on attitude

"The duty and the task of a writer are those of an interpreter." ~ Marcel Proust

"Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men."
~ Colossians 3:23

"All the words you need are to be found in the dictionary. All you have to do is put them in the right order." ~Emma Darcy

"The profession of book-writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business."
~ John Steinbeck

"The first four months of writing the book, my mental image is scratching with my hands through granite. My other image is pushing a train up the mountain, and it's icy, and I'm in bare feet." ~ Mary Higgins Clark

"It's nervous work. The state you need to write in is the state that others are paying large sums to get rid of." ~ Shirley Hazzard

"There is nothing to writing. All you have to do is sit down at the typewriter and just open a vein."  ~ Red Smith

"I don't like to write, but I love to have written." ~ Michael Kanin

"I write the first sentence and trust God for the next." ~ Laurence Sterne

"Straightaway the ideas flow in upon me, directly from God." ~ Johannes Brahms

"I myself do nothing. The Holy Spirit accomplishes all through me." ~ William Blake

"Harriet Beecher Stowe thought Uncle Tom's Cabin was written through her by Another Hand, so little did she know what was going to happen from moment to moment in the book. She herself was amazed at what she was writing."     ~ Sophy Burnham

"There are joys which long to be ours. God sends ten thousand truths, which come about us like birds seeking inlet; but we are shut up to them, and so they bring us nothing, but sit and sing awhile upon the roof, and then fly away."    ~ Henry Ward Beecher

"Every blade of grass has its Angel that bends over it and whispers, 'Grow, grow.'"
~ The Talmud

"Creativity is seeing something that doesn't exist already. You need to find out how you can bring it into being and in that way be a playmate of God."   ~ Michele Shea

"Every great creative act since the initial one has been in some measure a bringing of order out of chaos."    ~ John Gardner

"You must travel at random, like the first Mayans. You must risk getting lost in the thickets, but that is the only way to make art."  ~ Tezcatillipoca

"Most of us go to our grave with our music still inside us."  ~ attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes

"This is the true joy of life: being used up for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clot of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy." ~ George Bernard Shaw

"If you will extract the precious from the worthless, you will be My spokesman."
~ Jeremiah 15:19

"There's some task which the God of the Universe, the great Creator, your Redeemer in Christ Jesus has for you to do -- and which will remain undone and incomplete until by faith and obedience you step into the will of God."       ~ Alan Redpath

"I thought it good to declare the signs and wonders that the Most High God had worked for me." ~ Daniel 4:2

"Every person's life is a fairytale written by God's fingers."  ~ Hans Christian Andersen

"If a story is in you, it has got to come out."   ~ William Faulkner

"We write to understand our deepest secrets to ourselves, to understand. We write in an outpouring of love. We write in secret, either for publication or for a journal no one will see, or we write poems to be privately printed for the eyes of friends alone -- this is not our choice. The urge is to create. The outcome belongs to God." ~ Sophy Burnham

"Know something, Sugar? Stories only happen to people who can tell them."  ~ Allan Gurganus

"I shall live badly if I do not write, and I shall write badly if I do not live."   ~ Francoise Sagan

"I have this theory that anything that happens to you that leaves you alive and intact can be used somewhere in your writing."   ~ Octavia Butler

"How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live."  ~ Henry David Thoreau

"Throw yourself into the hurly-burly of life. It doesn't matter how many mistakes you make, what unhappiness you have to undergo. It is all your material ... Don't wait for experience to come to you; go out after experience. Experience is your material."   ~ W. Sommerset Maugham

"I write when I'm inspired, and I see to it that I'm inspired at nine o'clock every morning."
~ Peter DeVries

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act, but a habit."   ~ Aristotle

"I seat myself at the typewriter and hope, and lurk."   ~ Mignon Eberhart

"What's a writer? Someone who writes. 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

"The writer's duty is to keep on writing."  ~ William Styron

"A pro is someone who can do great work when he doesn't feel like it."  ~ Alistair Cook

"Genius begins great works; labor alone finishes them." ~ Joseph Joubert

"Anyone can become a writer. The trick is staying a writer."  ~ Harlan Ellison

"You can't sit around thinking. You have to sit around writing."   ~ David Long

"Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time ... the wait is simply too long."  ~ Leonard S. Bernstein

"If you wait for inspiration, you're not a writer, but a waiter."   ~ Anonymous

"A year from now you'll wish you had started today." ~ Karen Lamb

"It's like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way."   ~ E. L. Doctorow

"Compose first, worry later."   ~ Ned Rorem

"If you're going to be a writer, the first essential is just to write. Do not wait for an idea. Start writing something and the ideas will come. You have to turn the faucet on before the water starts to flow.   ~ Louis L'Amour

"I always do the first line well, but I have trouble with the others."   ~ Moliere

"You only learn to be a better writer by actually writing."   ~ Doris Lessing

"It is perfectly okay to write garbage--as long as you edit brilliantly." ~C. J. Cherryh

"How do I work? I grope." ~ Albert Einstein

"The rule, 'ending a sentence with a preposition' is something up with which I will not put."
  ~ Winston Churchill

"Put it before them briefly so they will read it, clearly so they will appreciate it, picturesquely so they will remember it, and above all, accurately so they will be guided by its light."  ~ Joseph Pulitzer

"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 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

"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. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time." ~ Kurt Vonnegut

"I always try to use the least words I can to tell the biggest story I can."   ~ Jasper Tomkins

"The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon."       ~ Robert Cromier

"Discovery consists of looking at the same thing as everyone else and thinking something different." ~ Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

"In every writer there is a certain amount of the scavenger."  ~ William Faulkner

"The writer gleans wind scraps; he listens wherever he can. Each day is full of instances; what counts, as with all stimuli, is the sympathetic response."   ~ Nicholas Delbanco

"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes, but in having new eyes."   ~ Marcel Proust

"How rare it is to find a soul quiet enough to hear God speak."   ~ Francois Fenelon

"Even the most productive writers are expert dawdlers."   ~ Donald M. Murray

"Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under the trees on a summer's day, listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time."   ~ Sir John Lubbock

"If you are seeking creative ideas, go out walking. Angels whisper to a man when he goes for a walk." ~ Raymond Inmon

"A writer is working when he's staring out the window."  ~ Burton Rascoe

"A guest at a dinner party observed the strange expression on James Thurber's face. 'Don't be concerned,' said Thurber's wife. 'He's writing.'"   ~ Sophy Burnham

"It takes a heap of loafing to write a book."   ~ Gertrude Stein

"Harriet Beecher Stowe was thirty-nine when she began Uncle Tom's Cabin. She had given birth to seven children and seen one die. She wrote her book to be serialized in an abolitionist newspaper. Much of it she composed on the kitchen table in between the cooking, mending, tending to her house."  ~ Sophy Burnham

P. G. Wodehouse once dedicated a novel to his young children, "without whose constant love and affection this book would have been finished in half the time." ~ P. G. Wodehouse

"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

"I'm a writer. I don't cook and I don't clean."  ~ Dorothy West

"I shall live badly if I do not write."  ~ Francoise Sagan

"Cats gotta scratch. Dogs gotta bite. I gotta write."   ~ James Ellroy

"Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind."  ~ Rudyard Kipling

"Not long ago, a writer friend, sunk in apathy and despair, came to visit.
     'What is it about writing?' he asked, striking his forehead with the flat of his hand. 'Why is it so awful? It's no way to live! Why do we do it?'
     And then he leapt to his feet to walk unhappily around his chair. 'Look at writers. I don't know a single writer who doesn't hate his work. Writers hate writing. They're always talking about how hard it is. Artists don't hate painting. You never hear an artist talking about how much he hates his work. Sculptors don't complain all the time about how hard they find sculpting. But writers ...!
     A few weeks later I had occasion to ask an artist if she agreed. Do artists hate their work? She looked at me, amused.
     'You're forgetting something,' she said.
     'What?'
     'Writing is so powerful. People rarely look at a painting and weep."      ~ Sophy Burnham

"I am entitled to tell this particular story in a way no one else can." ~ Amy Hempel

"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry as if nothing had happened." ~ Winston Churchill

"One sees great things from the valley, only small things from the peak."   ~ G. K. Chesterton

"Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark."   ~ Annie Dillard

"Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. 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

"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

"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." ~ Annie Dillard

"Write as if you are dying."  ~ Annie Dillard

"How long has it been since you wrote a story where your real love or your real hatred somehow got onto the paper? When was the last time you dared release a cherished prejudice so it slammed the page like a lightning bolt?"   ~ Ray Bradbury

"No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader."  ~ Robert Frost

"If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster."   ~ Isaac Asimov

"Those writers who hold their readers' attention are the ones who grab them by the lapel and say, 'You've got to listen to what I'm about to tell you.' It's hard to be that passionate. It means you must put your whole poke on the table. Yet this very go-for-broke quality grabs and holds a reader far more surely than any mastery of technique."  ~ Ralph Keyes

"To change one's life:
          1. Start immediately
          2. Do it flamboyantly
          3. No exceptions."        ~ William Jones

"If you hear a voice within you saying, 'You are not a painter,' then by all means paint . . . and that voice will be silenced."   ~ Vincent Van Gogh

"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 craftÑthen you can add all the genius you like." ~ Phyllis A. Whitney

"If you have made mistakes, even serious ones, there is always another chance for you. What we call failure is not the falling down, but the staying down."   ~ Mary Pickford

"A successful man is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks that others throw at him."   ~ David Brinkley

"To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong."   ~ Claude M. Bristol

"Courage doesn't always roar. Sometimes it is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, 'I will try again tomorrow.'"   ~ Mary Anne Rademacher-Hershey

"A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for." ~John A. Shedd

"All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath." ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

"I will go so far as to say that the writer who is not scared is happily unaware of the remote and tantalizing majesty of the medium."    ~ John Steinbeck

"Finding the courage to write does not involve erasing or 'conquering' one's fears. Working writers aren't those who have eliminated their anxiety. They are the ones who keep scribbling while their heart races and their stomach churns, and who mail manuscripts with trembling fingers. The key difference between writers who are paralyzed by fear and those who are merely terrified is that the latter come to terms with their anxieties. They learn how to keep writing even as fear tries to yank their hand from the page. They find the courage to write."  ~ Ralph Keyes, from his book   The Courage to Write

"You fail only if you stop writing."  ~ Ray Bradbury