Quotes

More quotes will be added soon.


Having imagination, it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that, if you were unimaginative, would take you only a minute. Or you might not write the paragraph at all.
Franklin P. Adams, Half a Loaf, 1927

May the warm winds of heaven blow softly upon your house. May the Great Spirit bless all who enter there. May your mocassins make happy tracks in many snows, and may the rainbow always touch your shoulder.
American Indian Cherokee Blessing

Great Spirit, help me always to speak the truth quietly, to listen with an open mind when others speak, and to remember the peace that may be found in silence.
American Indian Cherokee Prayer

Oh Great Spirit, grant that I may never find fault with my neighbor until I have walked the trail of life in his moccasins.
American Indian Cherokee Prayer

Listen for peace.
Choose to be well.
Find contentment.
Listen!
Or your tongue will make you deaf.
American Indian Cherokee Saying

Let us walk softly on the earth with all living beings great and small, remembering as we go, that one God, kind and wise, created all.
Ancient American Indian Prayer

Treat the earth well: it was not given to you by your parents; it was loaned to you by your children. We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.
Ancient American Indian Proverb

Certain things catch your eye, but pursue only those that capture your heart.
Ancient American Indian Proverb

When we show our respect for other living things, they respond with respect for us.
American Indian Arapaho Saying

Lose your temper and you lose a friend; lie and you lose yourself.
American Indian Hopi Saying

Wakan Tanka, Great Mystery, teach me how to trust my heart, my mind, my intuition, my inner knowing, the senses of my body, the blessings of my spirit. Teach me to trust these things so that I may enter my sacred space and love beyond my fear, and thus walk in balance with the passing of each glorious sun.
American Indian Lakota Prayer

Peace and happiness are available in every moment. Peace is every step. We shall walk hand in hand. There are no political solutions to spiritual problems. Remember, if the Creator put it there, it is in the right place. The soul would have no rainbow if the eyes had no tears.
Ancient American Indian Saying

Give thanks for unknown blessings already on their way.
Ancient American Indian Saying

Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.
Maya Angelou

What would you attempt today if you could not fail?
Anonymous

For success, attitude is as important as ability.
Anonymous

Every job is a self-portrait of the person who did it. Autograph your work with excellence.
Anonymous

Habits are first cobwebs, then cables.
Anonymous

Your IQ is not nearly as important as your “I WILL.”
Anonymous

Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
Hannah Arendt

If you run after two rabbits you won’t catch either one.
Armenian Proverb

Our sufferings and weaknesses, in so far as they are personal, are of no literary interest whatsoever. They are only interesting in so far as we can see them as typical of the human condition.
W.H. Auden

It is only a novel... or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.
Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

A metaphor is like a simile.
Author Unknown

Proofread carefully to see if you any words out.
Author Unknown

What man does not understand, he fears; and what he fears, he tends to destroy.
Author Unknown to Me

Those who hear not the music think the dancers mad.
Author Unknown to Me

The quieter you become, the more you can hear.
Baba Ram Dass

Knowledge is power.
Francis Bacon

In ballet a complicated story is impossible to tell ... we can't dance synonyms.
George Balanchine

Superficial people find the extraordinary fascinating, and profound people find the ordinary riveting.
Julian Barbour

When we dream we make connections that astound us later. The same thing happens on the page when we forget ourselves and as it were, watch our own waking dream. Later we can make sense of what we've created and craft it accordingly. That's when we appreciate the poetry of our unconscious mind.
Tom Batt

The fragrance always stays in the hand that gives the rose.
Hadia Bejar

No one should rely unduly on his “competence”. Strength lies in improvisation. All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.
Walter Benjamin

The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.
Henri Bergson, French Philosopher

The bird of paradise alights only upon the hand that does not grasp.
John Berry

Grown men can learn from very little children for the hearts of the little children are pure. Therefore, the Great Spirit may show to them many things which older people miss.
Black Elk

Let children read whatever they want and then talk about it with them. If parents and kids can talk together, we won't have as much censorship because we won't have as much fear.
Judy Blume

Do you know what astonished me the most in this world?
The inability of force to create anything.
Napoleon Bonaparte

Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide.
Napoleon Bonaparte

In the long run, the sword is always beaten by the spirit.
Napoleon Bonaparte

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, Atlantic, December 1957

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

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, Fahrenheit 451

All of us have a place in history. Mine is clouds.
Richard Brautigan

I didn't know the full dimensions of forever, but I knew it was longer than waiting for Christmas to come.
Richard Brautigan

It's strange how the simple things in life go on while we become more difficult.
Richard Brautigan

"Excuse me, I said. I thought you were a trout stream. I'm not, she said."
Richard Brautigan (Trout Fishing in America)

Finding is losing something else. I think about, perhaps even mourn, what I lost to find this.
Richard Brautigan (Loading Mercury With a Pitchfork)

I'm in a constant process of thinking about things.
Richard Brautigan

I believe I saw a woodcock. He had a long bill like putting a fire hydrant into a pencil sharpener, then pasting it onto a bird and letting the bird fly away in front of me with this thing on its face for no other purpose than to amaze me.
Richard Brautigan

Treat others with respect. How you treat others will be how they treat you.
Buddha

When wishes are few, the heart is happy. When desire ends, there is peace.
Buddha

If you light a lamp for somebody, it will also brighten your path.
Buddha

Strip your psyche to the bare bones of spontaneous process, and you give yourself one chance in a thousand to make the pass.
William Burroughs

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

There is no line between the 'real world' and 'world of myth and symbol.' Objects, sensations, hit with the impact of hallucination.
William Burroughs

I miss you so much your absence causes me, at times, accute pain. I don't mean sexually. I mean in connection with my writing.
William Burroughs to Allen Ginsberg

Everyone who has ever taken a shower has had an idea. It’s the person who gets out of the shower, dries off, and does something about it that makes a difference.
Nolan Bushnell

When a man is in doubt about this or that in his writing, it will often guide him if he asks himself how it will tell a hundred years hence.
Samuel Butler

Books want to be born: I never make them. They come to me and insist on being written, and on being such and such.
Samuel Butler

We are involved in a life that passes understanding and our highest business is our daily life.
John Cage

There is only one trait that marks the writer. He is always watching. It's a kind of trick of the mind and he is born with it.
Morley Callaghan

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

Rather, I think one should write, as nearly as possible, as if he were the first person on earth and was humbly and sincerely putting on paper that which he saw and experienced and loved and lost; what his passing thoughts were and his sorrows and desires.
Neal Cassady to Jack Kerouac

I alone, as the sharer of their way of life, presented a replica of childhood.
Neal Cassady

I became the unnatural son of a few score of beaten men.
Neal Cassady

Proverbs are short sentences drawn from long experience.
Cervantes

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

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

If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.
Noam Chomsky

We make a living by what we get. We make a life by what we give.
Winston Churchill

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

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, Casual Chance, 1964

Giving connects two people, the giver and the receiver, and this connection gives birth to a new sense of belonging.
Deepak Chopra

No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.
Confucius

It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.
Confucius

If you believe you're a poet, then you're saved.
Gregory Corso

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

A very great vision is needed and the man who has it must follow it as the eagle seeks the deepest blue of the sky.
Crazy Horse (Tashunkewitko, Oglala)

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

Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.
Marie Curie

If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.
The Dalai Lama

My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness.
The Dalai Lama

The quieter you become, the more you can hear.
Ram Dass

In the history of language the first obscenity was silence.
Christina Davis

I keep little notepads all over the place to write down ideas as soon as they strike, but the ones that fill up the quickest are always the ones at my nightstand.
Emily Logan Decens

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

Doing something does not require discipline. It creates its own discipline – with a little help from caffeine.
Annie Dillard

Planning to write is not writing. Outlining… researching… talking to people about what you’re doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.
E.L. Doctorow

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.
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll)

All things in the world are two. In our minds we are two, good and evil. With our eyes we see two things, things that are fair and things that are ugly. We have the right hand that strikes and makes for evil, and we have the left hand full of kindness, near the heart. One foot may lead us to an evil way, the other foot may lead us to a good. So are all things two, all two.
Eagle Chief (Letakos-Lesa) Pawnee

What is life? It is a flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow that runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.
Eagle Chief (Letakos-Lesa) Pawnee

If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.
Albert Einstein

Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Albert Einstein

Laws alone can not secure freedom of expression; in order that every man present his views without penalty there must be spirit of tolerance in the entire population.
Albert Einstein

When I was writing Searches and Seizure, I was living in London, and I needed to describe a hotel room. I've been in lots of hotel rooms, of course, but I didn't want to depend on my memory. And so I went to the Royal Garden Hotel in Kensington and rented a room, simply to study the furniture there, to feel the glossy top of the wood that is almost not wood, to get the smell of the shower, the textures in the bath, to look at the rhetoric on the cards on top of the television set. This is stuff that I could not invent, and it was important to me to have it down very, very accurately. So I took notes. Somebody watching me would have thought I was a madman.
Stanley Elkin

The days come and go like muffled and veiled figures sent from a distant party, but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

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, A Kind of Magic, 1963

Write your first draft with your heart. Re-write with your head.
From the movie Finding Forrester

It isn't where you came from, its where you're going that counts.
Ella Fitzgerald

What people are ashamed of usually makes a good story.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

It is difficult to give away kindness. It keeps coming back to you.
Cort Flint

Writing is a difficult lonely endeavor, and every writer is a perpetual beginner. Therefore, don’t be ungenerous with another person’s attempts. Such an act will only reflect on you.
Isabella Franconati

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

I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge. That myth is more potent than history. That dreams are more powerful than facts. That hope always triumphs over experience. That laughter is the only cure for grief. And I believe that love is stronger than death.
Robert Fulghum, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten

I shall pass through this world but once. Any good therefore that I can do or any kindness that I can show to any human being, let me do it now. Let me not defer or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.
Mohandas Gandhi

Break up the larger story into its components, make sure you understand the exact function of each component (a story is like a machine with numerous gears: it should contain no gear that doesn't turn something), and after each component has been carefully set in place, step back and have a look at the whole. Then rewrite until the story flows as naturally as a river, each element so blending with the rest that no one, not even yourself two years from now, can locate the separate parts.
John Gardner

A notepad by the bedside accounts for half the earnings of my livelihood. If it weren't for bedtime, half my novels would still be stuck at dock.
Ever Garrison

Never deny the voice- no, never forget it, don't get lost mentally wandering in other spirit worlds or American or job worlds or advertising worlds or earth worlds.
Allen Ginsberg's vow to himself

For me to do a story, something has to happen to someone. It’s a story in the way you learn what a story is in third grade, where there is a person and things happen to them and then something big happens and they realize something new.
Ira Glass (Host of This American Life)

Through music you learn not to care about the color of someone’s skin.
Vince Gill

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

Talents are nurtured best in solitude, but character on life’s tempestuous seas.
Goethe

The deed is everything; the fame is nothing.
Goethe

We're here for a reason. I believe a bit of the reason is to throw little torches out to lead people through the dark.
Whoopi Goldberg

Every work of literature has both a situation and a story. The situation is the context of circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say.
Vivian Gornick

A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the other one.
Baltasar Gracián

Many attempts to communicate are nullified by saying too much.
Robert Greenleaf

The first impulse in writing is to flood it out, let as much run freely as you possibly can. Then to take a walk or go to the bank... and come back in a day or six months later. To read it with a cold eye and say, 'This is good. This is not. That sentence works. This is magical. This is crummy.' You have to maintain your critical sensibility and not just assume, because it was an extraordinary dream for you, that it will be a dream for other people. Because people need maps to your dreams.
Alan Gurganus

A sharp spear needs no polish.
H. Rider Haggard, Novelist

If every living body were assured of love, peace could create itself.
Hallmark Card

I don't look at music from the standpoint of being a musician; I look at it from the standpoint of being a human being.
Herbie Hancock

Never be afraid to sit and think.
Lorraine Hansberry

Fiction is better experienced than interpreted. To fully understand a symbol is to kill it.
Ron Hansen

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

Easy reading is damn hard writing.
Nathaniel Hawthorne

I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows.
Ernest Hemingway

All stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true story teller who would keep that from you.
Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon

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, interview in Paris Review, Spring 1958

The life so short, the craft so long to learn.
Hippocrates

Attitude is everything. Do not harbor negativity about your writing or your ability to market it. Positives can become realities as easily as negatives.
Carolyn Howard-Johnson

Having our voices heard is more important than selling books. Having our voices heard is sharing our souls.
Carolyn Howard-Johnson

The quality of your life is determined by the focus of your attention.
Cheri Huber

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
Aldous Huxley

Crocodiles are easy, they try to kill and eat you. People are harder. Sometimes they pretend to be your friend first.
Steve Irwin

The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading in order to write. A man will turn over half a library to make a book.
Samuel Johnson

Few things are impossible to diligence and skill.
Samuel Johnson

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

You have to expect things of yourself before you can do them.
Michael Jordan

If the white man wants to live in peace with the Indian, he can live in peace. Treat all men alike. Give them all the same law. Give them all an even chance to live and grow. All men were made by the same Great Spirit Chief. We are all brothers. The Earth is the mother of all people, and all people should have equal rights upon it. Let me be a free man, free to travel, free to stop, free to work, free to trade where I choose, my own teachers, free to follow the religion of m fathers, free to think, talk, and act for myself, and I will obey every law, or submit to the penalty.
Chief Joseph, Nez Perce (Nimiputimt)

Thinking in pictures precedes thinking in words.
Immanuel Kant

The truth is that everything is One, and this of course is not a numerical one.
Philip Kapleau

The writer writes in order to teach himself, to understand himself, to satisfy himself; the publishing of his ideas, though it brings gratification, is a curious anticlimax.
Alfred Kazin, Think, February 1963

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt within the heart.
Helen Keller

We can do anything we want to if we stick to it long enough.
Helen Keller

I am only one; but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something. I will not refuse to do the something I can do.
Helen Keller

Every writer I know has trouble writing.
Joseph Heller

The charging restless mute unvoiced road keening in a seizure of tarpaulin power.
Jack Kerouac's favorite line from On The Road

Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?
Jack Kerouac

Love is all.
Jack Kerouac

Accept loss forever.
Jack Kerouac

I am going to marry my novels and have little short stories for children.
Jack Kerouac

My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them.
Jack Kerouac to Neal Cassady

All human beings are also dream beings. Dreaming ties all mankind together.
Jack Kerouac

Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for your own joy.
Jack Kerouac

You're a genius all the time.
Jack Kerouac

You cannot have a better tomorrow if you are thinking about yesterday all the time.
Charles F. Kettering

The beautiful thing about learning is nobody can take it away from you.
B. B. King

We all have idols. Play like anyone you care about but try to be yourself while you're doing so.
B. B. King

When a good writer is having fun, the audience is almost always having fun too.
Stephen King

Life's most persistent and urgent question is, "What are you doing for others?"
Martin Luther King, Jr.

Compassion for ourselves gives rise to the power to transform resentment into forgiveness, hatred into friendliness, and fear into respect for all beings.
Jack Kornfield

You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.
Madeleine L'Engle

I am going to be rather hard-nosed and say that if you have to find devices to coax yourself to stay focused on writing, perhaps you should not be writing what you're writing. And if this lack of motivation is a constant problem, perhaps writing is not your forte. I mean, what is the problem? If writing bores you, that is pretty fatal. If that is not the case, but you find that it is hard going and it just doesn't flow, well, what did you expect? It is work; art is work.
Ursula K. Le Guin

I try to leave out the parts that people skip.
Elmore Leonard, Jr.

Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: 'You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.
Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

The cure for mixed metaphors, I have always found, is for the patient to be obliged to draw a picture of the result.
Bernard Levin

It is impossible to discourage the real writers - they don't give a damn what you say, they're going to write.
Sinclair Lewis

Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.
Abraham Lincoln

Conversation was never begun at once, nor in a hurried manner. No one was quick with a question, no matter how important, and no one was pressed for an answer. A pause giving time for thought was the truly courteous way of beginning and conducting a conversation. Silence was meaningful with the Lakota, and his granting a space of silence to the speech-maker and his own moment of silence before talking was done in the practice of true politeness and regard for the rule that thought comes before speech.
Luther Standing Bear, Oglala Sioux Chief

There is a road in the hearts of all of us, hidden and seldom traveled, which leads to an unkown, secret place. The old people came literally to love the soil, and they sat or reclined on the ground with a feeling of being close to a mothering power. Their teepees were built upon the earth and their altars were made of earth. The soul was soothing, strengthening, cleansing, and healing. That is why the old Indian still sits upon the earth instead of propping himself up and away from its life giving forces. For him, to sit or lie upon the ground is to be able to think more deeply and to feel more keenly. He can see more clearly into the mysteries of life and come closer in kinship to other lives about him.
Luther Standing Bear, Oglala Sioux Chief

If you only trust what's visible, you're missing half the show.
Macy's Christmas Window, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.
Nelson Mandela

A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
Thomas Mann, Essays of Three Decades, 1947

One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain.
Bob Marley

There's nothing that says you have to succeed in the same way as someone else. In fact, there's nothing that says you must define success in the same way as someone else.
Ralph Marston

A good style should show no signs of effort. What is written should seem a happy accident.
W. Somerset Maugham, Summing Up, 1938

The best style is the style you don't notice.
W. Somerset Maugham

We are all trying to get the exact style of ourselves.
Michael McClure on the San Francisco Renaissance

We had gone beyond a point of no return- and we were ready for it, for a point of no return. We wanted voice and we wanted vision.
Michael McClure

History is who we are and why we are the way we are.
David McCullough

For me, singing sad songs often has a way of healing a situation. It gets the hurt out in the open into the light, out of the darkness.
Reba McEntire

A critic can only review the book he has read, not the one which the writer wrote.
Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
Margaret Mead

If there is to be any peace, it will come through being, not having.
Henry Miller

A person's true wealth is the good he or she does in the world.
Mohammed

Almost all good stories are sad because it is the human struggle that engages us readers and listeners the most. To watch characters confront their hardships and uncertainties makes us feel better about our own conflicts and confusions and fears. We have a sense of community, of sympathy, a cleansing sympathy, as Aristotle said, and relief that we are safe in our room only reading the story. A story of sadness, even tragedy, makes us feel, paradoxically, better, as though we are confronting our own conflicts and fears, and have endured.
Robert Morgan

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

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

If you can't feed a hundred people, then feed just one.
Mother Teresa

True beauty emanates from a selfless heart.
Cristina Munoz

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

The difficult is what takes a little time; the impossible is what takes a little longer.
Fridtjof Nansen

To love people we need a loving mind more than we need people to act lovably. Our love for others won't depend on their personal characteristics, behavior or relationship with us but on our loving minds.
Sarah Napthali

Forgive all who have offended you, not for them, but for yourself.
Harriet Nelson

Art is the highest task and the proper metaphysical activity of this life.
Nietzsche
(Pinned to Jack Kerouac's wall to inspire his writing.)

The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.
Anaïs Nin

Somewhere we know that without silence words lose their meaning, that without listening speaking no longer heals, that without distance closeness cannot cure.
Henri Nouwen

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

Very few people who are supposedly interested in writing are interested in writing well. They are interested in publishing something… They are interested in being a writer, not writing… If this is what you are interested in, I am not going to be much use to you. I feel that the external habits of the writer will be guided by his common sense or his lack of it and by his personal circumstances; and that these will seldom be alike in two cases. What interests the serious writer is not external habits but what Maritain calls, “the habit of art”; and he explains that “habit” in this sense means a certain quality or virtue of the mind.
Flannery O’Connor

There is an urgent need for Americans to look deeply into themselves and their actions, and musical poetry is perhaps the most effective mirror available. Every newspaper headline is a potential song.
Phil Ochs

It is wrong to expect a reward for your struggles. The reward is the act of struggle itself, not what you win.
Phil Ochs

Step outside the guidelines of the official umpires and make your own rules and your own reality.
Phil Ochs

Even though you can't expect to defeat the absurdity of the world, you must make that attempt. That's morality, that's religion. That's art. That's life.
Phil Ochs

In such ugly times, the only true protest is beauty.
Phil Ochs

The wise man believes profoundly in silence, the sign of a perfect equilibrium. Silence is the absolute poise or balance of body, mind, and spirit. The man who preserves his selfhood ever calm and unshaken by the storms of existence - not a leaf, as it were, astir on the tree, not a ripple upon the surface of the shinning pool - his, in the mind of the unlettered sage, is the ideal attitude and conduct of life. Silence is the cornerstone of character.
Ohiyesa, Wahpeton Santee Sioux

It was our belief that the love of possessions is a weakness to be overcome. Its appeal is to the material part, and if allowed its way, it will in time disturb one's spiritual balance. Therefore, children must early learn the beauty of generosity. They are taught to give what they prize most, that they may taste the happiness of giving.
Ohiyesa, Wahpeton Santee Sioux

He who is not prepared today will be less so tomorrow.
Ovid

If I fall asleep with a pen in my hand, don't remove it - I might be writing in my dreams.
Danzae Pace

An unshared happiness is not happiness.
Boris Pasternak

The trouble with most of us is that we would rather be praised than saved by criticism.
Norman Vincent Pearle

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

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

No law or ordinance is mightier than understanding.
Plato

Those who seek the truth by means of intellect and learning only get further and further away from it. Not till your thoughts cease all their branching here and there, not till you abandon all thoughts of seeking for something, not till your mind is motionless as wood or stone, will you be on the right road to the Gate.
Huang Po

When something can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing.
Enrique Jardiel Poncela

Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one.
Terry Pratchett

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.
Marcel Proust

We must protect the forests for our children, grandchildren, and children yet to be born. We must protect the forests for those who can't speak for themselves such as the birds, animals, fish, and trees.
Qwatsinas, Nuxalk Nation

Freedom is never given; it is won.
A. Philip Randolph

What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window.
Burton Rascoe

I am poor and naked but I am the chief of a nation. We do not want riches but we do want to train our children right. Riches would do us no good. We could not take them with us to the other world. We do not want riches. We want peace and love.
Red Cloud, Oglala Sioux

The basic line in any good verse is cadenced, building it around the natural breath structures of speech.
Kenneth Rexroth

And now let us welcome the new year, full of things that have never been.
Rainer Maria Rilke

Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.
Rainer Maria Rilke

Wit should be wit, but never satire.
La Rochejacquelin

If I lose the light of the sun, I will write by candlelight, moonlight, no light. If I lose paper and ink, I will write in blood on forgotten walls. I will write always. I will capture nights all over the world and bring them to you.
Henry Rollins

Nobody can make you feel inferior without your permission.
Eleanor Roosevelt

There is more power in telling little than in telling all.
Mark Rothko, Artist

Know your game. Put in the time. And, when you go after your goal, convince yourself that you’re the best. It works. An average talent can be an above average performer.
Paraphrased from Joan Ryan
Columnist, San Francisco Examiner

A single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us. To live is to be slowly born.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Most people are prisoners, thinking only about the future or living in the past. They are not in the present, and the present is where everything begins.
Carlos Santana

If you want to be free, there is but one way; it is to guarantee an equally full measure of liberty to all your neighbors. There is no other.
Carl Schurz

Constant kindness can accomplish much. As the sun makes ice melt, kindness causes misunderstanding, mistrust, and hostility to evaporate.
Albert Schweitzer

Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.
Chief Seattle, Chief of the Suquamis

All things share the same breath - the beast, the tree, the man. The air shares its spirit with all the life it supports.
Chief Seattle, Chief of the Suquamis

Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.
Seneca

Be humble, for you are made of earth.
Be noble, for you are made of stars.
Serbian Proverb

Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.
Dr. Seuss, from The Lorax

I like nonsense; it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, It's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, And that enables you to laugh at life's realities. You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose. You're on your own. And you know what you know. You are the guy who'll decide where to go. All alone! Whether you like it or not, alone is something you'll be quite a lot. I'm afraid sometimes you'll play lonely games too, games you can't win because you'll play against you. You can get help from teachers, but you are going to have to learn a lot by yourself, sitting alone in a room.
Dr. Seuss

Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind.
Dr. Seuss

Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.
George Bernard Shaw

The omlet fell apart, as with such eggs it must.
Wilifrid Sheed, on the San Francisco Renaissance Poets

It’s too easy to get swept up, doing things because the opportunities are there, not because we’re burning to do them.
Sam Sheppard

The wastebasket is a writer's best friend.
Isaac Bashevis Singer

There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.
Walter Wellesley "Red" Smith

No matter who you are, no matter where you live, and no matter how many people are chasing you, what you don't read is often as important as what you do read.
Lemony Snicket

I want to create wilderness out of empire.
Gary Snyder

A reading is a kind of communion. The poet articulates the semi-known for the tribe.
Gary Snyder

Around Jack there circulated a palpable aura of fame and death.
Gary Snyder

Find your place on the planet. Dig in, and take responsibility from there.
Gary Snyder

It gave a sense of the possibilities of an alternative culture. And it wasn't just poetry that moved people. It was the sense of a community, of people with a vision.”
Gary Snyder

The first chapter sells the book. The last chapter sells the next book.
Mickey Spillane

The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.
Gloria Steinem

Writing is the only thing that---when I'm doing it, I don't feel that I should be doing something else instead.
Gloria Steinem

My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.
Adlai E. Stevenson

A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint them on silence.
Leopold Stokowki

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, interview, Writers at Work, 1958

People seldom see the halting and painful steps by which the most insignificant success is achieved.
Anne Sullivan

Discovery consists in seeing what everyone else has seen and thinking what no one else has thought.
Albert Szent-Gyorgi

So live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart. Trouble no one about their religion; respect others in their view, and demand that they respect yours. Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life. Seek to make your life long and its purpose in the service of your people. Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide. Always give a word or a sign of salute when meeting or passing a friend, even a stranger, when in a lonely place. Show respect to all people and bow to none. When you arise in the morning, give thanks for the food and for the joy of living. If you see no reason for giving thanks, the fault lies only in yourself. Abuse no one and nothing, for abuse turns the wise ones to fools and robs the spirit of its vision. When it comes your time to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song and die like a hero going home.
Tecumseh - Shawnee

If you judge people, you have no time to love them.
Mother Teresa

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

Goodness is the only investment which never fails.
Henry David Thoreau

Each person has unique virtues; look for them.
Blanche Tipton

Deeds of giving are the very foundations of the world.
The Torah

The more you explain yourself the more unsure of yourself you appear to be.
Truth

Do your little bit of good where you are; it's those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu

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

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

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

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
Mark Twain

In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.
Mark Twain

It's true that writing is a solitary occupation, but you would be surprised at how much companionship a group of imaginary characters can offer once you get to know them.
Anne Tyler

I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head.
John Updike

A story has to be a good date, because the reader can stop at any time. Remember, readers are selfish and have no compulsion to be decent about anything.
Kurt Vonnegut

I have realized that the past and the future are real illusions, that they only exist in the present, which is what there is and all that there is.
Alan Watts

Yams fill the belly, but music fills the heart.
West African Proverb

There is no royal path to good writing; and such paths as do exist do not lead through neat critical gardens, various as they are, but through the jungles of self, the world, and of craft.
Jessamyn West, Saturday Review, 21 September 1957

Be obscure clearly.
E.B. White

Writing is both mask and unveiling.
E.B. White

Re-examine all that you have been told. Dismiss that which insults your soul.
Walt Whitman

Americans should know the universe itself as a road, as many roads, as roads for traveling souls.
Walt Whitman

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 are learning your craft -- then you can add all the genius you like.
Phyllis Whitney

The opposite of love is not hate, its indifference.
Elie Wiesel

I never travel without my diary. One must always have something sensational to read on the train.
Oscar Wilde (The Importance of Being Earnest)

The writer trusts nothing she writes--it should be too reckless and alive for that, it should be beautiful and menacing and slightly out of control. . . . Good writing . . . explodes in the reader's face. Whenever the writer writes, it's always three or four or five o'clock in the morning in her head.
Joy Williams

A writer starts out . . . wanting to be a transfiguring agent, and ends up usually just making contact, contact with other human beings. This, unsurprisingly, is not enough. . . . Writers end up writing stories--or rather, stories' shadows--and they're grateful if they can, but it is not enough. Nothing the writer can do is ever enough.
Joy Williams

There is a time for departure even when there’s no certain place to go.
Tennessee Williams

I choose to rise up out of that storm and see that in moments of desperation, fear, and helplessness, each of us can be a rainbow of hope, doing what we can to extend ourselves in kindness and grace to one another. And I know for sure that there is no them - there's only us.
Oprah Winfrey

On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.
Virginia Woolf

Lock up your libraries if you like, but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.
Virginia Woolf

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.
William Wordsworth

The excitement of learning separates youth from old age. As long as you're learning, you are not old.
Rosalyn Yalow

Oh, Great Spirit whose voice I hear in the winds, and whose breath gives life to all the world, hear me, I am small and weak, I need your strength and wisdom. Let me walk in beauty and make my eyes ever behold the red and purple sunset. Make my hands respect the things your have made and my ears sharp to hear your voice. Make me wise so that I may understand the things you have taught my people. Let me learn the lessons you have hidden in every leaf and rock. I seek strength, not to be greater than my brother, but to fight my greatest enemy - myself. Make me always ready to come to you with clean hands and straight eyes. So, when life fades, as the fading sunset, my spirit may come to you without shame.
Chief Yellow Lark, Lakota sharing a Native American Prayer

Behold, my brothers, the spring has come; the earth has received the embraces of the sun and we shall soon see the results of that love! Every seed has awakened and so has all animal life. It is through this mysterious power that we too have our being and we therefore yield to our neighbors, even our animal neighbors, the same right as ourselves, to inhabit this land.
Tatanka Yotanka (Sitting Bull), Hunkpapa Lakota Sioux