H. G. Wells

Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly misunderstand them.

John Ruskin

You can’t say, I won’t write today because that excuse will extend into several days, then several months, then you are not a writer anymore, just someone who dreams about being a writer.

Dorothy C. Fontana

In the right light, at the right time, everything is extraordinary.

Aaron Rose

The unexpected is always upon us.

Morgan Freeman

Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.

G. K. Chesterton

It is the artist’s business to create sunshine when the sun fails.

Romain Rolland

The most interesting information comes from children, for they tell all they know and then stop.

Mark Twain

Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.

W. H. Auden

The acceptance that all that is solid has melted into the air, that reality and morality are not givens but imperfect human constructs, is the point from which fiction begins.

Salman Rushdie

‘Know thyself’ is a good saying, but not in all situations. In many it is better to say ‘know others.’

Menander

Nine-tenths of the existing books are nonsense and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense.

Benjamin Disraeli

The words that enlighten the soul are more precious than jewels.

Hazrat Inayat Khan

Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis.

Jack Handy

To write it took three months; to conceive it – three minutes; to collect the data in it – all my life.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

I do not write as I want to; I write as I can.

Somerset Maugham

A good poem is almost always good housekeeping.

Don Welch

Being an artist means ceasing to take seriously that very serious person we are when we are not an artist.

Jose Ortega y Gasset

Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterwards.

Vernon Sanders Law

As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.

Henry David Thoreau

Fear may come true that which one is afraid of.

Viktor E. Frankl

Tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

All colors are the friends of their neighbors and the lovers of their opposites.

Marc Chagall

A dramatist is one who believes that the pure event, an action involving human beings, is more arresting than any comment that can be made upon it.

Thornton Wilder

He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.

Henry James

Of all the hazards, fear is the worst.

Sam Snead

When you arise in the morning think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive, to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.

Marcus Aurelius

Books aren’t written, they’re rewritten. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn’t quite done it.

Michael Crichton

The things that you know more about than you want to know are very useful.

Robert Stone

Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy.

Sigmund Freud

There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.

G. K. Chesterton

In writing fiction, the more fantastic the tale, the plainer the prose should be. Don’t ask your readers to admire your words when you want them to believe your story.

Ben Bova

A child is not a blank tablet awaiting your pen. A child is an open book awaiting your study.

Max Lucado

The writer is one who writes. He withdraws to some quiet corner, a bedroom perhaps, or any cubicle with a chair and table, and applies himself to his blank paper. Two hours a day are needed, three hours are better, four are heroic.

Gerald Warner Brace

If you look at it right, you can see the whole world is a garden.

Francis Hodgson Burnett

The secret to happiness is low expectations.

Barry Schwartz

If we survive danger it steels our courage more than anything else.

Reinhold Niebuhr

When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not.

Mark Twain

Experience is what you get while looking for something else.

Federico Fellini

Stories exist to be exchanged. They are the currency of human growth.

Jean Houston

The artists who want to be writers read the reviews; the artists who want to write, don’t.

William Faulkner

The eye sees what it brings the power to see.

Thomas Carlyle

I’ve always thought of portrait painters as unlicensed psychiatrists.

William Zinsser

I’m not interested in preserving the status quo; I want to overthrow it.

Niccolo Machiavelli

Man is made or unmade by himself; in the armory of thought he forges the weapons by which he destroys himself.

James Allen

The artist must be ready to be consumed by the fire of his own creation.

Auguste Rodin

Still bent to make some port he knows not where, still standing for some false impossible shore.

Matthew Arnold

The degree in which a poet’s imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.

George Santayana

If you were to make little fishes talk, they would talk like whales.

Oliver Goldsmith

Electricity is really just organized lightning.

George Carlin

Emancipation from the bondage of the soil is no freedom for the tree.

Rabindranath Tagore

All men are children, and of one family. The same tale sends them all to bed, and wakes them in the morning.

Henry David Thoreau

Never look backwards or you’ll fall down the stairs.

Rudyard Kipling

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.

Carl Jung

The fewer the words, the better the prayer.

Martin Luther

There is more pleasure to building castles in the air than on the ground.

Edward Gibbon

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid.

James Baldwin

What a man can be, he must be.

Abraham Maslow

An archeologist is the best husband any woman can have; the older she gets, the more interested he is in her.

Agatha Christie

Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable.

G. K. Chesterton

The kind of humor I like is the thing that makes me laugh for five seconds and think for ten minutes.

William Davis

You can think you can or you can think you cannot – either way you are right.

Henry Ford

Never was anything great achieved without danger.

Niccolo Machiavelli

If only neediness and begging were attractive qualities.

Woody Allen

I love you, said Brenda Ueland to Brenda Ueland. I love you, too, Brenda answered shyly, with a sincere look in her fine, strong face.

Brenda Ueland

I wish I could write a beautiful book to break those hearts that are soon to cease to exist: a book of faith and small neat worlds.

Zelda Fitzgerald

Happiness consists in activity. It is running steam, not a stagnant pool.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

A man’s interest in a single bluebird is worth more than a complete list of the fauna and flora of a town.

Henry David Thoreau

We cannot always oblige; but we can always speak obligingly.

Voltaire

How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.

Benjamin Disraeli

I doubt if a single individual could be found from the whole of mankind free from some form of insanity. The only difference is one of degree. A man who sees a gourd and takes it for his wife is called insane because this happens to very few people.

Erasmus

The just is close to the people’s heart, but the merciful is close to the heart of God.

Kahlil Gibran

Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence.

Ernest Hemingway

I just need enough to tide me over until I need more.

Bill Hoest

The question is always far more important than the answer. The question is the answer. What was the question?

David Kern

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

G. K. Chesterton

It’s not so much knowing when to speak, as when to pause.

Jack Benny

What is to give light must endure burning.

Viktor E. Frankl

A burlesque word is often a powerful sermon.

Nicolas Boileau

A man’s kiss is his signature.

Mae West

If you’re a young Mafia gangster out on your first date, I bet it’s real embarrassing if someone tries to kill you.

Jack Handy

Writing is physical work. It’s sweaty work. You just can’t will yourself to become a good writer. You really have to work at it.

Will Haygood

The book should be a ball of light in one’s hand.

Ezra Pound

To make your unknown known – that’s the important thing.

Georgia O’Keefe

Nobody wants to see the village of the happy people.

Lew Hunter

What is Art? It is the response of man’s creative soul to the call of the Real.

Rabindranath Tagore

Much have I traveled in the realms of gold, and many goodly states and kingdoms seen.

John Keats

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

The lessons I learned that were most important were the ones that hurt my feelings.

Robert Stone

Write a little every day, without hope and without despair.

Isak Dinesen

I don’t like work – no man does – but I like what is in the work – the chance to find yourself.

Joseph Conrad

The work of a writer, his continuing work, depends for breath of life on a certain privacy of heart.

Tennessee Williams

Everybody should do at least two things each day that he hates to do, just for practice.

William James

The word is a sign or symbol of the impressions or affections of the soul.

Aristotle

At the beginning of their careers many writers have a need to overwrite. They choose carefully turned-out phrases; they want to impress their readers with their large vocabularies. By the excesses of their language, these young men and women try to hide their sense of inexperience. With maturity the writer becomes more secure in his ideas. He finds his real tone and develops a simple and effective style.

Jorge Luis Borges

Success is for those of us not cursed by self-awareness.

Paul Azinger

who cares if some oneyed son of a bitch invents an instrument to measure Spring?

ee cummings

Buy the ticket, take the ride.

Hunter S. Thompson

Habit and routine have an unbelievable power to waste and destroy.

Henri de Lubac

War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle.

Thomas Carlyle

Scenery is fine, but human nature is finer.

John Keats

Journalism will kill you, but it will keep you alive while you’re at it.

Horace Greeley

It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.

Oscar Wilde

The animal is ignorant of the fact that he knows. The man is aware of the fact that he is ignorant.

Victor Hugo

The story of the human race is the story of men and women selling themselves short.

Abraham Maslow

It is a fool’s prerogative to utter truths that no one else will speak.

Neil Gaiman

Coincidences are spiritual puns.

G. K. Chesterton

Here is the test to find whether your mission on Earth is finished: if you’re alive, it isn’t.

Richard Bach

Earth laughs in flowers.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

True humor springs not more from the head than from the heart. It is not contempt; its essence is love. It issues not in laughter, but in still smiles, which lie far deeper.

Thomas Carlyle

All romances end in tragedy. One of the key people in a romance becomes a monster sooner or later.

David Cronenberg

If you read good books, when you write, good books will come out of you.

Natalie Goldberg

If you can’t annoy somebody with what you write, I think there’s little point in writing.

Kingsley Amis

It takes a long time to grow young.

Pablo Picasso

It is not funny that anything else should fall down; only that a man should fall down. Why do we laugh? Because it is a gravely religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.

G. K. Chesterton

Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul.

Somerset Maugham

Do not tell fish stories where the people know you; but particularly, don’t tell them where they know the fish.

Mark Twain

What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step.

C. S. Lewis

I don’t pretend to understand the Universe – it’s a great deal bigger than I am.

Thomas Carlyle

Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another purposively, to cause vibrations in the soul.

Wassily Kandinsky

Bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur.

Matthew Arnold

How can you write if you can’t cry?

Ring Lardner

You go to dark places so that you can get there, steal the trophy, and get out. That is more important than to be psychologically safe.

Frederick Busch

Writers seldom write the things they think. They simply write the things they think other folks think they think.

Elbert Hubbard

The superfluous, a very necessary thing.

Voltaire

I have learned silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet, strange thing, I am ungrateful to those teachers.

Kahlil Gibran

Life is the dancer, and you are the dance.

Eckart Tolle

The highest treason a crab can commit is to make a leap for the edge of the bucket.

Steven Pressfield

By words the mind is wingéd.

Aristophanes

Even nectar is poison if taken to excess.

Hindu proverb

We cannot let external criticism, even if it’s true, fortify our internal foe. That foe is strong enough already.

Steven Pressfield

The happy childhood is hardly worth your while.

Frank McCourt

Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Art is not a thing; it is a way.

Elbert Hubbard

Writing is the best way to talk without being interrupted.

Jules Renard

The accepted novelist may take his novel up and put it down, spend days upon it in vain, and write not any more that he makes haste to blot. Not so the beginner. Human nature has certain rigths; instinct – the instinct of self-preservation – forbids that any man (cheered and supported by the consciousness of no previous victory) should endure the miseries of unsuccessful literary toil beyond a period to be measured in weeks.

Robert Louis Stevenson

Any idea, plan, or purpose may be placed in the mind through repetition of thought.

Napoleon Hill

All of a writer that matters is in the book.

Jean Rhys

You swing your best when you have the fewest things to think about.

Bobby Jones

Without imagination, love stales into sentiment, duty, and boredom. Intimacy fails not because we have stopped loving but because we stopped imagining.

James Hillman

Knock on the sky and listen to the sound.

Zen saying

Call on God, but row away from the rocks.

Hunter S. Thompson

Color has got me. I no longer need to chase after it. It has got me for ever. I know it. That is the meaning of this happy hour.

Paul Klee

You don’t live your life, but life lives you.

Eckart Tolle

The poetry of the earth is never dead.

John Keats

Women are meant to be loved, not to be understood.

Oscar Wilde

The fixity of a habit is in direct relation to its absurdity.

Marcel Proust

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.

G. K. Chesterton

Aim past the wood; aim through the wood; aim for the chopping block.

Annie Dillard

Nothing in the world can take the place of perseverance. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.

Calvin Coolidge

Practice will never make you perfect. Why should it? What fun would that be?

Stephen King

The mere habit of writing, of constantly keeping at it, of never giving up, ultimately teaches you how to write.

Gabriel Fielding

When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.

Lao Tzu

Writing is a dreadful labor, yet not so dreadful as idleness.

Thomas Carlyle

Let the Calcinatory Furnace be made square, in length four foot and three foot in breadth, and let the thickness of the walls be half a foot; after this manner: Luna, Venus, Mars, or other things to be calcined, must be put into dishes or pans of most strong clay, such as of which Crucibles are made, that they may persist in the asperity of Fire.

Pseudo-Geber

Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body.

George Santayana

Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

If it takes a lot of words to say what you have in mind, give it more thought.

Dennis Roch

We must never be afraid to go too far, for truth lies beyond.

Marcel Proust

There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad.

Salvador Dali

If you see a tree as blue, then make it blue.

Paul Gauguin

Those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.

Nietzsche

All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.

Edgar Allan Poe

The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness.

Abraham Maslow

Every human being has a personal legend to be fulfilled, and this is our reason for being in the world.

Paulo Coelho

Is there anything more beautiful than a beautiful, beautiful flamingo, flying across in front of a beautiful sunset? And he’s carrying a beautiful rose in his beak, and also he’s carrying a very beautiful painting with his feet. And also, you’re drunk.

Jack Handy

Ye who write, choose a subject suited to your abilities.

Horace

God sells us all things at the price of the labor.

Leonardo da Vinci

The reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror.

Flannery O’Connor

Write from what you know into what you don’t know.

Grace Paley

People who like this sort of thing will find this thing the sort of thing they like.

Abraham Lincoln

It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.

Henry James

Make sure you go to the writer to get at his meaning, not to find yours.

John Ruskin

You will never do anything in this world without courage. It is the greatest quality of the mind next to honor.

Aristotle

Where there is great love there are always miracles.

Willa Cather

You tell your daughter she just has to own pink.

Lissa Rankin

When you are old and gray and full of sleep, and nodding by the fire, take down this book and slowly read, and dream of the soft look your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep.

William Butler Yeats

A great artist is a great man in a great child.

Victor Hugo

If you’re going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you’re going to be locked up.

Hunter S. Thompson

To bring anything into your life, imagine that it’s already there.

Richard Bach

How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it.

Marcus Aurelius

Hard days, lots of work, no money, too much silence. Nobody’s fault. You chose it.

Bill Barich

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

Philip Humbert

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

Oscar Wilde

In books lies the soul of the whole past time.

Thomas Carlyle

I came across a capital word the other day, quite new to me: psychopannychia, the all-night sleep of the soul.

Patrick O’Brian

Without opening your door, you can open your heart to the world.

Lao Tzu

The essence of the wizard is transformation.

Deepak Chopra

The talking oak to the ancient spoke. But any tree will talk to me.

Mary Carolyn Davies

Writing is about sensing.

Peter H. Fogtdal

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.

Marcel Proust

Specialization is for insects.

Robert A. Heinlein

Maybe the Beloved will make my love so Pure that he comes to sit upon all my beautiful empty pages.

Haifiz

The woods would be very silent if no birds sang except those that sang best.

Henry Van Dyke

He’s my friend and he talks to me. When I’m writing him, I can’t wait to get to the typewriter and find out what he’s going to say.

Thomas Berger

Fourteen hours on snowshoes and wish I had a pie.

Early California Settler

Suspense: the only literary tool that has any effect upon tyrants and savages.

E. M. Forster

All artists dream of a silence which they must enter, as some creatures return to the sea to spawn.

Iris Murdoch

We are here and it is now. Further than that all human knowledge is moonshine.

H. L. Mencken

The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love colour the most.

John Ruskin

To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.

G. K. Chesterton

We are all born originals. The tragedy is that most of us die copies.

Howard Thurman

Knowledge without wisdom is a load of books on the back of an ass.

Japanese proverb

Use your gifts faithfully, and they shall be enlarged; practice what you know, and you shall attain to higher knowledge.

Matthew Arnold

Alas for those that never sing, but die with all their music in them!

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true.

Honoré de Balzac

A writer is a man walking down a street thinking how he would describe himself as a man walking down the street.

Theodore Morrison

The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious.

T. S. Eliot

If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.

Thomas Carlyle

Art is the sex of the imagination.

George Jean Nathan

I’ve had a wonderful time, but this wasn’t it.

Groucho Marx

Reward and punishment is the lowest form of education.

Zhuangzi

The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.

Oscar Wilde

Every drop of ink in my pen ran cold.

Horace Walpole

I’ve had it with these cheap sons of bitches who claim they love poetry but never buy a book.

Kenneth Rexroth

No one who cannot limit himself has ever been able to write.

Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux

To follow Story is to understand the path of healing. Each of our stories is a universe. Each one of us is living a story. To discover its shape and essence is essential to soul making.

Deena Metzger

No tale tells all.

Alexei Panshin

Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.

Henry David Thoreau

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Facing it, always facing it, that’s the way to get through. Face it.

Joseph Conrad

Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleave of care
The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath
Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,
Chief nourisher in life’s feast.

William Shakespeare

I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.

C. S. Lewis

Good composition is like a suspension bridge – each line adds strength and takes none away.

Robert Henri

Princes and governments are far more dangerous than other elements within society.

Niccolo Machiavelli

If pain could have cured us we should long ago have been saved.

George Santayana

He whose face gives no light, shall never become a star.

William Blake

We are healed from suffering only by experiencing it to the full.

Marcel Proust

Will you take a glass of lemon barley-water, or do you prefer a draught of moist and corny ale?

Patrick O’Brian

The truth is outside of all fixed patterns.

Bruce Lee

It’s the embrace that fulfills us, not the thing that we embrace.

Thich Nhat Hanh

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.

Deepak Chopra

There is a road from eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.

G. K. Chesterton

Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads.

Erica Jong

Don’t be so humble, you’re not that great.

Golda Meir

What you see but can’t see over is as good as infinite.

Thomas Carlyle

All my colors sing together like a chord in music.

Henri Matisse

I have my faults, but changing my tune is not one of them.

Samuel Beckett

Power takes as ingratitude the writhing of its victims.

Rabindranath Tagore

The greatest mistake you can make in life is continually fearing that you’ll make one.

Elbert Hubbard

The whole secret of life is to be interested in one thing profoundly and in a thousand things well.

Horace Walpole

My soul is naked. It wears the transparent garment of love.

Rumi

Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one’s values.

Ayn Rand

The first thing a man will do for his ideals is lie.

Joseph Schumpeter

I want to sing like birds sing, not worrying who listens or what they think.

Deepak Chopra

You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.

Saul Bellow

Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts – the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art. Not one of these books can be understood unless we read the two others, but of the three the only trustworthy one is the last.

John Ruskin

Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.

Mark Twain

The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors because the whole of nature is a metaphor for the human mind.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past.

Spinoza

You cannot step into the same river twice.

Heraclitus

What is first uttered in the impotence of an overheated apartment becomes the fate of nations.

Salman Rushdie

Have the courage to act instead of react.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

No writer need feel sorry for himself if he writes and enjoys it, even if he doesn’t get paid.

Irwin Shaw

You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.

Mae West

The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

When I only begin to read, I forget I’m on this world. It lifts me on wings with high thoughts.

Anzia Yezierska

As above so below and as below so above, to make the miracle of the one thing. Through this the marvels of the work of one thing are procured and perfected. As all things are made from one, by the condsideration of one, so all things were made from this one, by conjunction. The father of it is the sun, the mother the moon. The wind bore it in the womb. Its nurse is the earth, the mother of all perfection. Its power is perfected if it is turned into earth. Separate the earth from the fire, the subtle and thin from the crude and coarse, prudently, with modesty and wisdom. This ascends from the earth into the sky and again descends from the sky to the earth, and receives the power and efficacy of things above and of things below. By this means you will acquire the glory of the whole world, and so you will drive away all shadows and blindness.

Hermes Trismegistus

The travel writer seeks the world we have lost – the lost valleys of the imagination.

Alexander Cockburn

Negative Capability, that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.

John Keats

Characters must not brood too long. They must not waste time running up and down ladders in their own insides.

E. M. Forster

If you define cowardice as running away at the first sign of danger, screaming and tripping and begging for mercy, then yes, Mr. Brave Man, I guess I’m a coward.

Jack Handy

Good words are worth much, and cost little.

George Herbert

Our brains are no longer conditioned for reverence and awe.

John Updike

To be conscious that you are ignorant of the facts is a great step to knowledge.

Benjamin Disraeli

Every wall is a door.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

All things are water.

Thales

Let us be gentle when we question our fathers.

Anne Carson

If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.

Peter Handke

Let your fiction grow out of the land beneath your feet.

Willa Cather

Write about what you’re most afraid of.

Donald Barthelme

The Arts are man’s most useless – and essential – activity.

Eugene Ionesco

I am interested in making up a good case for distortion, as I am coming to believe it is the only way to make people see.

Flannery O’Connor

The measure of artistic merit is the length to which a writer is willing to go in following his own compulsions.

John Updike

The historian records, but the novelist creates.

E. M. Forster

the world so unsure, unknowable
the world so unsure, unknowable
who knows – our grief may
hold our greatest hopes.

Zeami

A torn jacket is soon mended; but hard words bruise the heart of a child.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

What you vibrate, you create.

Kendra E. Thornbury

Life is a dream from which only death awakens us.

Pedro Caldéron de la Barca

There is always more mystery.

Anaïs Nin

The only rule of travel is, Don’t come back the way you went. Come a new way.

Anne Carson

Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life’s about creating yourself.

George Bernard Shaw

All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.

Marshall McLuhan

The temple of art is built of words.

J. G. Holland

When a thought takes one’s breath away, a lesson on grammar seems an impertinence.

Thomas Wentworth Higginson

So, what’s going to hold you?

Sandra Jensen

I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.

Oscar Wilde

You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.

Henry David Thoreau

What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.

Samuel Johnson

The saddest summary of a life contains three descriptions: could have, might have, and should have.

Louis E. Boone

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

Cyril Connolly

Successful people bore me as fictional creations.

Stephen Dixon

Apart from the known and the unknown, what else is there?

Harold Pinter

Games lubricate the body and the mind.

Benjamin Franklin

Successful writers separate their brain functions deliberately and at will. They write with passion, from the head and the heart. They write fast. They dispassionately edit what they’ve written as if somebody else wrote it.

Ken Rand

God will not look you over for medals, degrees or diplomas, but for scars.

Elbert Hubbard

Morning without you is a dwindled dawn.

Emily Dickinson

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

E. L. Doctorow

Realism is a bad word. In a sense everything is realistic. I see no line between the imaginary and the real.

Federico Fellini

Stretch the reader’s credulity, his sense of logic, to the utmost – it is quite elastic – but don’t break it. In this way, you will write something new, surprising and entertaining both to yourself and the reader.

Patricia Highsmith

If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time – or the tools – to write. Simple as that.

Stephen King

I began to write because I was too shy to talk, and too lonely not to send messages.

Heather McHugh

To use only the words known to the least knowledgeable reader is to embrace a slow erosion of the language. You want to paint with the full palette of colors available.

Peter Meltzer

The man who promises everything is sure to fulfil nothing, and everyone who promises too much is in danger of using evil means in order to carry out his promises, and is already on the road to perdition.

Carl Jung

To order, to govern, is to begin naming; when names proliferate it’s time to stop.

Lao Tzu

We are rarely proud when we are alone.

Voltaire

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

Henry David Thoreau

Without a pen I feel naked, but it’s writing that is my exhibitionism.

Carrie Latet

Poetry will go on cutting a hand-made path through the mass-market insanity. For me, anyway, that path is the one that leads to the Chapel of the Grail.

Jeanette Winterson

The real payoff is the writing itself.

Anne Lamott

Don’t get it right, get it written.

James Thurber

Merit itself is offensive.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Isn’t it true that saying a thing well is as interesting and as difficult as painting it?

Vincent van Gogh

Travel reboots.

Peg Miller

Death most resembles a prophet who is without honor in his own land.

Kahlil Gibran

Don’t delay. When the feeling’s there, act!

Joe Vitale

Love has reasons which reason cannot understand.

Blaise Pascal

What I like to do is treat words as a craftsman does his wood or stone or what-have-you, to hew, carve, mold, coil. Polish, and plane them into patterns, sequences, sculptures, figures of sound expressing some lyrical impulse, some spiritual doubt or conviction, some dimly realized truth that I must try to reach and realize.

Dylan Thomas

Let each become all that he was created capable of being.

Thomas Carlyle

A cat is a puzzle for which there is no solution.

Hazel Nicholson

Experience is one thing you can’t get for nothing.

Oscar Wilde

Find the key emotion; this may be all you need know to find your story.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Rewriting is like scrubbing the basement floor with a toothbrush.

Pete Murphy

Love puts away all masks and takes off the silk robes.

Rumi

Any tool can be used as a weapon.

Ken Rand

Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth.

Blaise Pascal

Responsive to feedback, immune to criticism, is a good idea.

Deepak Chopra

Nine-tenths of the people were created so you would want to be with the other tenth.

Horace Walpole

The man who never in his mind and thoughts traveled to heaven is no artist.

William Blake

Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the and the blind can see.

Mark Twain

The truth will set you free. But first, it will piss you off.

Gloria Steinem

I don’t like to talk much with people who always agree with me.

Thomas Carlyle

There is not a fragment in all nature, for every relative fragment of one thing is a full harmonious unit in itself.

John Muir

Where there is joy there is creation. Where there is no joy there is no creation.

Upanishads

I love, therefore I am.

Sheila Shurling

A film is never really any good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.

Orson Welles

London is filled with bumpkins at this time of the year; they stare about them like oxen.

Patrick O’Brian

Style has always been in my mind the author’s Self, the creative expression of that self.

Whit Burnett

There are places where writing is acting and acting is writing.

Sam Shepard

Write about it by day, and dream about it by night.

E. B. White

Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground.

G. K. Chesterton

Make voyages! Attempt them – there’s nothing else.

Tennessee Williams

Just as Leonardo da Vinci studied human anatomy and dissected corpses, so I try to dissect souls.

Edvard Munch

To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.

Samuel Beckett

He who does not understand your silence will probably not understand your words.

Elbert Hubbard

If you want people to notice your faults, start giving advice.

Kelly Stephens

While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings.

Henry David Thoreau

You don’t always whittle down, sometimes you whittle up.

Grace Paley

The fiction writer has to engage in a continual examination of conscience. He has to be aware of the freak in himself.

Flannery O’Connor

A good artist should be isolated. If he isn’t isolated, something is wrong.

Orson Welles

A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.

William Blake

A novel is like getting on a train to Louisiana. All you know at the moment is that you’re getting on the train, and you’re going to Louisiana. But you don’t know who you’re going to sit behind, or in front of, or beside; you don’t know what the weather is going to be when you pass through certain areas of the country; you don’t know what’s going to happen South; you don’t know all these things, but you know you’re going to Louisiana.

Ernest J. Gaines

If equations are trains threading the landscape of numbers, then no train stops at pi.

Richard Preston

A man does not know what he is saying until he knows what he is not saying.

G. K. Chesterton

For tis not in mere death that men die most.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the old man who will not laugh is a fool.

George Santayana

Bach was first my chore, gradually my interest, and finally my quest.

Arnold Steinhardt

The only real problem we have is that our process is not yet complete.

Rev Ashlag

What I give form to in daylight is only one percent of what I have seen in darkness.

M. C. Escher

The world is but a canvas to the imagination.

Henry David Thoreau

Forsythia is pure joy. There is not an ounce, not a glimmer of sadness or even knowledge in forsythia. Pure, undiluted, untouched joy.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

I thing it’s a good think.

Inge Kraus

The silence between the notes are as important as the notes themselves.

Mozart

Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.

Blaise Pascal

One of the secrets of literature that every writer knows is that any life will do. It’s not necessary to go bathe one’s feet in the Ganges and travel around the world and work on a steamer to be a poet. Meaning is in small things.

Marvin Bell

I found that it was boring not to write. It made the world emptier and thinner for me.

Alison Lurie

Words are great, but seeing is more primal than language and smelling more primal still.

Stella Reinwald

Mothers are all slightly insane.

J. D. Salinger

It were a real increase of human happiness, could all young men from the age of nineteen be covered under barrels, or rendered otherwise invisible; and there left to follow their lawful studies and callings, till they emerged, sadder and wiser, at the age of twenty-five.

Thomas Carlyle

Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.

C. S. Lewis

There is no such thing as wasted effort.

Yehuda Berg

They teach anything in universities today. You can major in mud pies.

Orson Welles

Only from the heart can you touch the sky.

Rumi

The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.

Jane Austen

Dragons have one soft spot, somewhere, always.

Neil Gaiman

Human beings have the awesome ability to take any experience of their lives and create a meaning that disempowers them or one that can literally save their lives.

Anthony Robbins

The whole order of things is as outrageous as any miracle which could presume to violate it.

G. K. Chesterton

From error to error, one discovers the entire truth.

Sigmund Freud

What the caterpillar calls the end, the rest of the world calls a butterfly.

T. S. Eliot

The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.

Thomas A. Edison

It’s no use. I find it impossible to work with security staring me in the face.

Sherwood Anderson

So you want to be a writer? Okay. Be one.

Ed Wood, Jr.

There is only one expert who is qualified to examine the souls and the life of a people and make a valuable report – the native novelist. And when a thousand able novels have been written, there you have the soul of the people; and not anywhere else can these be had.

Mark Twain

No tale is so good but it can be spoilt in the telling.

Terence

The important thing in writing is the capacity to astonish. Not shock, but astonish.

Terry Southern

Eloquence may set fire to reason.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Trust ghosts. Trust those you have helped to help you in their turn. Trust dreams. Trust your heart, and trust your story.

Neil Gaiman

The cure for pain is in the pain.

Rumi

If you can’t answer a man’s arguments, all is not lost; you can still call him vile names.

Elbert Hubbard

The man who never alters his opinions is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.

William Blake

Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees.

Marcel Proust

A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself.

Abraham Maslow

Those who realize their folly are not true fools.

Zhuangzi

Every novel is an attempt to capture time, to weave something solid out of air.

David Beaty

Not only does God play dice, but he sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen.

Stephen Hawking

American women expect to find in their husbands a perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers.

Somerset Maugham

Only love interests me, and I am only in contact with things that revolve around love.

Marc Chagall

Only a fool expects to be happy all the time.

Robertson Davies

Planning to write is not writing. Outlining a book is not writing. Researching is not writing. Talking to people about what you’re doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.

E. L. Doctorow

Teach as an old fishing guide takes out a beginner.

Theodore Roethke

Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none.

William Shakespeare

Rewriting means deep structural change in character and story.

Robert McKee

The Akashic Records are the collective memories and histories of every thought, sound, physical and emotional vibration, major event and incidental moment in eternity.

Edgar Cayce

We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be.

Jane Austen

Hold fast to dreams for if dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly.

Langston Hughes

Life is like a game of cards. The hand you are dealt is determinism; the way you play it is free will.

Jawaharlal Nehru

The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom.

William Orville Douglas

The novelist must be his own most harsh critic and also his own most loving admirer and about both he must say nothing.

Angus Wilson

He who stops getting better stops being good.

Oliver Cromwell

Avoid words that can’t even scratch at the hundred hidden meanings in objects and structures.

Eduardo Paolozzi

Many possessions, if they do not make a man better, are at least expected to make his children happier; and this pathetic hope is behind many exertions.

George Santayana

Conduct is three-fourths of our life and its largest concern.

Matthew Arnold

The essence of a sculpture must enter on tip-toe, as light as animal footprints on snow.

Hans Arp

I’ll see it when I believe it.

Squiggy

Take head out of ass, begin writing.

David Hunter

Hope is like a bird that senses the dawn & starts to sing while it is still dark.

Tagore

When the solution is simple, God is answering.

Albert Einstein

Good communication is just as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Believe nothing because a so-called wise person said it. Believe only what you yourself test and judge to be true.

Buddha

It is not good to have everything one wants.

Blaise Pascal

Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are.

Jose Ortega y Gasset

Write everyday, line by line. Page by page. Hour by hour. Do it despite of fear, for above all else, beyond imagination and skill. What the world asks of you is courage. Courage to risk rejection, ridicule and failure. As you follow the quest for stories told with meaning and beauty. Study thoughtfully, but write boldly. Then like the hero in the fable, your dance will dazzle the world.

Robert McKee

People seldom improve when they have no other model but themselves to copy.

Oliver Goldsmith

If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful at all.

Michelangelo

The wastepaper basket is the writer’s best friend.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

A creative writing class may be one of the last places you can go where your life still matters.

Richard Hugo

As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.

Henry David Thoreau

It is thought and feeling which guides the universe, not deeds.

Edgar Cayce

Sleep on your writing; take a walk over it; scrutinize it of a morning; review it of an afternoon; digest it after a meal; let it sleep in your drawer a twelvemonth.

A. Bronson Alcott

I passionately hate the idea of being with it; I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.

Orson Welles

I am paid by the word, so I always write the shortest words possible.

Bertrand Russell

In the midst of great joy do not promise to give a man anything; in the midst of great anger do not answer a man’s letter.

Chinese proverb

Everyone is in love with his own ideas.

Carl Jung

A novelist is someone who wonders why people act as they do, and he doesn’t know, so he imagines an explanation and that’s his novel.

Theodore Morrison

Art is the tree of life. Science is the tree of death.

William Blake

Be pleasant until ten o’clock in the morning and the rest of the day will take care of itself.

Elbert Hubbard

Oh! do not attack me with your watch.

Jane Austen

I have nothing to say and I’m saying it.

John Cage

As a writer I’m merely a journalist who has learned to write better than others.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I suffer as always from putting down the first line. It is amazing the terrors, the magics, the prayers, the straightening shyness that assails one.

John Steinbeck

I will gaze at the moon and cleanse my heart.

Zeami

What is the fear inside language? No accident of the body can make it stop burning.

Anne Carson

Stories are the creative conversion of life itself into a more powerful, clearer, more meaningful experience. They are the currency of human contact.

Robert McKee

A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it.

Marcel Proust

Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men.

G. K. Chesterton

Even the wisest men relish a little nonsense every now and then.

Roald Dahl

Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things that escape those who dream only at night.

Edgar Allan Poe

No pressure, no diamonds.

Thomas Carlyle

The artists must be sacrificed to their art. Like the bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The person who has the will to undergo all labor may win any goal.

Menander

To be a surrealist means barring from your mind all remembrance of what you have seen, and being always on the lookout for what has never been.

René Magritte

Greet Yourself in your thousand other forms as you mount the hidden tide and travel back home. All the hemispheres in heaven are sitting around a fire chatting, while stitching themselves together into the Great Circle inside of You.

Hafiz of Persia

Art gropes, it stalks like a hunter lost in the woods, listening to itself and to everything around it, unsure of itself, waiting to pounce.

John W. Gardner

There is something fundamental within each of us that must be named, faced, and conquered in order to free the human spirit.

Elizabeth Debold

Anyone who is afraid of a natural process is a child.

Marcus Aurelius

Dreams are today’s answers to tomorrow’s questions.

Edgar Cayce

Surprises make a child of us.

Anne Carson

Those at the top of the mountain didn’t fall there.

Marcus Washlington

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Henry Ward Beecher

The more closely the author thinks of why he wrote, the more he comes to regard his imagination as a kind of self-generating cement which glued his facts together, and his emotions as a kind of dark and obscure designer of those facts. Reluctantly, he comes to the conclusion that to account for his book is to account for his life.

Richard Wright

One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.

Salvador Dalí

A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge.

Thomas Carlyle

If I had a song, I’d sing it in the morning, I’d sing it in the evening, All over this land.

Lee Hays

You and I are essentially infinite choice-makers.

Deepak Chopra

Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he isn’t. A sense of humor was provided to console him for what he is.

Horace Walpole

You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes.

Alan Watts

Fear wist not to evade as Love wist to pursue.

Francis Thompson

It takes as much courage to have tried and failed as it does to have tried and succeeded.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

There is no charm equal to tenderness of heart.

Jane Austen

Since we cannot know all that there is to be known about anything, we ought to know a little about everything.

Blaise Pascal

In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy.

William Blake

For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive.

D. H. Lawrence

Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act.

Truman Capote

Weak eyes are fondest of glittering objects.

Thomas Carlyle

All artists, if they are to survive, are forced at last to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.

James Baldwin

Before all else, be armed.

Niccolo Machiavelli

One way of looking at speech is to say it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.

Harold Pinter

Sanity is madness put to good use.

George Santayana

If we feel for others in the same way as we feel for our own dear ones, we love God.

Meher Baba

Why does it enrage an animal to be given what it already knows?

Anne Carson

I don’t say we all ought to misbehave, but we ought to look as if we could.

Orson Welles

Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces.

Marcel Proust

Live as if you were living a second time, and as though you had acted wrongly the first time.

Viktor E. Frankl

Words are a replacement for the reality.

Ron Gang

Trees are the earth’s endless effort to speak to the listening heaven.

Rabindranath Tagore

When a person really desires something, all the universe conspires to help that person to realize his dream.

Paulo Coelho

Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.

Somerset Maugham

Editors are extremely fallible people, all of them. Don’t put too much trust in them.

Maxwell Perkins

In general there’s no point in writing hopeless novels. We all know we’re going to die; what’s important is the kind of men and women we are in the face of this.

Anne Lamott

Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.

C. S. Lewis

Show me the man you honor, and I will know what kind of man you are.

Thomas Carlyle

When you have exhausted all possibilities, remember this – you haven’t.

Thomas Edison

All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost; the old that is strong does not wither, deep roots are not reached by the frost. From the ashes a fire shall be woken, a light from the shadows shall spring; renenwed shall be blade that was broken, the crownless again shall be king.

J.R.R. Tolkien

Reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot.

Alan Watts

How can you write if you can’t cry?

Ring Lardner

Writing’s not terrible, it’s wonderful. I keep my own hours, do what I please. When I want to travel, I can. I’m doing what I most wanted to do all my life. I’m not into the agonies of creation.

Raymond Carver

It is the flash which appears, the thunderbolt will follow.

Voltaire

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.

Edgar Allan Poe

You will not be punished for your anger, you will be punished by your anger.

Buddha

Up vistaed hopes I sped; and shot, precipitated, adown titanic glooms of chasmèd fears.

Francis Thompson

An entrance is important to a pilgrim: there can be only one.

Anne Carson

How quick come the reasons for approving what we like.

Jane Austen

It is incomprehensible that God should exist, and it is incomprehensible that he should not exist.

Blaise Pascal

I don’t wish to be everything to everyone, but I would like to be something to someone.

Javan

The alchemical quest begins with a search for Primal Matter, that chaotic base material from which gold can be produced. While its identity eludes many initiates, this mysterious substance contains all that is needed to complete the work. It is composed of two essential properties, Philosophic Sulphur and Philosophic Mercury, polarized masculine and feminine aspects of matter often pictured as King and Queen, or as the sun and the moon. In the laboratory, these two properties are separated, refined, and purified. In the illuminations and engravings that accompany many alchemical texts, their story unfolds as a romance, culminating with their sexual union and the birth of their child, the Philosopher’s Stone.

M. E. Warlick

You got to line ‘em up then flatten out and go down the line.

John Madden

Though I meekly pass where you plow and fire,
Everywhere I leave fox fur on the wire.
And a fox’s face, masked in human skin,
Sometimes wild and sharp, holds its laughter in.

Loren Eisely

Guilt can be expiated, but shame is ashamed forever.

Li Hongzhi

A man must have sojourned in the workhouse before he boasts himself indifferent to dainties.

Robert Louis Stevenson

He knew that it is in the crack between opposites – dark and light, yes and no, here and there – that the real thing happens.

P. L. Travers

You cannot resist something that is not there. Therefore the act of resisting something places it there.

Neale Walsch

Lad of Athens faithful be to thyself and mystery – all the rest is perjury.

Emily Dickenson

Leave the essayist to ramble about, content with living a free life and enjoying the satisfactions of a somewhat undisciplined existence.

E. B. White

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Wallace Stevens

The beast is shrouded; use The Eye.

Doctor Strange

The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.

Hegel

I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat.

Edgar Allan Poe

When I see a play and understand it the first time, then I know it can’t be much good.

T. S. Eliot

A bird does not sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.

Chinese proverb

A bitter thing, a lamentable thing, a thing which is horrible to contemplate, terrible to hear of, a detestable crime, an execrable evil, an abominable work, a detestable disgrace, a thing almost inhuman, indeed set apart from all humanity.

King Philip IV

Arm yourself my amiable young friend with all the philosophy you are mistress of.

Jane Austen

If you’re going to have a complicated story you must work to a map; otherwise you’ll never make a map of it afterwards.

J.R.R. Tolkien

We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.

Alan Watts

Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.

James Bovard

When a writer talks about his work, he’s talking about a love affair.

Alfred Kazin

Beware how you take away hope from another human being.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

I do not get ideas; ideas get me.

Robertson Davies

The more one judges, the less one loves.

Honoré de Balzac

How can any man be weak who dares to be at all?

Henry David Thoreau

Anxiety is the handmaiden of creativity.

T. S. Eliot

What is the point of working so hard if I can’t even smile?

Sarah Damani

The end is the beginning of all things.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Why shouldn’t truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense.

Mark Twain

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

Samuel Coleridge

The death of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.

Edgar Allan Poe

I longed to devise a setting by which the trees might really march to war.

J.R.R. Tolkien

For happiness one needs security, but joy can spring like a flower even from the cliffs of despair.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Respect for right conduct is felt by every body.

Jane Austen

Injustice is acting a lie.

Horace Walpole

Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.

Marcel Proust

There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.

G. K. Chesterton

Remember there’s no such thing as a small act of kindness. Every act creates a ripple with no logical end.

Scott Adams

Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.

Lao Tzu

Ain’t no man can avoid being born average, but there ain’t no man got to be common.

Satchel Paige

As a calligrapher I paint with words. I tell my students that we are artists who interpret words, expressing the emotion that the words evoke on paper.

Carrie Imai

The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything. Except what is worth knowing.

Oscar Wilde

You write about the thing that sank its teeth into you and wouldn’t let go.

Paul West

By hammer and hand, all arts do stand.

Hammerman’s Guild

Religion is the frozen thought of man out of which they build temples.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

But nothing in life – nor perhaps, in death – is ever really finished. A book, for instance, is no book at all, unless, when we come to the last page, it goes on and on within us.

P. L. Travers

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

Yeats

You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.

Alan Watts

One man’s style must not be the rule of another’s.

Jane Austen

Eloquence is a painting of the thoughts.

Blaise Pascal

The true teacher is the learner.

Elbert Hubbard

The only means of strengthening one’s intellect is to make up one’s mind about nothing, to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts.

John Keats

One writes to make a home for oneself, on paper, in time and in others’ minds.

Alfred Kazin

Because we believe that our ethnic group, our society, our political party, our God, is better than your God, we kill each other.

Neale Donald Walsch

Thought is the sculptor who can create the person you want to be.

Henry David Thoreau

A useless life is an early death.

Goethe

It requires self-esteem to receive – not self-love but just a pleasant acquaintance and liking for oneself.

John Steinbeck

Let the caller and the called disappear; be lost in the Call.

Rumi

There is a momentum of walking, hunger, roads, empty bowl of thoughts that is more luxurious – more civil than any city. Even the earliest Pligrim’s Guide, published in A.D. 1130, contains remarks touching the dilemma of the pilgrim who reaches his destination and cannot bear to stop.

Anne Carson

Life is a gift, given in trust – like a child.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

You can never lose anything that really belongs to you, and you can’t keep that which belongs to someone else.

Edgar Cayce

Story begins when an event, either by human decision or accident in the universe, radically upsets the balance of forces in the protagonist’s life, arousing in that character the need to restore the balance of life.

Robert McKee

Opposition is true friendship.

William Blake

To err is human, but it feels divine.

Mae West

Immoral: something I haven’t tried yet.

Brian Wall

Proper words in proper places makes the true definition of a style.

Jonathan Swift

Each stroke on the canvas represents a word, a word that contributes to the statement on the canvas.

Mona Schlesinger

People tend to forget their duties but remember their rights.

Indira Gandhi

Money is everywhere but so is poetry. What we lack are the poets.

Federico Fellini

Each juggler should be trained in the ignorance of the laws of physics.

Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

A novelist is a man who doesn’t like his mother.

Georges Simenon

Any work of art must first of all tell a story.

Robert Frost

My language is the universal whore whom I have to make into a virgin.

Karl Kraus

You are what your deep driving desire is;
As your deep driving desire is, so is your will;
As your will is so is your deed;
As your deed is so is your destiny.

The Upanishads

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

Seneca

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

Marcus Fabius Quintilianus

A dragon is no idle fancy.

J.R.R. Tolkien

Great novels are diamonds mined from layered rewrites.

Andre Jute

No one is able to enjoy such a feast as the one who throws a party in his own mind.

Selma Lagerlöf

Prose books are the show dogs I breed and sell to support my cat.

Robert Graves

My object is to show what I have found, not what I am looking for.

Pablo Picasso

There is an eloquence in true enthusiasm.

Edgar Allan Poe

My country, ‘tis of thee,
Sweet land of felony,
Of thee I sing –
Land where my father fried
Young witches and applied
Whips to the Quaker’s hide
And made him spring.

Ambrose Bierce

They are much to be pitied who have not been given a taste for nature early in life.

Jane Austen

The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.

Orson Welles

Never invoke the gods unless you really want them to appear. It annoys them very much.

G. K. Chesterton

Religion is for people who are scared to go to hell. Spirituality is for people who have already been there.

Bonnie Raitt

I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.

Michelangelo

Do not say, ‘It is morning,’ and dismiss it with a name of yesterday. See it for the first time as a newborn child that has no name.

Rabindranath Tagore

I don’t want to be near you for the thoughts we share but the words we never have to speak.

Nikki Giovanni

One of the characteristics of the dream is that nothing surprises us in it.

Jean Cocteau

Glorify who you are today, do not condemn who you were yesterday, and dream of who you can be tomorrow.

Neale Donald Walsch

All significant truths are private truths. As they become public they cease to become truths; they become facts.

T. S. Eliot

Every writer making a secondary world wishes in some measure to be a real maker, or hopes that he is drawing on reality: hopes that the peculiar quality of this secondary world (if not all the details) are derived from reality, or are flowing into it.

J.R.R. Tolkien

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.

Blaise Pascal

Art is not a thing; it is a way.

Elbert Hubbard

With a great poet the sense of beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

John Keats

I know the joy of fishes in the river through my own joy, as I go walking along the same river.

Zhuangzi

Wise men speak because they have something to say; fools because they have to say something.

Plato

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature.

Helen Keller

The furthest out is the only place to be.

Stanley Elkin

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

Somerset Maugham

Authorship is exhibitionism, and readers a species of voyeur.

Carrie Latet

Drama, instead of telling us the whole of a man’s life, must place him in such a situation, tie such a knot, that when it is untied, the whole man is visible.

Leo Tolstoy

Writing counts.

Allyson Dickey

There is more pleasure to building castles in the air than on the ground.

Edward Gibbon

The writer in western civilization has become not a voice of his tribe, but of his individuality. This is a very narrow-minded situation.

Aharon Appelfeld

A man who is not afraid is not aggressive.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

If you go off into a far, far forest and get very quiet, you’ll come to understand that you’re connected with everything.

Alan Watts

If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.

Marcel Proust

Wonder into wonder existence opens.

Lao Tzu

Death gives meaning to our lives. It gives importance and value to time.

Ray Kurzweil

Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Dreams have only one owner at a time. That’s why dreamers are lonely.

Erma Bombeck

Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall.

Salman Rushdie

Proofread carefully to see if you any words out.

Dave Barry

There is no sincerer love than the love of food.

George Bernard Shaw

Best advice I’ve ever received – finish.

Peter Mayle

An exclamation mark is like laughing at your own joke.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

I would never write about someone who is not at the end of his rope.

Stanley Elkin

The idea of authors running around helplessly behind their cretinous inventions is contemptible.

John Cheever

Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously.

Ernest Hemingway

Praise will lead you to vanity and blame will lead you to self-pity and both are bad for writers.

John Berryman

The unknown eludes the cognitive mind and reveals itself instead through dreams, feelings, meditative states and symbols.

Almine

If you’re silent for a long time, people just arrive in your mind.

Alice Walker

If you want to know your characters better, ask yourself: “How would they behave in a quarrel?”

Barnaby Conrad

A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.

Jean Cocteau

You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems and suffer and understand, for all that is life.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Home is where one starts from.

T. S. Eliot

I dislike allegory wherever I smell it.

J.R.R. Tolkien

There are people who the more you do for them, the less they will do for themselves.

Jane Austen

The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship.

William Blake

To the man who only has a hammer, everything he encounters begins to look like a nail.

Abraham Maslow

The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

G. K. Chesterton

Are we to paint what’s on the face, what’s inside the face, or what’s behind it?

Pablo Picasso

I don’t need a friend who changes when I change and who nods when I nod; my shadow does that much better.

Plutarch

The important thing is that you make sure that neither the favorable nor the unfavorable critics move into your head and take part in the composition of your next work.

Thornton Wilder

Writing is turning one’s worst moments into money.

J. P. Donleavy

Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.

C. S. Lewis

Who so loves believes the impossible.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

What do you despise? By this you are truly known.

Michelangelo

Fortune favors the brave.

Publius Terence

Be yourself, everyone else is taken.

Oscar Wilde

Artists stare at fear so long and hard that fear becomes afraid of them.

Bernice Ellis

Drama is life with the dull bits left out.

Alfred Hitchcock

Do not be bullied out of your common sense by the specialist; two to one, he is a pedant.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren’t there.

George Santayana

The life of an artist is like the life of a monk, a lewd monk if you like, very Rabelaisian.

Marcel Duchamp

Clever men are good, but they are not the best.

Thomas Carlyle

I’m not confused, I’m just well mixed.

Robert Frost

Never let your schooling interfere with your education.

Mark Twain

Your children will become what you are; so be what you want them to be.

David Bly

Nobody on earth can give you either the key or the door to open, except yourself.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

When a painting feels like it is coming into being, it coincides with a certain knowing that starts to settle in my body.

Holly Friesen

I’ve always had the feeling it’s dangerous to be friends with a writer; you can end up talking away your books.

Norman Mailer

The poet doesn’t invent. He listens.

Jean Cocteau

I was told to challenge every spiritual teacher, every world leader to utter the one sentence that no religion, no political party, and no nation on the face of the earth will dare utter: ‘Ours is not a better way, ours is merely another way’.

Neale Donald Walsch

A writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.

Ernest Hemingway

Loving ourselves works miracles in our lives.

Louise Hay

What people forget is a journey to nowhere starts with a single step, too.

Chuck Palahniuk

It’s easy, after all, not to be a writer. Most people aren’t writers, and very little harm comes to them.

Julian Barnes

Men are only as great as they are kind.

Elbert Hubbard

Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?

Henry David Thoreau

I want to give the audience a hint of a scene. No more than that. Give them too much and they won’t contribute anything themselves. Give them just a suggestion and you get them working with you. That’s what gives the theater meaning: when it becomes a social act.

Orson Welles

An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man’s entire existence.

Honoré de Balzac

Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist.

René Magritte

Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.

Benjamin Disraeli

March on. Do not tarry. To go forward is to move toward perfection. March on, and fear not the thorns, or the sharp stones on life’s path.

Kahlil Gibran

The words dripped on my consciousness, sank into my being, and carried me away to the magic long ago of once upon a time.

Peter Abrahams

I hope that someday we will be able to put away our fears and prejudices and just laugh at people.

Jack Handy

Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none is undeservedly remembered.

W. H. Auden

Men like women who write. Even though they don’t say so. A writer is a foreign country.

Marguerite Duras

First I must look, then I must learn.

Theodore Roethke

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

Henry Ward Beecher

Good enough is never good enough.

A. B. Guthrie

Dialogue in fiction should be reserved for the culminating moments and regarded as the spray into which the great wave of narrative breaks in curving toward the watcher on the shore.

Edith Wharton

It’s not wise to violate rules until you know how to observe them.

T. S. Eliot

The purpose of life is a life of purpose.

Robert Byrne

What really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful ‘sub-creator’. He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is ‘true’: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside.

J.R.R. Tolkien

If you don’t know what your passion is, realize that one reason for your existence on earth is to find it.

Oprah Winfrey

A voice coming from behind your back can be different.

Anne Carson

There is something so amiable in the prejudices of a young mind, that one is sorry to see them give way to the reception of more general opinions.

Jane Austen

Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which are everything in this world.

Blaise Pascal

The eye altering, alters all.

William Blake

The excellency of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeable evaporate.

John Keats

Flow with whatever may happen and let your mind be free. Stay centered by accepting whatever you are doing. This is the ultimate.

Zhuangzi

Beauty is power; a smile is its sword.

John Ray

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.

Pablo Picasso

The essence of pleasure is spontaneity.

Germaine Greer

Artists are modest. They know they’re not doing the work; they’re just taking dictation.

Steven Pressfield

Life is hard. After all, it kills you.

Katharine Hepburn

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear – not absence of fear.

Mark Twain

The extreme limit of wisdom, that’s what the public calls madness.

Jean Cocteau

The first duty of man is to conquer fear; he must get rid of it, he cannot act till then.

Thomas Carlyle

As music is the poetry of sound, so is painting the poetry of sight.

James McNeill Whistler

Politics have no relation to morals.

Niccolo Machiavelli

Everything can be taken from a man or a woman but one thing: the last of human freedoms to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

Viktor E. Frankl

Supposing such dispositions in the artist as have been previously laid down, for his direction herein we shall describe the changes which our subject undergoes during the second part of the process, commonly called the Great Work of the Philosophers: Our vessel being warily heated at the first for fear of its cracking, an ebullition of the contained matter is brought on, so that the moisture is alternately circulated in white fumes above, and condensed below. Other colours may be exhibited in this part of the work without danger, if they pass transiently; but if a faint redness continues, the matter is in danger of vitrifying, either from an impatient urging of the fire, or the moisture not being sufficiently predominant. An ingenious artist can remedy this by opening his vessel and adding more of the acuated mercury; but a novice would do much better to prevent it by governing his fire according to the appearances of his matter, with judgment and patience, till such time as the vapours become dark; and a pellicle or film on the matter shows its disposition for fixing, till it breaks through at different places on its surface with darker clouds, till the whole substance resembles molten pitch, bubbling less and less, resting in one entire black substance at the bottom of your glass. This is called the blackness of black, the head of the crow, etc., and is esteemed a desirable stage in our philosophical generation, being the perfect putrefaction of our seed, which will ere long show its vital principle by a glorious manifestation of Seminal Virtue.

A. E. Waite

That trite little whimsey about characters getting out of hand; it is as old as the quills. My characters are galley slaves.

Vladimir Nabokov

Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws.

Plato

If a book comes from the heart, it will contrive to reach other hearts.

Thomas Carlyle

It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it.

Salman Rushdie

We gain freedom when we have paid the full price.

Rabindranath Tagore

O, wind, if winter comes, can spring be far behind?

Percy Bysshe Shelley

An early-morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.

Henry David Thoreau

Love is the unclaimed gold in the rush to intensity.

Pamir Kiciman

Constantly choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil.

Jerry Garcia

All human happiness and misery take the form of action.

Aristotle

My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.

Anton Chekhov

Exercise the writing muscle every day. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up.

Jane Yolen

The freedom to create is somehow linked with facility of access to those obscure regions below the conscious mind.

Loren Eiseley

Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion.

T. S. Eliot

That pleasure which is at once the most pure, the most elevating and the most intense, is derived, I maintain, from the contemplation of the beautiful.

Edgar Allan Poe

Nothing – the negative, the empty – is exceedingly powerful.

Alan Watts

From politics it was an easy step to silence.

Jane Austen

We awaken in others the same attitude of mind we hold toward them.

Elbert Hubbard

Begin well, with attack and accuracy. Drive it through. But, whatever else, make the end the best.

Alma Gluck

One can never know for sure what a deserted area looks like.

George Carlin

I tried to find Him on the Christian cross, but He was not there; I went to the temple of the Hindus and to the old pagodas, but I could not find a trace of Him anywhere. I searched on the mountains and in the valleys, but neither in the heights nor in the depths was I able to find Him. I went to the Kaaba in Mecca, but He was not there either. I questioned the scholars and philosophers, but He was beyond their understanding. I then looked into my heart, and it was there where He dwelled that I saw Him; He was nowhere else to be found.

Rumi

The trouble with doing something right the first time is that nobody appreciates how difficult it was.

Walt West

Gardens are not created or made, they unfold, spiraling open like the silk petals of an evening primrose flower to reveal the ground plot of the mind and heart of the gardener and the good earth.

Wendy Johnson

Never feel guilty about reading. That’s what you do.

William Safire

You can’t write fiction unless you read fiction.

Bill Adler

Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.

Jean Cocteau

Fear is what prevents the flowering of the mind.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Change is an act of creation. Resistance stops creation. That is the difference.

Neale Walsch

There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something. You certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after.

J.R.R. Tolkien

Life in abundance comes only through great love.

Elbert Hubbard

We are what we imagine ourselves to be.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age.

Anaïs Nin

The older one grows, the more one likes indecency.

Virginia Woolf

A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It finds the thought and the thought finds the words.

Robert Frost

It is a golden maxim to cultivate the garden for the nose, and the eyes will take care of themselves.

Robert Louis Stevenson

The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his information and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he’s always doing both.

James A. Michener

Imagination decides everything.

Blaise Pascal

Live in eternity’s sunrise.

William Blake

Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination.

Marcel Proust

The final wisdom of life requires not the annulment of incongruity but the achievement of serenity within and above it.

Reinhold Niebuhr

It is wise to direct your anger towards problems, not people.

William Arthur Ward

If you make friends with yourself you will never be alone.

Maxwell Maltz

A boy has to peddle his book.

Truman Capote

I have my standards. They may be low, but I have them.

Bette Midler

Training to be a writer is a slow and continuous process, with time off for human behavior.

Marie-Elise

Writers have no real area of expertise. They are merely generalists with a highly inflamed sense of punctuation.

Lorrie Moore

Reading is to the mind what exercize is to the body.

Richard Steele

I think that if ever a mortal heard the voice of God it would be in a garden at the cool of the day.

F. Frankfort Moore

Beginning writers must appreciate the prerequisites if they hope to become writers. You pay your dues – which takes years.

Alex Haley

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

It will not always happen that the success of a poet is proportionate to his labor.

Samuel Johnson

Fundamental accuracy of statement is the one sole morality of writing.

Ezra Pound

Remarks aren’t literature.

Gertrude Stein

Time spent peddling an unfinished novel could be better spent finishing it.

Margaret Reavey

People should practice an art in order to make their souls grow and not to make money or become famous. Paint a picture. Write.

Kurt Vonnegut

I feel at times that I’m making up these little people and I’ve lost my mind.

Carolyn Chute

This is not a pen, it is a prayer, one must have compassion for that.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

An idea has to have some dirt on its shoes, or it’s just air.

Marvin Bell

I am going to write because I cannot help it.

Charlotte Bronte

A writer needs loneliness, and he gets his share of it. He needs love, and he gets shared and also unshared love. He needs friendship. In fact, he needs the universe. To be a writer is, in a sense, to be a day-dreamer – to be living a kind of double life.

Jorge Luis Borges

I will fight no more forever.

Chief Joseph

They had names for everything but understood so little.

Ned B. Johnson

My religion is simple. My religion is kindness.

Dalai Lama

When you have done your best for a flower, and it fails, you have some reason to be aggrieved.

Frank Swinnerton

It graduates to ‘our state is better than your state,’ and ‘our nation is better than your nation.’ And it circles all the way around to where it started: ‘Our God is better than your God.’

Neale Donald Walsch

What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.

T. S. Eliot

One has a nose. The nose scents and it chooses. An artist is simply a kind of pig snouting truffles.

Igor Stravinsky

A person who is gifted sees the essential point and leaves the rest as surplus.

Thomas Carlyle

Painting is the intermediate something between a thought and a thing.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

We are what we believe we are.

C. S. Lewis

A good traveler has no fixed plan, and is not intent on arriving.

Lao Tzu

I’ve never known a storyteller who was unhappy when telling stories.

Alan Dean Foster

It doesn’t matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was.

Anne Sexton

Sex is a hole.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Let me be as one small seed that questions not, but sends its roots into the dark.

Donna Miesbach

The greatest barrier to success is the fear of failure.

Sven Goran Eriksson

Let every dawn be to you as the beginning of life, and every setting sun be to you as its close.

John Ruskin

A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight.

Oscar Wilde

Nothing is poetical if plain daylight is not poetical; and no monster should amaze us if the normal man does not amaze.

G. K. Chesterton

To kindness, to knowledge, we make promise only; pain we obey.

Marcel Proust

I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.

Pablo Picasso

All ideologies are idiotic.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Of all the several ways of beginning a book which are now in practice through the known world, I am confident my own way of doing it is the best, for I begin with writing the first sentence – and trust to Almighty God for the second.

Laurence Sterne

The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?

Edgar Allan Poe

To sit in the shade on a fine day and look upon verdure is the most perfect refreshment.

Jane Austen

Human beings must be known to be loved; but Divine beings must be loved to be known.

Blaise Pascal

God is alone, but the Devil, he is far from being alone; he sees a great deal of company.

Henry David Thoreau

Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.

Peter Ustinov

The five conditions of getting: It is not like. It is like. It is just like. It is only like this and not like anything else. It is.

Classical Chinese wisdom

Sometimes you come to an edge that just breaks off.

Anne Carson

I think in metaphysical terms, I would call that increasing the speed of the vibration of life.

Neale Donald Walsch

If you aren’t in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?

T. S. Eliot

The reason we have poverty is that we have no imagination.

Alan Watts

Nobody can hurt me without my permission.

Mahatma Gandhi

What sins to me unknown dipped me in ink, my parents or my own?

Alexander Pope

If a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger?

T. H. Huxley

Words are pegs to hang ideas on.

Henry Ward Beecher

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself.

Abraham Maslow

Old books are new, when life changes.

Helen Hirst

The axiom is the end of thought.

Martin Heidegger

Love is an art class at Castle in the Air.

Leia Phillips

Mystery has its own mysteries, and there are gods above gods. We have ours, they have theirs. That is what’s known as infinity.

Jean Cocteau

If we examine our thoughts, we shall find them always occupied with the past and the future.

Blaise Pascal

The mind ought sometimes to be amused, that it may the better return to thought, and to itself.

Phaedrus

That is the road we all have to take – over the Bridge of Sighs into eternity.

Søren Kierkegaard

I have striven not to laugh at human actions, nor to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them.

Baruch de Spinoza

Writers, like teeth, are divided into incisors and grinders.

Walter Bagehot

We work to become, not to acquire.

Elbert Hubbard

You look out the window and you see the tip of a tiger outside, and you know there’s a whole tiger attached to that tip, and you wonder about the tiger: What’s a tiger doing in Dover? What is the tiger like, how does it feel, what does it think? You have to track it down until you find the whole tiger. If you’re really smart, you carry a pound of raw hamburger with you.

Mekeel McBride

I write chapter outlines so I can have the pleasure of departing from them later on.

Garth Nix

How you think when you lose determines how long it will be until you win.

G. K. Chesterton

The important thing is this: to be able, at any moment, to sacrifice what we are for what we could become.

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

You are right in demanding that an artist approach his work consciously, but you are confusing two concepts: the solution of a problem and the correct formulation of a problem. Only the second is required of the artist.

Anton Chekhov

Determination not to give in, and the sense of an impending shape keep one at it more than anything.

Virginia Woolf

For a writer life consists of either writing or thinking about writing.

Eugene Ionesco

To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood.

George Santayana

Never complain. Never explain.

Katharine Hepburn

The spiritual is the parent of the practical.

Thomas Carlyle

Men die in despair, while spirits die in ecstasy.

Honoré De Balzac

The sword the body wounds, sharp words the mind.

Menander

I have no interest in the printed word. I would continue to write if there were no writing and no print. I put my words down for a matter of memory. They are more made to be spoken than to be read.

John Steinbeck

If you go flying back through time and you see somebody else flying forward into the future, it’s probably best to avoid eye contact.

Jack Handy

The man who speaks to you of sacrifice is speaking of slaves and masters, and intends to be the master.

Ayn Rand

A thought often makes us hotter than a fire.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Art is not a mirror to reflect reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.

Bertolt Brecht

The only problem with seeing too much is that it makes you insane.

Phaedrus

A schoolmaster should have an atmosphere of awe, and walk wonderingly, as if he was amazed at being himself.

Walter Bagehot

Love is a story that tells itself.

Anne Carson

Things happen individually first, and then collectively. It’s not the other way around.

Neale Donald Walsch

It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.

G. K. Chesterton

My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living.

Anaïs Nin

Giving birth is like taking your lower lip and forcing it over your head.

Carol Burnett

Fear cannot be without hope nor hope without fear.

Baruch Spinoza

A consistent thinker is a thoughtless person, because he conforms to a pattern; he repeats phrases and thinks in a groove.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

The most exhausting thing in life is being insincere.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Doubt, of whatever kind, can be ended by action alone.

Thomas Carlyle

There’s man all over for you, blaming on his boots the fault of his feet.

Samuel Beckett

The marble not yet carved can hold the form of every thought the greatest artist has.

Michelangelo

Being a poet is one of the unhealthier jobs – no regular hours, so many temptations!

Elizabeth Bishop

I often think of a poem as a door that opens into a room where I want to go.

Minnie Bruce Pratt

Parataxis is a charged instant of language cold on the surface, unexplained underneath.

Anne Carson

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

Stupidity often saves a man from going mad.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Great art picks up where nature ends.

Marc Chagall

I never drink while I’m working, but after a few glasses I get ideas that would never have occurred to me dead sober.

Irwin Shaw

Every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of man.

Rabindranath Tagore

God save us from reading nothing but the best.

Robertson Davies

Look at my arms, you will find no party hand-cuff on them.

Davy Crockett

Kindness trumps greed: it asks for sharing. Kindness trumps fear: it calls forth gratefulness and love. Kindness trumps even stupidity, for with sharing and love, one learns.

Marc Estrin

Because thou must not dream, thou need not despair.

Matthew Arnold

Art is Nature speeded up and God slowed down.

Malcolm de Chazal

Science must have originated in the feeling that something was wrong.

Thomas Carlyle

Making good decisions is a crucial skill at every level.

Peter Drucker

Confidence comes not from always being right but from not fearing to be wrong.

Peter T. Mcintyre

Our work is to present things that are as they are.

Frederick the Great

When I am attacked by gloomy thoughts, nothing help me so much as running to my books.

Montaigne

You cannot find peace by avoiding life.

Virginia Woolf

Two men look out throught the same bars: one sees the mud, the other the stars.

Frederick Langbridge

Love is space and time measured by the heart.

Marcel Proust

Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

There are truths which one can only say after having won the right to say them.

Jean Cocteau

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

T. S. Eliot

I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible.

Jane Austen

I avoid talking before the youth of the age as I would dancing before them.

Horace Walpole

I can forgive, but I cannot forget, is only another way of saying I will not forgive.

Henry Ward Beecher

Easy writing makes hard reading.

Ernest Hemingway

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 found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way – things I had no words for.

Georgia O’Keeffe

It’s too bad that stupidity isn’t painful.

Anton LaVey

The humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it.

Mark Twain

Small minds are concerned with the extraordinary, great minds with the ordinary.

Blaise Pascal

I owe my solitude to other people.

Alan Watts

No professional writer can afford only to write when he feels like it. If he waits till he is in the mood, till he has the inspiration, he waits indefinitely and ends by producing little or nothing. The professional writer creates the mood. He has his inspiration too, but he controls and subdues it to his bidding by setting himself regular hours of work. But in time writing becomes a habit, and like the old actor in retirement, who gets restless when the hour arrives at which he has been accustomed to go down to the theatre and make up for the evening performance, the writer itches to get to his pens and paper at the hours at which he has been used to write. Then he writes automatically.

Somerset Maugham

Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains.

Thomas Carlyle

We must not let daylight in upon the magic.

Walter Bagehot

There is as much greatness of mind in acknowledging a good turn, as in doing it.

Seneca

We steal if we touch tomorrow. It is God’s.

Henry Ward Beecher

Sex just hasn’t been the same since women started enjoying it.

Lewis Grizzard

Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which once you have got it you may be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted had you known.

Garrison Keillor

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

Woody Allen

The common workshop goal is revision, not suicide.

Hilma Wolitzer

No complete son of a bitch ever wrote a good sentence.

Malcolm Cowley

I suffer as always from the fear of putting down the first line. It is amazing the terrors, the magics, the prayers, the straightening shyness that assails one.

John Steinbeck

To the last, I grapple with thee; From Hell’s heart, I stab at thee; For hate’s sake, I spit my last breath at thee.

Herman Melville

I have frequently gained my first real insight into the character of parents by studying their children.

Arthur Conan Doyle

Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes.

Henry David Thoreau

The box was a universe, a poem, frozen on the boundaries of human experience.

William Gibson

When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.

Viktor E. Frankl

A person is always startled when he hears himself called old for the first time.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

If thou must love me, let it be for naught except for love’s sake only.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Fortunately, somewhere between chance and mystery lies imagination, the only thing that protects our freedom, despite the fact that people keep trying to reduce it or kill it off altogether.

Luis Buñuel

No man is sane who does not know how to be insane on proper occasions.

Henry Ward Beecher

If men were born free, they would, so long as they remained free, form no conception of good and evil.

Baruch Spinoza

The constant assertion of belief is an indication of fear.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Every writer making a secondary world wishes in some measure to be a real maker, or hopes that he is drawing on reality: hopes that the peculiar quality of this secondary world (if not all the details) are derived from Reality, or are flowing into it.

J.R.R. Tolkien

The soul of sweet delight can never be defiled.

William Blake

It isn’t that they can’t see the solution. It is that they can’t see the problem.

G. K. Chesterton

Named must your fear be before banish it you can.

Yoda

In the middle of the silence in a writer’s house lies an invalid: the book being worked on.

Richard Eder

Art is essentially the affirmation, the blessing, and the deification of existence.

Friedrich Nietzsche

It is not white hair that engenders wisdom.

Menander

It is not love that should be depicted as blind, but self-love.

Voltaire

Every reader finds himself.

Marcel Proust

What happens to the hole when the cheese is gone?

Bertolt Brecht

Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.

Jean Cocteau

If we simply decided to believe and act as if first, we’re all one, and second, life is eternal, it would render virtually everything we’ve done all our lives pointless.

Neale Donald Walsch

One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.

Jane Austen

Do you wish people to think well of you? Don’t speak well of yourself.

Blaise Pascal

All men have eyes, but few have the gift of penetration.

Niccolo Machiavelli

Surprise is the greatest gift which life can grant us.

Boris Pasternak

The cut of a garment speaks of intellect and talent and the color of temperament and heart.

Thomas Carlyle

Painting is only a bridge linking the painter’s mind with that of the viewer.

Eugène Delacroix

Honour sinks where commerce long prevails.

Oliver Goldsmith

Art is a partnership not only between those who are living but between those who are dead and those who are yet to be born.

Edmund Burke

Throughout the day no time for memorandums now. Go ahead! Liberty and independence forever.

Davy Crockett

Words, as symbols for thoughts, are too precious to squander.

Brian Knowles

Intolerance is evidence of impotence.

Aleister Crowley

The most dangerous people are the ignorant.

Henry Ward Beecher

Life becomes fun when one realizes that it’s just a game.

Nerijus Stasiulis

You must squeeze out of yourself every sensation, every thought, every image, – mercilessly, without reserve and without remorse: you must search the darkest corners of your heart, the most remote recesses of your brain, – you must search them for the image, for the glamour, for the right expression. And you must do it sincerely, at any cost: you must do it so that at the end of your day’s work you should feel exhausted, emptied of every sensation and every thought, with a blank mind and an aching heart, with the notion that there is nothing, – nothing left in you.

Joseph Conrad

Whenever you write, whatever you write, never make the mistake of assuming the audience is any less intelligent than you are.

Rod Serling

I’m a writer first and a woman after.

Katherine Mansfield

You don’t need strength to let go of something. What you really need is understanding.

Guy Finley

The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.

G. K. Chesterton

Love has nothing to do with what you are expecting to get, only with what you are expecting to give, which is everything.

Katharine Hepburn

In the writing process, the more a thing cooks, the better.

Doris Lessing

In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.

Margaret Atwood

First drafts are for learning what your novel or story is about.

Bernard Malamud

I can imagine myself on my death-bed, spent utterly with lust to touch the next world, like a boy asking for his first kiss from a woman.

Aleister Crowley

A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn no other way.

Mark Twain

God and Country are an unbeatable team; they break all records for oppression and bloodshed.

Luis Buñuel

All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality – the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape.

Walter Bagehot

Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.

Jean Cocteau

Let’s not be narrow, nasty, and negative.

T. S. Eliot

If you can’t help others, at least don’t hurt them.

Dalai Lama

Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.

H. L. Mencken

Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn.

John Updike

Go as far as you can see; when you get there you’ll be able to see farther.

Thomas Carlyle

Be a scribe! Your body will be sleek, your hand will be soft. You are one who sits grandly in your house; your servants answer speedily; beer is poured copiously; all who see you rejoice in good cheer. Happy is the heart of him who writes; he is young each day.

Ptahotep

I am, in plainer words, a bundle of prejudices – made up of likings and dislikings.

Charles Lamb

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.

E. F. Schumacher

I believe in not quite knowing. A writer needs to be doubtful, questioning. I write out of curiousity and bewilderment.

William Trevor

The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.

Dorothy Parker

My feeling about technique in art is that it has the same value as technique in lovemaking. That is to say, heartfelt ineptitude has its charm and so has heartless skill, but what you really want is passionate virtuosity.

John Barth

The world I create in writing compensates for what the real world does not give me.

Gloria Anzaldua

Everyone chases after happiness, not noticing that happiness is right at their heels.

Bertolt Brecht

They have called the knowledge itself hiden, and they have also referred to the method of transmission, whereby they leave the knowledge to their successors, as hiden. When doing so, they transmit not only knowledge but also power and authority, along with symbolic objects to signify the legitimacy of a recipient, such as a praised sword, fan, or the like. In this paradigm, both the transmission and knowledge do not depend on what is called modern “reason,” which was once believed to ensure objective truth.

Maki Isaka Morinaga

If you study the writings of the mystics, you will always find things in them that appear to be paradoxes.

Alan Watts

If you don’t risk anything, you risk even more.

Erica Jong

He was distinguished for ignorance; for he had only one idea, and that was wrong.

Benjamin Disraeli

One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.

E. M. Forster

There are a hundred ways to begin a story but only one to end it, and the writer must know the end before he begins.

Katherine Anne Porter

Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery.

Kurt Vonnegut

Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.

Oscar Wilde

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

Jean Malaquais

Nothing on earth in fiction is less interesting than characters under the influence of alcohol.

John L’Heureux

The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean.

Robert Louis Stevenson

Buildings, too, are children of Earth and Sun.

Frank Lloyd Wright

Follow effective action with quiet reflection.

Peter F. Drucker

We don’t receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.

Marcel Proust

One thought fills immensity.

William Blake

If there hadn’t been women we’d still be squatting in a cave eating raw meat, because we made civilization in order to impress our girlfriends.

Orson Welles

An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.

Jean Cocteau

Success tempts many to their ruin.

Phaedrus

Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The ordinary man looking at a mountain is like an illiterate person confronted with a Greek manuscript.

Aleister Crowley

Love is not something you feel, it is something you do.

Mark Kolke

The language you use for your poems should be the language you use with your friends.

Robert Bly

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

Maya Angelou

A warrior never worries about his fear.

Carlos Castaneda

Humor is reason gone mad.

Groucho Marx

If you look for the bad in people expecting to find it, you surely will.

Abraham Lincoln

Hungry man, reach for the book: it is a weapon.

Bertolt Brecht

Never mind about the young! I am not interested in the ‘child’ as such, modern or otherwise, and certainly have no intention of meeting him or her half way, or a quarter of the way. It is a mistaken thing to do anyway, either useless when applied to the stupid or pernicious when inflicted on the gifted.

J.R.R. Tolkien

Every tyrant who has lived has believed in freedom for himself.

Elbert Hubbard

Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.

William James

I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.

Pablo Picasso

Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is lightning that does all the work.

Mark Twain

What role does silence have in all this noise?

Federico Fellini

All art is a kind of subconscious madness expressed in terms of sanity.

George Jean Nathan

In every phenomenon the beginning remains always the most notable moment.

Thomas Carlyle

A man who thinks much of his words as he writes them will generally leave behind him the smell of oil.

Anthony Trollope

Action is eloquence.

William Shakespeare

It is the Light of Nature which is at work during sleep.

Paracelcus

Worried about playing the fool, we forget how to simply play.

Julia Cameron

Habit is a great deadener.

Samuel Beckett

The painting rises from the brushstrokes as a poem rises from the words. The meaning comes later.

Joan Miró

Comedy is the art of making people laugh without making them puke.

Steve Martin

If a myth does not refer both to the realm of the gods and to that of our own lives, or if it does not speak both about the world and about our psyches, it is not a myth.

Deena Metzger

The being without an opinion is so painful to human nature that most people will leap to a hasty opinion rather than undergo it.

Walter Bagehot

We are to learn about fear, not how to escape from it.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

You are the music while the music lasts.

T. S. Eliot

The actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts.

John Locke

Simple is hard.

Martin Scorsese

It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.

Walter Lippmann

Soften your focus and put your attention on the entire space around you. Imagine that the space and everything in it, including you, is filled with God’s Boundless Joy.

Jim Kitzmiller

If you’re going through hell, keep going.

Winston Churchill

Those who are clever, who have a Brain, never understand anything.

Winnie the Pooh

Witches are often betrayed by their appetites.

Neil Gaiman

Any time you’ve got nothing to do and lots of time to do it, come on up.

Mae West

Charlotte’s Web was the first book that made me weep, and I wept because I knew that it contained truth.

Jenny Boylan

When I die I will soar with angels and when I die to the angels, what I shall become, you cannot imagine.

Rumi

Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new at all.

Abraham Lincoln

Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them...well, I have others.

Groucho Marx

Now comes the mystery.

Henry Ward Beecher

Anything that actually occurs is of no importance.

Oscar Wilde

Anecdotes don’t make good stories. Generally I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdotes were about.

Alice Munro

Children read books, not reviews. They don’t give a hoot about critics.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

Satisfaction is death.

George Bernard Shaw

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Modern morality and manners suppress all natural instincts, keep people ignorant of the facts of nature and make them fighting drunk on bogey tales.

Aleister Crowley

The writer’s point of view is a choice among tools.

Tracy Kidder

The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours.

T. S. Eliot

The thing we fear we bring to pass.

Elbert Hubbard

Self-esteem isn’t everything; it’s just that there’s nothing without it.

Gloria Steinem

For a creative writer possession of the “truth” is less important than emotional sincerity.

George Orwell

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.

Thomas Carlyle

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.

Groucho Marx

I hear things in a kinesthetic way. I tap into a rhythm of language to portray what I feel.

Mary Gordon

I want always to be writing the book I was born to write.

Pat Conroy

You ask for the distinction between Editor and Publisher: an editor selects manuscripts; a publisher selects editors.

Max Schuster

Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.

Marie Curie

To see takes time.

Georgia O’Keeffe

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.

Oscar Wilde

I looked up, and it was Christmas.

David Kern

Writing, like life itself, is a voyage of discovery. The adventure is a metaphysical one; it is a way of approaching life indirectly, of acquiring a total rather than a partial view of the universe. The writer lives between the upper and lower worlds: he takes the path in order eventually to become that path himself.

Henry Miller

I wore myself out scheming for my desired end, yet only in surrender did I find far more than I could have ever hoped for.

Jocelyn Soriano

Writers don’t write from experience. Writers write from empathy.

Nikki Giovanni

This is love: to fly toward a secret sky, to cause a hundred veils to fall each moment. First to let go of life. Finally, to take a step without feet.

Rumi

They are made by man in his own image and likeness; but freed from those limitations which he feels most to press upon him. They are immortal, and their will is directly effective for the achievement of imagination and desire.

J.R.R. Tolkien

It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.

Pablo Picasso

The person who knows how to laugh at himself will never cease to be amused.

Shirley MacLaine

Love is the river of life in the world.

Henry Ward Beecher

If you do not break out in that sweat of fear when you write, then you have not gone far enough.

Dorothy Allison

Industry is a better horse to ride than genius.

Walter Lippmann

Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are.

Bertolt Brecht

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Where there is no temple there shall be no homes.

T. S. Eliot

All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.

G. K. Chesterton

I find hope in the darkest of days, and focus in the brightest. I do not judge the universe.

Dalai Lama

Old age is no place for sissies.

Bette Davis

Oh, give us the man who sings at his work.

Thomas Carlyle

Rationality squeezes out much that is rich and juicy and fascinating.

Anne Lamott

The plot is the line on which I hang the wash, and the wash is what I care about.

Robert B. Parker

Pick up the specific terminology of a different field each year.

Paul West

Trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle.

Michelangelo

Breathe fire into everything you do. Make it glow.

Tom Morris

When God hands you a gift, he also hands you a whip; and the whip is intended for self-flagellation solely.

Truman Capote

A novelist should not be too intelligent.

Anthony Burgess

The writer has to force himself to work. He has to make his own hours and if he doesn’t go to his desk at all there is nobody to scold him.

Roald Dahl

The greatest artist is always a devout person.

Abraham Lincoln

It is my belief that women like to be given a task in the middle.

Anne Carson

I love cats because I enjoy my home; and little by little, they become its visible soul.

Jean Cocteau

The more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it.

Steven Pressfield

Do what you will, this world’s a fiction and is made up of contradiction.

William Blake

In the depth of winter I found there was in me an invincible summer.

Albert Camus

The most certain sign of wisdom is cheerfulness.

Michel de Montaigne

I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.

John Muir

All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.

Galileo Galilei

Writer’s block often results from overwriting; the general has gotten too far ahead of his army and finds his supply lines cut.

William Burroughs

The greatest of all faults is to be conscious of none.

Thomas Carlyle

Men know they are sexual exiles. They wander the earth seeking satisfaction, craving and despising, never content. There is nothing in that anguished motion for women to envy.

Camille Paglia

To you I’m an atheist; to God, I’m the Loyal Opposition.

Woody Allen

Fiction is fact distilled into truth.

Edward Albee

Disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business.

Tom Robbins

If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.

Dorothy Parker

Common Sense is that which judges the things given to it by other senses.

Leonardo da Vinci

Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.

André Gide

If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly, our whole life would change.

Buddha

Begin where the reader will be invited to do the most anticipating of the story, where the reader will be most compelled to guess wrong.

John Irving

I started writing because of a terrible feeling of powerlessness.

Anita Brookner

A poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu.

William Stafford

Let who you are, what you are, what you believe, shine through every sentence you write, every piece you finish.

John Jakes

No great work has ever been produced except after a long interval of still and musing meditation.

Walter Bagehot

The first thing I do i