“Read widely…and sometimes while immersed in the multitude voices of others, you just might find your own.”
~ CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE
“Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one.”
~ STELLA ADLER
“The creative process is not controlled by a switch you can simply turn on or off; it’s with you all the time.”
~ ALVIN AILEY
“Your voice is wild and simple. You are untranslatable into any one tongue.”
~ ANNA AKHMATOVA
“I write to understand my circumstances, to sort out the confusion of reality, to exorcise my demons. But most of all, I write because I love it!”
~ ISABEL ALLENDE
“I think the whole glory of writing lies in the fact that it forces us out of ourselves and into the lives of others.”
~ SHERWOOD ANDERSON
“The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.”
~ MAYA ANGELOU
“…good characterization begins with observation, with details, with particulars. These are not only physical details, but also actions and gestures, what poker players refer to as ‘tells,’ that offer the observer clues about the character, that suggest more than they actually say.”
~ TONY ARDIZZONE
“If my doctor told me I only had six months to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.”
~ ISAAC ASIMOV
“It’s a slight myth that writing a book that is working takes a toll on the writer. What takes a toll is when you’re writing a book that isn’t working out.”
~ MARGARET ATWOOD
“Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with age. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones.”
~ MARGARET ATWOOD
“Get up very early and get going at once. In fact, work first and wash afterwards.”
~ W.H. AUDEN
“An artist cannot do anything slovenly.”
~ JANE AUSTEN
“A well-thought-out story doesn’t need to resemble real life. Life itself tries with all its might to resemble a well-crafted story.”
~ ISAAC BABEL
“Every form is difficult, no one is easier than another. They all kick your ass.”
~ JAMES BALDWIN
“You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.”
~ JAMES BALDWIN
“Write about what you’re afraid of.”
~ DONALD BARTHELME
“The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure.”
~ MIKHAIL BARYSHNIKOV
“To play a wrong note is insignificant; to play without passion is inexcusable!”
~ LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
“You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.”
~ SAUL BELLOW
“Nobody’s heart is really good for much until it has been smashed to little bits.”
~ ELIZABETH BISHOP
“It is not enough to have a vision. In order to have its power, you must enact your vision on earth for all to see. Only then do you have the power.”
~ BLACK ELK
“Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.”
~ JORGE LUIS BORGES
“If you feel safe in the area that you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area.”
~ DAVID BOWIE
“Don’t think. 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
“Let the world burn through you. Throw the prism light, white hot, on paper.”
~ RAY BRADBURY
“A ruffled mind makes a restless pillow.”
~ CHARLOTTE BRONTE
“A person who has not done one half his day’s work by ten o’clock, runs a chance of leaving the other half undone.”
~ EMILY BRONTE
“Specific, definite, concrete, particular details–these are the life of fiction.”
~ JANET BURROWAY
“First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won’t. Habit is persistence in practice.”
~ OCTAVIA E. BUTLER
“Story is a yearning meeting an obstacle.”
~ ROBERT OLEN BUTLER
“It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.”
~ JOSEPH CAMPBELL
“Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.”
~ WILLA CATHER
“There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.”
~ WILLA CATHER
“Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.”
~ ANTON CHEKHOV
“Art does not have to solve problems. It just has to formulate them correctly.”
~ ANTON CHEKHOV
“There are some people who leave impressions not so lasting as the imprint of an oar upon the water.”
~ KATE CHOPIN
“Amateurs look for inspiration; the rest of us just get up and go to work.”
~ CHUCK CLOSE
“Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.”
~ CHUCK CLOSE
“I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.”
~ TA-NEHISI COATES
“I often liken writing a book to spinning plates. There are many, many different things you have to keep up and spinning at all times.”
~ MICHAEL CONNELLY
“A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom.”
~ ROALD DAHL
“Do not fear mistakes. There are none.”
~ MILES DAVIS
“Any art worth its name requires you to be fundamentally lost for a very long time.”
~ JUNOT DIAZ
“The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.”
~ EMILY DICKINSON
“Grammar is a piano I play by ear. All I know about grammar is its power.”
~ JOAN DIDEON
“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.”
~ ANNIE DILLARD
“All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.”
~ ISAK DINESEN
“Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
~ E.L. DOCTOROW
“My preference is for prose with more silence in it, language that contains more pockets of strangeness.”
~ ANTHONY DOERR
“The high note is not the only thing.”
~ PLACIDO DOMINGO
“Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point where he cannot distinguish the truth within him or around him, and so loses respect for himself. And having no respect, he ceases to love.”
~ FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY
“Beauty will save the world.”
~ FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY
“Every time I sit down to write, I try to feel that I’m starting over. It’s all new. It’s all fresh, and I’m learning as we go.”
~ RITA DOVE
“Read some good, heavy, serious books just for discipline. Take yourself in hand and master yourself.”
~ W.E.B. DU BOIS
“I think the deeper you go into questions, the deeper or more interesting the questions get. And I think that’s the job of art.”
~ ANDRE DUBUS III
“In writing songs, I’ve learned as much from Cezanne as I have from Woody Guthrie.”
~ BOB DYLAN
“The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.”
~ UMBERTO ECO
“That adage about ‘Write what you know’ is basically the opposite of the way I function. I write about what I’m curious to find out.”
~ JENNIFER EGAN
“Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.”
~ ALBERT EINSTEIN
“I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.”
~ ALBERT EINSTEIN
“The poet’s mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.”
~ T.S. ELIOT
“The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.”
~ RALPH ELLISON
“Here I am, where I ought to be. A writer must have a place where he or she feels this, a place to love and be irritated with.”
~ LOUISE ERDRICH
“I would say to get the character in your mind. Once he is in your mind, and he is right, and he’s true, then he does the work himself. All you need to do then is to trot along behind him and put down what he does and what he says.”
~ WILLIAM FAULKNER
“Take your broken heart, make it into art.”
~ CARRIE FISHER
“A novel is like a dream in which everyone is you. They’re all parts of yourself.”
~ JANET FITCH
“Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.”
~ F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
“Writing never came naturally and I still have to force my hand to do it.”
~ RICHARD FORD
“The king died and then the queen died is a story. The king died, and then the queen died of grief is a plot.”
~ E.M. FORSTER
“When I was taken to the concentration camp of Auschwitz, a manuscript of mine ready for publication was confiscated. Certainly, my deep desire to write this manuscript anew helped me to survive the rigors of the camps I was in.”
~ VIKTOR FRANKL
“An artist should appear in his work no more than God in nature. The man is nothing; the work is everything.”
~ LUCIAN FREUD
“No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.”
~ ROBERT FROST
“This is how you do it: You sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until it’s done. It’s that easy, and that hard.”
~ NEIL GAIMAN
“We read five words on the first page of a really good novel and we begin to forget that we are reading printed words on a page; we begin to see images.”
~ JOHN GARDNER
“The cloud never comes from the quarter of the horizon from which we watch for it.”
~ ELIZABETH GASKELL
“Do whatever brings you to life, then. Follow your own fascinations, obsessions, and compulsions. Trust them. Create whatever causes a revolution in your heart.”
~ ELIZABETH GILBERT
“To gain your own voice, you have to forget about having it heard.”
~ ALLEN GINSBERG
“Writers don’t write from experience, though many are resistant to admit that they don’t. I want to be clear about this. If you wrote from experience, you’d get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.”
~ NIKKI GIOVANNI
“If you don’t know what to do, there’s actually a chance of doing something new.”
~ PHILIP GLASS
“Always think of what is useful and not what is beautiful. Beauty will come of its own accord.”
~ NIKOLAI GOGOL
“Writers live twice.”
~ NATALIE GOLDBERG
“My art is an attempt to reach beyond the surface appearance.”
~ ANDY GOLDSWORTHY
“Know your literary tradition, savor it, steal from it, but when you sit down to write, forget about worshiping greatness and fetishizing masterpieces.”
~ ALLEGRA GOODMAN
“…Nothing quite focuses the mind like dissonant details awaiting harmonious resolution.”
~ BRIAN GREENE
“Fear is the cheapest room in the house. I would like to see you living in better conditions.”
~ HAFEZ
“I’m writing a first draft and reminding myself that I’m simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build sand castles.”
~ SHANNON HALE
“A novel is an impression, not an argument; and there the matter must rest.”
~ THOMAS HARDY
“It’s hell writing and it’s hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.”
~ ROBERT HASS
“Easy reading is damn hard writing.”
~ NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
“Art is not escape, but a way of finding order in chaos, a way of confronting life.”
~ ROBERT HAYDEN
“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”
~ ERNEST HEMINGWAY
“To make a great film you need three things: the script, the script and the script.”
~ ALFRED HITCHCOCK
“You must plan to be spontaneous.”
~ DAVID HOCKNEY
“Life-transforming ideas have always come to me through books.”
~ BELL HOOKS
“The one who tells the stories rules the world.”
~ HOPI NATIVE AMERICAN PROVERB
“Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.”
~ KHALED HOSSEINI
“An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he might choose.”
~ LANGSTON HUGHES
“Writing is a way of saying you and the world have a chance.”
~ RICHARD HUGO
“Those that don’t got it, can’t show it. Those that got it, can’t hide it.”
~ ZORA NEALE HURSTON
“Memory is quite central for me. Part of it is that I like the actual texture of writing through memory.”
~ KAZUO ISHIGURO
“My mother always told me, even if a song has been done a thousand times, you can still bring something of your own to it. I’d like to think I did that.”
~ ETTA JAMES
“If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.”
~ JUAN RAMÓN JIMÉNEZ
“Mistakes are the portals of discovery.”
~ JAMES JOYCE
“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
“If you want the truth, I’ll tell you the truth: Listen to the secret sound, the real sound, which is inside you.”
~ KABIR
“They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn’t. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.”
~ FRIDA KAHLO
“Writing, regardless of the end result—whether good or bad, published or not, well reviewed or slammed—means celebrating beauty in an often ugly world.”
~ MARY KARR
“Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.”
~ JACK KEROUAC
“When I’m writing, I think about the garden, and when I’m in the garden I think about writing. I do a lot of writing by putting something in the ground.”
~ JAMAICA KINCAID
“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”
~ STEPHEN KING
“What keeps you going isn’t some fine destination but just the road you’re on, and the fact that you know how to drive.”
~ BARBARA KINGSOLVER
“Everything vanishes around me, and works are born as if out of the void. Ripe, graphic fruits fall off. My hand has become the obedient instrument of a remote will.”
~ PAUL KLEE
“The pictures were painted directly through me, without preliminary drawings and with great power. I had no idea what the pictures would depict and still I worked quickly and surely without changing a single brush-stroke.”
~ HILMA af KLINT
“A novel is a long piece of synthetic prose based on play with invented characters. These are the only limits.”
~ MILAN KUNDERA
“I am drawn to any story that makes me want to read from one sentence to the next. I have no other criterion.”
~ JHUMPA LAHIRI
“Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.”
~ ANNE LAMOTT
“One of the few mistakes I haven’t made is to talk about the unwritten book.”
~ JOHN LE CARRÉ
“Real courage is when you know you’re licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.”
~ HARPER LEE
“The artist deals in what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.”
~ URSULA K. LE GUIN
“I’d spent five hours that morning trying to write a song that was meaningful and good, and I finally gave up and lay down. Then, ‘Nowhere Man’ came, words and music, the whole damn thing, as I lay down.”
~ JOHN LENNON
“I try to leave out the parts that people skip.”
~ ELMORE LEONARD
“If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it. Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can’t allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative.”
~ ELMORE LEONARD
“You only learn to be a better writer by actually writing.”
~ DORIS LESSING
“Whatever you’re meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.”
~ DORIS LESSING
“I’m not very good at praying, but what I experience when I’m writing a poem is close to prayer.”
~ DENISE LEVERTOV
“All we have is compassion and stories.”
~ BARRY LOPEZ
“I try to resist composing for as long as I can. I try to get to something essential before I start manipulating notes. I try to hold things in my mind’s ear as long as I can.”
~ JOHN LUTHER ADAMS
“If I’m trying to remember something I can’t quite name, trying to hear it focuses my attention in a certain way and then I finally start composing when I can not compose—and I have to write it down.”
~ JOHN LUTHER ADAMS
“You have an idea and continually remembering it—making many xerox copies of it until it becomes something so steeped it becomes a piece.”
~ JOHN LUTHER ADAMS
“Passion is one great force that unleashes creativity, because if you’re passionate about something, you’re more willing to take risks.”
~ YO-YO MA
“A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”
~ THOMAS MANN
“It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.”
~ GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ
“The worst thing you can think about when you’re painting is yourself.”
~ AGNES MARTIN
“I’m very careful not to have ideas, because they’re inaccurate.”
~ AGNES MARTIN
“Creativity takes courage.”
~ HENRI MATISSE
“There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”
~ SOMERSET MAUGHAM
“You can’t plot things out. You just have to trust in, you know, wherever it comes from.”
~ CORMAC McCARTHY
“I want, even for the worst of the characters, grace under pressure, some slinking nobility.”
~ CORMAC McCARTHY
“Nothing pleases me more than to go into a room and come out with a piece of music.”
~ PAUL McCARTNEY
“The joy is in the surprise. It can be as small as a felicitous coupling of noun and adjective.”
IAN McEWAN
“If the story you’re telling, is the story you’re telling, you’re in deep shit.”
~ ROBERT McKEE
“Writing is a suspension of life in order to recreate life.”
~ JOHN McPHEE
“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.”
~ THOMAS MERTON
“Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, that’s creativity.”
~ CHARLES MINGUS
“I have felt the swaying of the elephant’s shoulders, / and now you want me to climb /
on a jackass? Try to be serious.”
~ Mīrābāī
“You will have to say no to things to say yes to your work. It will be worth it.”
~ LIN-MANUEL MIRANDA
“If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”
~ TONI MORRISON
“The power of imagination makes us infinite.”
~ JOHN MUIR
I have tried very hard as a novelist to say, “Novels are about individuals and especially larger than life individuals.” My protagonists are very feisty characters.
~ BHARATI MUKHERJEE
“Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories – and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.”
~ ALICE MUNRO
“Dreaming is the day job of novelists, but sharing our dreams is a more important task.”
~ HARUKI MURAKAMI
“Caress the detail, the divine detail.”
~ VLADIMIR NABOKOV
“The writer’s job is to get the main character up a tree, and then once they are up there, throw rocks at them.”
~ VLADIMIR NABOKOV
“Peace goes into the making of a poem as flour goes into the making of bread.”
~ PABLO NERUDA
“Become tough through exposure to the opinions of others, through which you will eventually learn your own genuine opinion of your writing.”
~ VIET THANH NGUYEN
“It is in the moments of emotional crisis that human beings reveal themselves most accurately.”
~ ANAÏS NIN
“Read, observe, listen intensely! — as if your life depended upon it.”
~ JOYCE CAROL OATES
“I would never write first — I don’t think that’s good at all. As soon as you write in language, it becomes frozen. It’s better to think first — to think for a long time — and then write when you’re ready to write. But writing prematurely is a mistake.”
~ JOYCE CAROL OATES
“In a way winter is the real spring, the time when the inner things happen, the resurge of nature.”
~ EDNA O’BRIEN
“The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require attention.”
~ FLANNERY O’CONNOR
“May I have the courage today to live the life I would love …to postpone my dream no longer. But do at last what I came here for and waste my heart on fear no more.”
~ JOHN O’DONOHUE
“I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life – and I’ve never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.”
~ GEORGIA O’KEEFFE
On practice: “With my pencil I’ve traveled to the moon and back several times.”
~ MARY OLIVER
“And when is there time to remember, to sift, to weigh, to estimate, to total?”
~ TILLE OLSEN
“I don’t understand this whole concept of writer’s block. If I get stuck, I work on another scene.”
~ MICHAEL ONDAATJE
“Let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around.”
~ GEORGE ORWELL
“I wanted to use what I was, to be what I was born to be – not to have a ‘career’, but to be that straightforward obvious unmistakable animal, a writer.”
~ CYNTHIA OZICK
“You have to really understand how people speak, and you have to reconstruct it. …Most pleasure in writing, you know, is in inventing.”
~ GRACE PALEY
“This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.”
~ DOROTHY PARKER
“I don’t outline; I listen to a kind of whisper inside the material.”
~ JAYNE ANNE PHILLIPS
“To draw you must close your eyes and sing.”
~ PABLO PICASSO
“Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.”
~ PABLO PICASSO
“Everything you can imagine is real.”
~ PABLO PICASSO
“I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me.”
~ SYLVIA PLATH
“Art has no end but its own perfection.”
~ PLATO
“I believe great people do things before they are ready.”
~ AMY POEHLER
“I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction.”
~ KATHERINE ANNE PORTER
“A need to hear and tell stories is essential to the species Homo sapiens— second in necessity apparently after nourishment and before love and shelter.”
~ REYNOLDS PRICE
“If we want to write, it makes sense to read—and to read like a writer. If we wanted to grow roses, we would want to visit rose gardens and try to see them the way that a rose gardener would.”
~ FRANCINE PROSE
“Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees.”
~ MARCEL PROUST
“The brightest memory fades faster than the dullest ink.”
~ CLAUDIA RANKINE
“Now that we do not have priests and philosophers anymore, artists are the most important people in the world.”
~ GERHARD RICHTER
“The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.”
~ PHILIP ROTH
“You’ve got sadness in you, I’ve got sadness in me – and my works of art are places where the two sadnesses can meet, and therefore both of us need to feel less sad.”
~ MARK ROTHKO
“I find that discussing an idea out loud is often the way to kill it stone dead.”
~ J.K. ROWLING
“Criticism polishes my mirror.”
~ Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad RUMI
“Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.”
~ SALMAN RUSHDIE
“Waking consciousness is dreaming – but dreaming constrained by external reality.”
~ OLIVER SACKS
“May I write words more naked than flesh, stronger than bone, more resilient than sinew, sensitive than nerve.”
~ SAPPHO
“Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace.”
~ MAY SARTON
“I think a character who is basically like the writer and the reader (good, sensible, intelligent, well-intentioned, and so on) is going to produce a more deeply felt ride. Fiction gets most under our skin, I think, when we find it impossible to distance ourselves from the narrated dilemma.”
~ GEORGE SAUNDERS
“To get any forward momentum, I have to make stories that have drama, which for me often means putting some overt threat in there. And I’m not subtle. To make ‘threat’ and thereby ‘drama’ I will just – you know, create a kindergarten teacher and then introduce an approaching Mongol horde. In the midst of a crisis is where we get the true measure of a character, and thus some new feeling about human tendency.”
~ GEORGE SAUNDERS
“I have created nothing really beautiful, really lasting, but if I can inspire one of these youngsters to develop the talent I know they possess, then my monument will be in their work.”
~ AUGUSTA SAVAGE
“Work out of your work. Don’t work out of anybody else’s work.”
~ RICHARD SERRA
“Have more than you show, Speak less than you know.”
~ WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
“The wastebasket is the writer’s best friend.”
~ ISAAC B. SINGER
“Every first draft is perfect because all the first draft has to do is exist.”
~ JANE SMILEY
“Never let go of that fiery sadness called desire.”
~ PATTI SMITH
“I’m never interested in writing a kind of neutral universal novel that could be set anywhere. To me, a novel is a local thing.”
~ ZADIE SMITH
“Some of the most natural writers, the ones who seemed to shake their prose or poetry out of their sleeves, are among the disappeared. As far as I can tell, the decisive factor is what I call endurability: that is, the ability to deal effectively with uncertainty, rejection, and disappointment, from within as well as from without.”
~ TED SOLOTAROFF
“Everyone is born with a certain cargo, and your task in this life is to deliver your cargo to the world.”
~ MALIDOMA PATRICE SOMÉ
“The more restrictions you have, the easier anything is to write.”
~ STEPHEN SONDHEIM
“My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything.”
~ SUSAN SONTAG
“The hand that dips into the bottom of the pot will eat the biggest snail.”
~ WOLE SOYINKA
About Writer’s Block: “Lower your standards and keep on going.”
~ WILLIAM STAFFORD
“Hard writing makes easy reading.”
~ WALLACE STEGNER
“It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.
~ GERTRUDE STEIN
“The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean.”
~ ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
“It’s all about letting the story take over.”
~ ROBERT STONE
“All the best have something in common, a regard for reality, an agreement to its primacy over the imagination.”
~ Wisława SZYMBORSKA
“Who knows where inspiration comes from. Perhaps it arises from desperation. Perhaps it comes from the flukes of the universe, the kindness of the muses.”
~ AMY TAN
“When I’m writing, I am concentrating almost wholly on concrete detail: the color a room is painted, the way a drop of water rolls off a wet leaf after a rain.”
~ DONNA TARTT
“Creativity is a habit, and the best creativity is the result of good work habits.”
~ TWYLA THARP
“Art is the only way to run away without leaving home.”
~ TWYLA THARP
“Write while the heat is in you. … The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with.”
~ HENRY DAVID THOREAU
“Don’t get it right, just get it written.”
~ JAMES THURBER
“Ending a novel is almost like putting a child to sleep—it can’t be done abruptly.”
~ COLM TOIBIN
“In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.”
~ LEO TOLSTOY
“I suppose that there are endeavors in which self-confidence is even more important than it is in writing — tightrope walking comes immediately to mind — but it’s difficult for me to think of anybody producing much writing if his confidence is completely shot.”
~ CALVIN TRILLIN
“The most demanding part of living a lifetime as an artist is the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadfastly along the nerve of one’s own intimate sensitivity.”
~ ANNE TRUITT
“They [rules governing literary art] require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others.”
~ MARK TWAIN
“If I waited until I felt like writing, I’d never write at all.”
~ ANNE TYLER
“We’re past the age of heroes and hero kings. … Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it’s up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting.”
~ JOHN UPDIKE
“I dream my painting and I paint my dream.”
~ VINCENT VAN GOGH
“Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players. … I have 10 or so, and that’s a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.”
~ GORE VIDAL
“Art is, for me, a process of trying to wake up the soul. Because we live in an industrialized, fast-paced world that prefers that the soul remain asleep.”
~ BILL VIOLA
“Talent is extremely common. What is rare is the willingness to endure the life of the writer.”
~ KURT VONNEGUT
“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.”
~ KURT VONNEGUT
“Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.”
~ KURT VONNEGUT
“The English language is nobody’s special property. It is the property of the imagination.”
~ DEREK WALCOTT
“Whenever you are creating beauty around you, you are restoring your own soul.”
~ ALICE WALKER
“The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.”
~ DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
“The novelist works neither to correct nor to condone, not at all to comfort, but to make what’s told alive.”
~ EUDORA WELTY
“Life is always a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope.”
~ EDITH WHARTON
“Genius is more often found in a cracked pot than in a whole one.”
~ E.B. WHITE
“Don’t go searching for a subject, let your subject find you. You can’t rush inspiration… Once your subject finds you, it’s like falling in love.”
~ COLSON WHITEHEAD
“The best writing has no lace on its sleeves.”
~ WALT WHITMAN
“Be curious, not judgmental.”
~ WALT WHITMAN
“The great poems are not about experience, but are the experience itself, felt in the body.”
~ DAVID WHYTE
“A writer is someone who has taught his mind to misbehave.”
~ OSCAR WILDE
“We are saved only by love—love for each other and the love that we pour into the art we feel compelled to share: being a parent; being a writer; being a painter; being a friend. We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love.“
~ TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
“A true piece of writing is a dangerous thing. It can change your life.”
~ TOBIAS WOLFF
“It doesn’t have to be the truth, just your vision of it, written down.”
~ VIRGINIA WOOLF
“I’m writing a book. I’ve got the page numbers done.”
~ STEVEN WRIGHT
“Freedom of expression is the foundation of human rights, the root of human nature, and the mother of truth.”
~ LIU XIAOBO
“Those men that in their writings are most wise
Own nothing but their blind, stupefied hearts.”
~ W.B. YEATS
“The mystical life is at the centre of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write.”
~ W.B. YEATS
“Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.”
~ WILLIAM ZINSSER
Maybe you had to move cross-country after being relocated for a job. Or maybe you needed to leave an apartment before you expected to. How did that situation influence the rest of your life? If one unavoidable shift changed your world—for good and bad—in enduring ways, write it down and share it with Real Simple. A prize of $3,000 and publication in Real Simple is given annually for an essay on a theme. A second-place prize of $750 and a third-place prize of $500 are also given. The theme this year is “What was the most dramatic change you ever had to make?” The editors will judge. Submit an essay of up to 1,500 words by September 19. There is no entry fee. Visit the website for complete guidelines: http://www.realsimple.com/lifelessonscontest