The May 2015 blog series May Motivations featured my favorite quotes about writing and the writing process. I will return to these inspirational quotes for continued motivation for unfinished projects – hopefully you will too!
Easy reading is damned hard writing. – Nathaniel Hawthorne
When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation. – Jorge Luis Borges
Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in a human situation. – Graham Greene
Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass. – Anton Chekhov
There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed. – Ernest Hemingway
Poetry does not feed, but men have died for want of it. – Robert F. Kennedy
Ever tried? Ever failed? No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. – Samuel Beckett
If my doctor told me I had only six months to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster. – Isaac Asimov
Writing is just a man alone in the room with the English language trying to make it come out right. The important thing is that your work be something no one else could do. – John Berryman
There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you. – Maya Angelou
You must write every single day of your life… You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads… may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world. – Ray Bradbury
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
One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple. – Jack Kerouac
Follow your inner moonlight; don’t hide the madness. – Allen Ginsberg
I shall live badly if I do not write, and I shall write badly if I do not live. – Francoise Sagan
I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day. – Ernest Hemingway
All of those men of whom speak have long since mouldered away with their bones. Only their words remain. – Lao Tzu
Light tomorrow with today – Elizabeth Barrett Browning
You do not even have to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet. – Franz Kafka
The more a man writes, the more he can write. – William Hazlitt
A story is like something you wind out of yourself. Like a spider, it is a web you weave, and you love your story like a child. – Katherine Anne Porter
books and breezes 