So today, for a student who was job shadowing me, I came up with a list of quotes about writing.
“As a writer, or a storyteller, try to tell the stories only you can tell. Try to tell the stories you cannot help telling, the stories you would be telling yourself if you had no audience to listen. The ones that reveal a little bit too much about you to the world.”
–Neil Gaiman
“Every poem is a momentary mainstay against the confusion of the world.”
–Robert Frost
“I was taught to paint like other people–but I thought, if I paint like other people, I’ll never paint as well as the person I’m taught to paint like.”
–Georgia O’Keeffe
“You can build a [writing] career with any two of the following three: talent, persistence, and luck.”
–Nancy Kress (paraphrasing Elizabeth Hand)
“Habit is more dependable than inspiration.”
–Octavia Butler
“I hated childhood, and spent it behind a book waiting for adulthood to arrive. When I ran out of books, I made up my own.”
–Anne Tyler
“To be an artist means never to avert one’s eyes.”
–Akira Kurosawa
“This seems the nature of all writing: an awkward fumbling after grace, an interruption of everyday life in which we try to redeem something from that mostly graceless endeavor. Like fly-fishing, writing is an elaborate conspiracy to make lyrical an activity that is inherently a business of barbs and worms.”
–Wayne Fields
“If you think rejection is hard, try regret.”
–Carolyn Hax