Quotes

 

“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

“Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.”
– Cyril Connolly

“Success and failure are equally disastrous.”
– Tennessee Williams

“Writing is the hardest way of earning a living with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.”
– William Saroyan

“There is nothing like staying at home for real comfort”

Jane Austen

“Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.” 
– Benjamin Franklin 

“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 

“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 

“I write to discover what I think.” 
– Joan Didion

“The most beautiful clothes that can dress a woman are the arms of the man she loves,” he once said. “But for those who haven’t had the good fortune of finding this happiness, I am there.”

- Yves St. Laurent

“One writes out of one thing only — one’s own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from the experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give.” 

– James Baldwin 

“I have always felt that the first duty of a writer was to ascend — to make flights, carrying others along if you can manage it. To do this takes courage, even a certain conceit.” 
– E.B. White 

Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.

~Dr. Seuss

 

I’m sick of following my dreams.  I’m just gonna ask then where they’re going and meet up with them later. -Mitch Hedberg

 

“Love is friendship that has caught fire. It is quiet understanding, mutual confidence, sharing and forgiving. It is loyalty through good and bad times. It settles for less than perfection and makes allowances for human weaknesses.” -Ann Landers

 

“Happiness is good health and a bad memory.” Ingrid Bergman

“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 am a teller of tales, and in telling tales I find my delight.” 
– Theodore Sturgeon 

“Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.” 
– Charles Mingus 

“Success and failure are equally disastrous.” 

– Tennessee Williams 

“Fiction is the truth inside the lie.” 
– Stephen King 

“Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it..” 
– Oscar Wilde

“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

“Say what you have to say, not what you ought.” 
– Henry David Thoreau

“Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t, you’re probably right.” 
–Henry Ford

“The only way to have a friend is to be one.” 
–Ralph Waldo Emerson

“To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man’s life.” T. S. Eliot

“Kindness is in our power, even when fondness is not.” Samuel Johnson

“Motherhood is not simply the organic process of giving birth… it is understanding the needs of the world.” Alexis DeVeaux, mother and sponsor of MADRE, a Latin American relief organization

“You need only claim the events of your life to make yourself yours. When you truly possess all you have been and done, which may take some time, you are fierce with reality.” Florida Scott-Maxwell

“I never had any doubts about my abilities. I knew I could write. I just had to figure out how to eat while doing this. “ 
– Cormac McCarthy 

“Success is a finished book, a stack of pages each of which is filled with words. If you reach that point, you have won a victory over yourself no less impressive than sailing single-handed around the world.” 
– Tom Clancy

“Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” 
– Tom Stoppard 

“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 

“Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young.” 
– W. Somerset Maugham

“If you would not be forgotten,
as soon as you are dead and rotten,
either write things worth reading,
or do things worth the writing.” 
– Benjamin Franklin 

“All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.” 
– Ernest Hemingway 

 

“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 

“Engrave this in your brain: EVERY WRITER GETS REJECTED. You will be no different.” 
– John Scalzi 

“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

“I try to create sympathy for my characters, then turn the monsters loose.”
– Stephen Kin

The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.” 
– Thomas Jefferson 

“No fathers or mothers think their own children ugly; and this self-deceit is yet stronger with respect to the offspring of the mind.” 
– Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra 

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

Marianne Williamson

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library”

~ Jorge Luis Borges