Diane Ackerman
Words are small shapes in the gorgeous chaos of the world. They bring the world into focus, they corral ideas, they hone thoughts, they paint watercolors of perception.
Mario Andretti
Desire is the key to motivation, but it’s determination and commitment to an unrelenting pursuit of your goal–a commitment to excellence–that will enable you to attain the success you seek.
Maya Angelou
The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.
Lauren Bacall
I am not a has-been. I’m a will be.
Suzanne Brockmann
I never said, “IF I get published . . .” For me, it was always WHEN.
John Mason Brown
A good conversationalist is not one who remembers what was said, but someone who says what people want to remember.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Light tomorrow with today!
William Jennings Bryan
Destiny is not a matter of chance, it is a matter of choice; it is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved.
Frederick Buechner
Your vocation is when your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.
Dale Carnegie
You are something new in this world. Be glad of it. Make the most of what nature gave you. In the last analysis, all art is autobiographical. You can sing only what you are. You can paint only what you are. You must be what your experiences, your environment, and your heredity have made you. For better or for worse, you must cultivate you own little garden. For better or for worse, you must play your own little instrument in the orchestra of life.
George Washington Carver
When you can do the common things in an uncommon way, you will command the attention of the world.
Confucius
Find a job you love and you will never work a day in your life.
Joseph Conrad
A task, which I am trying to achieve, is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel — it is before all, to make you see.
Maureen Corrigan
Books take us to places we didn’t even suspect existed.
E. L. Doctorow
Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader — not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.
Clint Eastwood
I don’t believe in pessimism. If something doesn’t come up the way you want, forge ahead. If you think it’s going to rain, it will.
Albert Einstein
When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge. Imagination is more important than intelligence.
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man should learn to watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within.
If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mouse-trap than his neighbor, though he builds his house in the woods the world will make a beaten path to his door.
The reward of a thing well done, is to have done it.
Bernice FitzGibbon
Creativity often consists of merely turning up what is already there.
Rudolf Flesch
Creativity my simply be the realization that there’s no particular virtue to doing things the way they’ve always been done.
Sigmund Freud
Success is to have one’s ideas exclusively focused on one central interest.
Jerry Garcia
It’s not enough to be the best at what you do; you must be perceived as the only one who does what you do.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Individuality of expression is the beginning and the end of all art.
Ruth Gordon
Courage is very important. Like a muscle, it is strengthened by use.
Katherine Graham
To do work you love and feel that it matters; how could anything be more fun?
Alex Haley
Any time you see a turtle up on top of a fence post, you know he had some help.
Stephen Hawking
It matters if you just don’t give up.
Hesiod
If you only keep adding, little by little, it will soon become a big heap.
Samuel L. Jackson
Continue to expose yourself to new ideas. Trust your instincts and think for yourself. Make art, or at least value it.
William James
Genius means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.
Samuel Johnson
He is a benefactor of mankind who contracts the great rules of life into short sentences, that may be easily impressed on the memory, and so recur habitually to the mind.
Erica Jong
As a reader, I want a book to kidnap me into its world.
Carl Jung
The debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable.
Rosabeth Moss Kanter
Creativity is like looking at the world through a kaleidoscope. You look at a set of elements, the same ones everyone else sees, but then reassemble those floating bits and pieces into an enticing new possibility.
Madeleine L’Engle
Watch children at play. The same is true with writing: you get caught up in the rhythm. That’s when it really gets to be complete play.
Anne Lamott
Writers get to live life twice.
Frances Moore Lappe
The only real risk is the risk of thinking too small.
Ursula K. Le Guin
It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
James Russell Lowell
All the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a single lovely action.
Steve Martin
I’m always looking for something to engage my imagination and take me on a little voyage. I just want a new topic in my life.
Olin Miller
Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
I am happier when I have something to compose, for that, after all, is my sole delight and passion.
Louis Nizer
A man who works with his hands is a laborer; a man who works with his hands and his brain is a craftsman; but a man who works with his hands and his brain and his heart is an artist.
Peggy Noonan
Belief ain’t for sissies.
Anna Pavlova
To tend, unfailingly, unflinchingly, towards a goal, is the secret of success.
Edgar Allan Poe
Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.
Christopher Reeve
So many of our dreams at first seem impossible, then they seem improbable, and then, when we summon the will, they become inevitable.
Eleanor Roosevelt
I think if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow her child with the most useful gift, that gift would be curiosity.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today. Let us move forward with strong and active faith.
Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield
Whatever is worth doing at all, is worth doing well.
John Steinbeck
If there is magic in storytelling, and I’m convinced there is, the formula seems to lie solely in the aching urge of the writer to convey something he feels important to the reader.
J.R.R. Tolkien
What really happens is the story-maker proves a successful “subcreator.” He makes a secondary world which your mind can enter.
Johnny Unitas
There is a difference between conceit and confidence. Conceit is bragging about yourself. Confidence means you believe you can get the job done.
Kurt Vonnegut
And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.’
Barbara Walters
There are few times in your life when it isn’t too melodramatic to say your destiny hangs on the impression you make.
Tom Wolfe
If a man has a talent and cannot use it, he has failed. If he has a talent and uses only half of it, he has partly failed. If he has a talent and learns somehow to use the whole of it, he has gloriously succeeded, and won a satisfaction and a triumph few men ever know.
William Wordsworth
The mightiest lever known to the moral world, Imagination.