Inspiration

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

You miss 100 percent of the shots you never take.
—Wayne Gretzky

We can do this the hard way, or . . . actually, there’s just the hard way.
—Buffy the Vampire Slayer

It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.
—Albus Dumbledore

Whoever called it necking was a poor judge of anatomy.
—Groucho Marx.

I am not afraid of storms, for I’m learning how to sail my ship.
—Louisa May Alcott

In the long run, we only hit what we aim at.
—Henry David Thoreau

The stream and the broken pottery: what was any art but an effort to make a sheath, a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining, elusive element which is life itself,—life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose?
—Willa Cather, “The Song of the Lark”

Hat-check girl: Goodness! What diamonds!
Maudie Triplett (Mae West): Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie.
—Night after Night (1932)

Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back; a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country.
—Anais Nin

The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.
—Dorothy Parker

If I just work when the spirit moves me, the spirit will ignore me.
—Carolyn Forche

Sure, it’s simple, writing for kids . . . Just as simple as bringing them up.
—Ursula K. LeGuin

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

Words are sounds of the heart.
—Chinese Proverb

The secret of getting ahead is getting started.
—Agatha Christie

Don’t panic.
—Douglas Adams

Sometimes I think I write to throw away; it’s a process of distillation.
—Donald Barthelme

Regardless of the medium, rewriting and more rewriting is still necessary. No one gets anything right the first time, and since I don’t write with a hammer and chisel, it’s relatively easy for me to change. It’s just words on paper. Words are free. You don’t go to the store and order a pound of words, or five hundred words, and pay your three dollars. They’re free.
—August Wilson

The play was a great success but the audience was a disaster.
—Oscar Wilde

My first thought about art, as a child, was that the artist brings something into the world that didn’t exist before, and that he does it without destroying something else . . . That still seems to me its central magic, its core of joy.
—John Updike

Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.
—T. S. Eliot (from Doris E. Wright)