Perhaps those who have been where you are now can help to inspire you…
“Write about what you don’t know about what you know. ”
― Eudora Welty
“Don’t get it right, just get it written.” – James Thurber.
The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.” –Flannery O’Connor
“What I did have, which others perhaps didn’t, was a capacity for sticking at it, which really is the point, not the talent at all. You have to stick at it.” – Doris Lessing.
“The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.” – John Steinbeck.
“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.
“I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead,” – Mark Twain.
“A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper.” – E.B. White.
“Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open. Your stuff starts out being just for you, in other words, but then it goes out. Once you know what the story is and get it right — as right as you can, anyway — it belongs to anyone who wants to read it. Or criticize it.”
~Stephen King
“Writing is a solitary occupation. Family, friends, and society are the natural enemies of the writer. He must be alone, uninterrupted, and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking.” – Jessamyn West
“Each story, it seems to me, thrives in the course of being written only as long as it seems to have a life of its own.” ~Eudora Welty
“The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day when you’re rewriting a novel you will never be stuck.” ~Ernest Hemingway.
“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” ~Anton Chekhov
“I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.”~J.D. Salinger
Every writer I know has trouble writing. ~Joseph Heller
