Our Deepest Fear

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others." - Marianne Williamson

"Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." - The History

Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. “In the 1960 movie Inherit the Wind, an H.L. Mencken-like newspaper editor says, ‘It is the duty of a newspaper to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.’ Credit for this credit gets passed around. In his 1942 quotation collection, Mencken attributed the saying as ‘author unidentified’ – although Mencken himself is sometimes thought to have been that author. (He was prone to quoting himself anonymously.) Four decades before Mencken’s collection was published, however, Finley Peter Dunne wrote this observation by his philosophizing bartender, Mr. Dooley: “The newspaper does ivrything f’r us. It runs th’ polis force an’ th’ ligislachure, baptizes th’ young, marries th’ foolish, comforts th’ afflicted, afflicts th’ comfortable, buries th’ dead and’ roasts thim aftherward.”

Creativity & The Third Man

"In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock." - from the movie, The Third Man

Quote of the Day: Quentin Crisp

"Artists in any medium are nothing more than a bunch of hooligans who cannot live within their income of admiration." - Quentin Crisp

MLK's Wisdom

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter." - Martin Luther King Jr.

My Advice Quoted on Another Blog

Check it out:

http://quotesonwriting.blogspot.com/2009/09/avoiding-stale-plots.html
Click here

Thanks, Jim!

John Irving

"Being a real writer means being able to do the work on a bad day."-John Irving

Remembering Sen. Ted Kennedy

"..the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die."

Gandhi

"You can chain me, you can torture me, you can even destroy this body, but you will never imprison my mind."
- Mahatma Gandhi

William Faulkner to Malcolm Cowley

William Faulkner to Malcolm Cowley: "I dont care much for facts, am not much interested in them, you cant stand a fact up, you've got to prop it up, and when you move to one side a little and look at it from that angle, it's not thick enough to cast a shadow in that direction."

Inspiring Quote of the Day: Dale Carnegie

"All life is a chance. So take it! The person who goes furthest is the one who is willing to do and dare."
- Dale Carnegie

Stephen King on Writing

"There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky."
-Stephen King

Inspiring Quote of the Day: Steve Jobs

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others opinions drown out your own inner voice. And Most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everthing else is secondary." - Steve Jobs

Inspiring Quote of the Day: Donald Barthelme

"The not-knowing is crucial to art, is what permits art to be made. Without the scanning process engendered by not-knowing, without the possibility of having the mind move in unanticipated directions, there would be no invention...The not-knowing is not simple, because it's hedged about with prohibitions, roads that may not be taken. The more serious the artist, the more problems he takes into account and the more considerations limit his possible initiatives" - Donald Barthelme

Inspiring Quote of the Day: Marianne Williamson

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."

- Marianne Williamson

Walter Cronkite Quote

"I can't imagine a person becoming a success who doesn't give this game of life everything he's got." ~ Walter Cronkite

The Poet...

"The poet doesn't invent. He listens."

--Jean Cocteau

Writing Quotes of the Day

“If you have anything to say, anything you feel nobody has ever said before, you have got feel it so desperately that you will find some way to say it that nobody has ever found before, so that the thing you have to say and the way of saying it blend as one matter—as indissoluble as if they were conceived together.”— F. Scott Fitzgerald

“One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment.”—Hart Crane

“You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you're working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success—but only if you persist.”—Isaac Asimov



“1. Find a subject you care about. 2. Do not ramble, though. 3.Keep it simple. 4.Have the guts to cut. 5. Sound like yourself. 6.Say what you mean to say. 7. Pity the readers.”—Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

“Day by day, you have to give the work before you all the best stuff you have, not saving up for later projects, If you give freely, there will always be more.”—Anne Lamott

“Ideas are easy. It's the execution of ideas that really separates the sheep from the goats. I read newspapers, textbooks on crime. I talk to private investigators, police officers, jail administrators, doctors, lawyers, career criminals. Ideas are everywhere.”—Sue Grafton

“Unless a writer lives with a periodic delusion of his greatness, he will not continue writing. He must believe, against all reason and evidence, that the public will experience a catastrophic loss if he does not complete his novel. The public is just clamoring to give him his fame.”—Leonard Bishop

“You must find some way to elevate your act of writing...
Usually this means giving the reader an enjoyable surprise. Any number of methods will do the job: humor, anecdote, an unexpected quotation, a powerful fact, an outlandish detail, a circuitous approach, an elegant arrangement of words.”—William Zinsser



“Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.”—Rainer Maria Rilke

“I take the reporting side of writing more seriously than the writing side. I think it really is a lot of work to get things right, so I trained myself. I sort of take notes the way photographers take photos. You just sort of scattershot, record everything, because you never know what's going to prove invaluable...”—Jon Krakauer

Writing Quotes of the Day

“Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.”—T.S. Eliot

“The writer who cares more about words than about story (characters, action, setting, atmosphere) is unlikely to create a vivid and continuous dream; he gets in his own way too much; in his poetic drunkenness, he can't tell the cart—and its cargo—from the horse.”—John Gardner

“The Artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.”—Emile Zola

“When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.”—John Fitzgerald Kennedy

“One nice thing about putting the thing away for a couple of months before looking at it is that you start to appreciate your own wit. Of course, this can be carried too far. But it's kind of cool when you crack up a piece of writing, and then realize you wrote it. I recommend this feeling.”— Steven Brust

“Writing is like hunting. There are brutally cold afternoons with nothing in sight, only the wind and your breaking heart. Then the moment when you bag something big. The entire process is beyond intoxicating.”—Kate Braverman

“The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.”—Anaïs Nin

“A writer should concern himself with whatever absorbs his fancy, stirs his heart, and unlimbers his typewriter.... A writer has the duty to be good, not lousy; true, not false; lively, not dull; accurate, not full of error. He should tend to lift people up, not lower them down.”— E. B. White

”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

“If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.”—Toni Morrison

“Day by day, you have to give the work before you
all the best stuff you have, not saving up for later projects, If you give freely, there will always be more.”—Anne Lamott

“Ideas are easy. It's the execution of ideas that really separates the sheep from the goats. I read newspapers, textbooks on crime. I talk to private investigators, police officers, jail administrators, doctors, lawyers, career criminals. Ideas are everywhere.”—Sue Grafton

“Unless a writer lives with a periodic delusion of his greatness, he will not continue writing. He must believe, against all reason and evidence, that the public will experience a catastrophic loss if he does not complete his novel. The public is just clamoring to give him his fame.”—Leonard Bishop

“Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who kept on trying when there seemed no hope at all.”—Dale Carnegie

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection.”—Anais Nin

“Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.”—Virginia Woolf

“Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.”—Carl Sandburg

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worth cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at worse, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”—President Theodore Roosevelt

“The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.”— Tom Clancy