Quotations

There are 80 posts filed in Quotations (this is page 3 of 8).

Quotes for Writers from Seven Steps on the Writer’s Path 2

They can’t yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him. – Ernest Hemingway
The perfect journey is circular – the joy of departure and the joy of return. – Dino Basili

The medals don’t mean anything and the glory doesn’t last. It’s all about your happiness. The rewards are going to come, but my happiness is just loving the sport and having fun performing. – Jackie Joyner-Kersee

Nothing is work unless you’d rather be doing something else. – George Halas

Start by doing what’s necessary, then what’s possible and suddenly you are doing the impossible. – St. Francis of Assisi

Dream big but think small. – Sue Grafton

Perseverance is not a long race; it’s many short races one after another. – Walter Elliott

Don’t people know that it’s the hardest work in the world? Joseph Conrad said that he had loaded hundredweights of coal all day long on a ship in Amsterdam in the wintertime, and that is was nothing to the energy demanded for a day’s work writing. – Mary Lee Settle

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work. – Thomas A. Edison

I get very cranky when interrupted. I snap at people, sigh dramatically and slam my door shut. – Margaret Maron

It’s a help for writing in that I tend to live in my fantasy world for days at a time without interruption. It’s bad in that I tend to lose track of the things going on around me including missing important events in my friends’  lives. – Jeffrey Marks

Take your work seriously but yourself lightly. – C.W. Metcalf

I feel successful when the writing goes well. That lasts five minutes. Once, when I was on the best-seller list, I also felt successful. That lasted three minutes. – Jacqueline Briskin

Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up. – Thomas Edison

Sometimes you earn more doing the jobs that pay nothing. – Todd Ruthman

The reward for work well done is the opportunity to do more. – Jonas Salk

These characters persisted in annoying the writer until she finally set down their story, after which they were kind enough to leave her alone. – Nina Osier

I don’t want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well. – Diane Ackerman

For me the process works best with no interruptions, no breaks in the steady application, no letters to be answered, very little social life, no holidays; it is therefore a form of happy imprisonment. – Patrick O’Brian

You may be disappointed if you fail, but you’re doomed if you don’t try. – Beverly Sills

The most effective way to do it, is to do it. – Toni Cade Bambara

Hope is putting faith to work when doubting would be easier. – Anonymous

I feel there are two people inside of me – me and my intuition. If I go against her, she’ll screw me every time, and if I follow her, we get along quite nicely. – Kim Basinger

If you’re never scared or embarrassed or hurt, it means you never take any chances. – Julia Sorel

Action may not always be happiness but there is no happiness without action. – Benjamin Disraeli

You can have faith in writing itself. That’s where to place your faith, in the same way that a pole vaulter places his faith in the laws of physics. He will go up in direct proportion to the strength with which he pushed off, and he will come down every time. – Nancy Pickard

Happiness consists in the full employment of our faculties in some pursuit. – Harriet Martineau

I don’t understand writers who feel they shouldn’t have to do any of the ordinary things of life, because I think that this is necessary: one has to keep in touch with that… The ordinary action of taking a dress down to the dry cleaner’s or spraying some plants infected with greenfly is a very sane and good thing to do. It brings one back, so to speak. It also brings the world back. – Nadine Gordimer

To think too long about doing a thing often becomes it’s undoing. – Eva Young

You cannot do good work if you take your mind off of work to see how the community is taking it. – Dorothy L. Sayers
Perfectionism is self-abuse of the highest order. – Anne Wilson Schaef

We would worry less about what others think of us if we realized how seldom they do. – Ethel Barrett

He who forecasts all perils will never sail the sea. – Anonymous
You can’t build a reputation on what you are going to do. – Henry Ford

Have no fear of perfection – you’ll never reach it. – Salvador Dali

I realize that if I wait until I am no longer afraid to act, write, speak, be, I’ll be sending messages on a Ouija board, cryptic complaints from the other side. – Audre Lorde

It’s beginnings that are hard. I always begin with a great sense of dread and trepidation. Nietzsche says that the decision to start writing is like leaping into a cold lake. – Susan Sontag

A writer takes earnest measure to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it. – Don DeLillo

I developed a writer’s block that lasted for nearly nineteen years. I was devastated by a tiny error in my first book. Every time I picked up a pencil, I was afraid of making another mistake. – Teresa Miller

You have everything but one thing: madness. A man needs a little madness or else – he never dares cut the rope and be free. – Nikos Kazantzakis
You don’t need endless time and perfect conditions. Do it now. Do it today. Do it for twenty minutes and watch your heart start beating. – Barbara Sher

Quotes for Writers from Seven Steps on the Writer’s Path

The trouble with not having a goal is that you can spend your life running up and down the field and never scoring. – Bill Copeland

It takes five years to break in and fifteen years to support yourself as a writer. – Sue Grafton

With the power of conviction there is no sacrifice. – Pat Benatar

I wrote for twelve years and collected 250 rejection slips before getting any fiction published, so I guess outside reinforcement isn’t all that important to me. – Lisa Alther

"Now" is the operative word. Everything you’ve put in your way is just a method of putting off the hour when you could actually be doing your dream. – Barbara Sher

It’s never too late to be what you might have been. – George Eliot

The measure of achievement is not winning awards. It’s doing something that you appreciate, something you believe is worthwhile. I think of my strawberry souffle. I did that at least twenty-eight times before I finally conquered it. – Julia Child

I’ve arrived at this outermost edge of my life by my own actions. Where I am is thoroughly unacceptable. Therefore, I must stop doing what I’ve been doing. – Alice Koller

What you don’t do can be a destructive force. – Eleanor Roosevelt

Keep doing what you’re doing and you’ll keep getting what you’re getting. – Anonymous

There are people who put their dreams in a little box and say, "Yes, I’ve got dreams, of course, I’ve got dreams." Then they put the box away and bring it out once in awhile to look at it, and yep, they’re still there. These are great dreams, but they never even get out of the box. It takes an uncommon amount of guts to put your dreams on the line, to hold them up and say, "How good or how bad am I?" That’s where courage comes in. – Erma Bombeck

There is a need to find and sing our own song, to stretch our limbs and shake them in a dance so wild that nothing can roost there, that stirs the yearning for solitary voyage. – Barbara Lazear Ascher

If you have a dream of writing, that’s wishful thinking. If you have a commitment to writing, that’s the way to make your dreams come true. – Nancy Pickard

What had seemed easy in imagination was rather hard in reality. – L. M. Montgomery

To go against the dominant thinking of your friends, of most of the people you see everyday, is perhaps the most difficult act of heroism you can perform. – Theodore H. White

Don’t be afraid your life will end; be afraid it will never begin. – Grace Hansen

Growth itself contains the germ of happiness. – Pearl S. Buck

In the long run, men hit only what they aim at. – Henry David Thoreau

Let no one be deluded that a knowledge of the path can substitute for putting one foot in front of the other. – Mary Caroline Richards

I had not thought of myself as geography, as invisible, integral lines I could chart, but the more I searched, the more things connected, until the rivers and the memories became a story, and also, perhaps a map. – Paul Zalis

Traveling is like falling in love: the world is made new. – Jan Myrdal

Life is a great big canvas and you should throw all the paint on it you can. – Danny Kaye

If you want, all that happens is that you get older. – Larry McMurtry

The work will teach you how to do it. – Estonian proverb

The defense force inside of us wants us to be cautious, to stay away from anything as intense as a new kind of action. It’s job is to protect us, and it categorically avoids anything resembling danger. But it’s often wrong. – Barbara Sher

Fear is the dark room in which negatives are developed. – Anonymous

Pioneers may be picturesque figures but they are often rather lonely ones. – Nancy Astor

I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing. – Agatha Christie

Everything looks impossible for the people who never try anything. – Jean-Louis Etienne

Everyone has talents what is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads. – Erica Jong

The greatest mistake you can make in life is continually to be fearing you will make one. – Elbert Hubbard

Argue for your limitations and sure enough they’re yours. – Richard Bach

If you ask me what I have come to do in the world, I who am an artist, I will reply: "I am here to live aloud". – Emile Zola

Luck is a matter of preparation meeting opportunity. – Oprah

It’s so hard when I have to, and so easy when I want to. – Sondra Anice Barnes

Just don’t give up trying to do what you really want to do. Where there is love and inspiration, I don’t think you can go wrong. – Ella Fitzgerald

Nothing contributes so much to tranquilize the mind as a steady purpose – a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye. – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

I was always looking outside myself for strength and confidence, but it comes from within. It is there all the time. – Anna Freud

We’re frightened by what makes us different. – Anne Rice

I want to do it because I want to do it. – Amelia Earhart

I don’t know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about them. – Don DeLillo

It’s all right to have butterflies in your stomach, just get them to fly in formation. – Dr. Rob Gilbert

One of the quickest ways to become exhausted is by suppressing your feelings. – Sue Patton Thoele

Discipline is remembering what you want. – David Campbell

Establishing goals is all right if you don’t let them deprive you of interesting detours. – Doug Larson

Goals are dreams with deadlines. – Diana Scharf Hunt

What great thing would you attempt if you knew it could not fail? – Robert H. Schuller

More to follow. I started reading the book and found it interesting with some good tidbits. But, I’m not in the right frame of mind right now and, the book is due back at the library anyway.

Two Quotes from Billy Joel

I am no longer afraid of becoming lost, because the journey back always reveals something new, and that is ultimately good for the artist. – Billy Joel

If you make music for the human needs you have within yourself, then you do it for all humans who need the same things. You enrich humanity with the profound expression of these feelings. – Billy Joel

Favourite Photography Quotes

From the Boing Boing forum on Flickr come these photography quotations picked by forum readers:

"Photography…it’s the easiest medium in which to be competent. Anybody with a point-and-shoot camera can take a competent picture. But it’s the hardest medium in which to have, to express, some kind of personal vision. Because there is no touch, there is no hand, there is no physicality. The fact that you CAN have something that’s recognizable from 50 feet across the gallery as a Diane Arbus or an Irving Penn…the fact that you can have recognizable authorship means they really have done something." ~ Chuck Close

"…to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude." – Susan Sontag

"The best camera is the one that’s with you" – Chase Jarvis

"Shoot for the secrets, develop for the surprises" – Diane Arbus

"I work from awkwardness. By that I mean I don’t like to arrange things. If I stand in front of something, instead of arranging it, I arrange myself." Diane Arbus

"If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough." – Robert Capa

"He will take his camera and ride off in search of new evidence that his city, even in her most drunken and disorderly and pathetic moments, is beautiful." – William McCleery

"No place is boring, if you’ve had a good night’s sleep and have a pocket full of unexposed film." – Robert Adams

“You don’t take a photograph, you make it." – Ansel Adams

“Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst." – Henri Cartier-Bresson

"Beauty can be seen in all things, seeing and composing the beauty is what separates the snapshot from the photograph." – Matt Hardy

“Nothing happens when you sit at home. I always make it a point to carry a camera with me at all times…I just shoot at what interests me at that moment." – Elliott Erwitt

“Which of my photographs is my favorite? The one I’m going to take tomorrow." – Imogen Cunningham

"You’ve got to push yourself harder. You’ve got to start looking for pictures nobody else could take. You’ve got to take the tools you have and probe deeper." – William Albert Allard

"If I saw something in my viewfinder that looked familiar to me, I would do something to shake it up." – Garry Winogrand

“I always thought good photos were like good jokes. If you have to explain it, it just isn’t that good." – Anonymous

"Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop." – Ansel Adams

“It can be a trap of the photographer to think that his or her best pictures were the ones that were hardest to get." – Timothy Allen

Quotes from a Soap Opera

I laughed at a line spoken by David Vickers. I don’t know if I have it typed exactly, I tried to be quick while it was circulating around in my head. Then I picked up a few more when I tried to find the first quote, to see if anyone else had picked it up and had it the same way I did.

"I’ve been conducting a survey in my own head and there apparently, I’m legendary." – David Vickers, from the One Life to Live soap opera, talking about his Ninja skills and intelligence.

Todd Manning: "Must be nice living in a world of newspapers; all your people in black and white. "

Sad that All My Children and One Life to Live are ending. I began watching both of them sometime after Another World was cancelled. I had watched Another World with my Mother and Grandmother over years and years. It was very hard when Another World was cancelled, about the same time my Grandmother died. Anyway, now I’ve gotten attached to All My Children and One Life to Live. I’ve got favourite characters. I’d like to see them go on an on and eventually get old. Now I won’t. There is some talk about the shows getting another chance online. But, no guarantee that will happen or, that we will be able to see it in Canada. Already the online videos for past shows only work if you are watching from the US.

My little redheaded sister is getting married today. I should be getting ready, deciding what I am going to wear… but I’d really like to crawl back into bed and nap awhile instead. I hope I can nap in the car on the ride out there. (I’m not driving).

Talking to Conceal

Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself. – Friedrich W. Nietzsche

Think about this next time you’re writing some dialogue. Not just writing between the lines or leaving things out but what part of conversation hides things by using camouflage? Politicians use a lot of words to make it seem they are saying a lot but the words they use actually have little meaning, or the size of the words conceals the fact nothing is really being said at all. Still, there are people who will say a lot, seem to be intimate and honest and yet most of what they say is a red herring, keeping people away from what they don’t want to say or have known.

Quotes to Inspire Writers

For the A – Z Blogging Challenge… Q is for Quotes

These are quotes from 70 Days of Sweat Writing Challenge. The challenge ended but the blog is still up.

The story is not in the plot but in the telling. – Ursula K. LeGuin

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

Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason; they made no such demand upon those who wrote them. – Charles Caleb Colton

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

There is no perfect time to write. There’s only now. – Barbara Kingsolver

It is worth mentioning, for future reference, that the creative power which bubbles so pleasantly in beginning a new book quiets down after a time, and one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in. Then one becomes resigned. Determination not to give in, and the sense of an impending shape keep one at it more than anything. – Virginia Woolf

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

The main rule of a writer is never to pity your manuscript. If you see something is no good, throw it away and begin again. – Isaac Bashivas Singer

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard. – Daphne du Maurier

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

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

The difference between fiction and reality is that fiction has to make sense. Tom Clancy

Crossing out is an art that is, perhaps, even more difficult than writing. It requires the sharpest eye to decide what is superfluous and must be removed. And it requires ruthlessness toward yourself — the greatest ruthlessness and self-sacrifice. You must know how to sacrifice parts in the name of the whole. – Yevgeny Zamyatin

Dreaming and hoping won’t produce a piece of work; only writing, rewriting and rewriting (if necessary)–a devoted translation of thoughts and dreams into words on paper–will result in a story. – Roberta Gellis

… it isn’t ‘talent’ which is so important to a writer… The most important assets, I believe, are those associated with mules – a kind of stubbornness to get it done, to make it right, to make it better, and grit – not to quit – and even narrowness of purpose, a euphemism for being almost dumbly dedicated to accomplishing something. – Theodore Weesner

The search for a story is a matter of slowly, calmly, carefully, tentatively coaxing a hidden set of somethings into visibility. Those somethings may be characters, places, situations, scenes, hopes, fears – the unseen possibilities of drama that are lurking in what we know. – Stephen Koch

You can sit there, tense and worried, freezing the creative energies, or you can start writing something, perhaps something silly. It simply doesn’t matter what… In five or ten minutes the imagination will heat, the tightness will fade, and a certain spirit and rhythm will take over. – Leonard S. Bernstein

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

It’s an adrenaline surge rushing through your body. You have this spark of an idea that keeps threatening to burst into flames and you have to get the words out on paper to match this emotion or picture in your head. After this comes the work of cleaning up the mess you made. – Janet West

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

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

I don’t think it’s very useful to open wide the door for young artists; the ones who break down the door are more interesting. – Paul Schrader

I write for the same reason I breathe – because if I didn’t, I would die. – Isaac Asimov

The best stories don’t come from “good vs. bad” but from “good vs. good. – Leo Tolstoy

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

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

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world. – Albert Einstein

Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination. – Janet Frame

You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you’re working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success – but only if you persist. – Isaac Asimov

All that is necessary to break the spell of inertia and frustration is this: Act as if it were impossible to fail. That is the talisman, the formula, the command of right-about-face which turns us from failure to success. – Dorothea Brande

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 beautiful part of writing is that you don’t have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon. You can always do it better, find the exact word, the apt phrase, the leaping simile. – Robert Cormier

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

There is no failure except in no longer trying. There is no defeat except from within, no really insurmountable barrier save our own inherent weakness of purpose. – Kin Hubbard

Write what you want to read. The person you know best in this world is you. Listen to yourself. If you are excited by what you are writing, you have a much better chance of putting that excitement over to a reader. – Robin McKinley

Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don’t give up. – Anne Lamott

Writing is about hypnotizing yourself into believing in yourself, getting some work done, then unhypnotizing yourself and going over the material coldly. There will be many mistakes, many things to take out and others that need to be added. You just aren’t always going to make the right decision. – Anne Lamott

Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads. – Erica Jong

Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. – E. L. Doctorow

In truth, I’ve found that any day’s routine interruptions and distractions don’t much hurt a work in progress and may actually help it in some ways. It is, after all, the dab of grit that seeps into an oyster’s shell that makes the pearl, not pearl-making seminars with other oysters. – Stephen King

You don’t find time to write. You make time. It’s my job. – Nora Roberts

The best stories start with change… A stranger arrives in town… The first leaves of autumn fall… Notice in your reading of popular novels how often the moment of change is the moment the book begins… Think deeply about how to open your story with this crucial time of threatening change. – Jack M. Bickham

First drafts are for learning what your novel or story is about. Revision is working with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to re-form it… The first draft of a book is the most uncertain – where you need the guts, the ability to accept the imperfect until it is better. – Bernard Malamud

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

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

You fail only if you stop writing. – Ray Bradbury

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

The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself. – Anna Quindlen

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

When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages a sick sense of failure falls on me and I know I can never do it. This happens every time. Then gradually I write one page and then another. One day’s work is all I can permit myself to contemplate and I eliminate the possibility of ever finishing. – John Steinbeck

To know what you want to say is not the best condition for writing a novel. Novels go happiest when you discover something you did not know you knew: an insight into one of your opaque characters, a metaphor that startles you… a truth… that used to elude you. – Norman Mailer

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 way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn’t behave that way you would never do anything. – John Irving

“I’m not a very good writer, but I’m an excellent rewriter. – James Michener

I get a fine warm feeling when I’m doing well, but that pleasure is pretty much negated by the pain of getting started each day. Let’s face it, writing is hell. – William Styron

Everything stinks till it’s finished. – Dr. Seuss

Books aren’t written – they’re rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn’t quite done it. – Michael Crichton

Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth… But amusing? Never. – Edna Ferber

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined. – Henry David Thoreau

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

My most important piece of advice to all you would-be writers: when you write, try to leave out all the parts readers skip. – Elmore Leonard

Every day you may make progress. Every step may be fruitful. Yet there will stretch out before you an ever-lengthening, ever-ascending, ever-improving path. You know you will never get to the end of the journey. But this, far from discouraging, only adds to the joy and glory of the climb. – Sir William Churchill

The novel may stimulate you to think. It may satisfy your aesthetic sense. It may arouse your moral emotions. But if it does not entertain you it is a bad novel. – W. Somerset Maugham

The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean. – Robert Louis Stevenson

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