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

Writing Quotes of the Day

“The best way is always to stop when you are going good. If you do that, you’ll never be stuck. And don’t think or worry about it until you start to write again the next day. That way your subconscious will be working on it all the time, but if you worry about it, your brain will get tired before you start again. But work every day. No matter what has happened the day or night before, get up and bite on the nail.”

— Ernest Hemingway

“Writer's have two main problems. One is writer's block, when words won't come at all, and the other's logorrhea, when words come so fast that they hardly get to the wastebasket in time.”

— Cecilia Bartholomew

“When I don't write, I feel my world shrink. I lose my fire, my color.”

— Anais Nin

“Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money.”

— Moliere

“This manuscript of yours that has just come back from another editor is a precious package. Don't consider it rejected. Consider that you've addressed it 'to the editor who can appreciate my work' and it has simply come back stamped 'not at this address.' Just keep looking for the right address.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

Writers Writing

Writing Quotes of the Day

“The great thing about writing is that you can do all these antisocial things and you get paid for them and nobody ever arrests you because they're all make-believe. Then that way if you were actually ever driven to do any of those things, the pressure's off because you'd have already written them down. It's therapy.”
—Stephen King

*****

“If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly, our whole life would change.”
—Buddha

*****

“First sentences are doors to worlds.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin

*****

“Writing that springs from the surface of existence—when there is no other way and the deeper wells have dried up—is nothing, and collapses the moment a truer emotion makes that surface shake.

"That is why one can never be alone enough when one writes, why there can never be enough silence around one when one writes, why even night is not night enough.”

—Franz Kafka

*****

“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

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

Writing Quotes of the Day

“I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality.”—James Joyce

“The work never matches the dream of perfection the artist has to start with.”—William Faulkner

“To have something to say is a question of sleepless nights and worry and endless ratiocination of a subject - of endless trying to dig out of the essential truth, the essential justice.”—F. Scott Fitzgerald

“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

“What has a writer to be bombastic about? Whatever good a man may write is the consequence of accident, luck, or surprise, and nobody is more surprised than an honest writer when he makes a good phrase or says something truthful.”—Edward Dahlberg

“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

“When I face the desolate impossibility of writing 500 pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I write one page and then another. One day's works is all I can permit myself to contemplate.”—John Steinbeck

“The secret of good writing is to say an old thing in a new way or to say a new thing in an old way.”—Richard Harding Davis

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

“Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.”—Rudyard Kipling

Poetry Quotes of the Day

“We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.”—from the movie “Dead Poets Society”

“Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is a painting that speaks.”—Simonides

“Poetry creates the myth, the prose writer draws its portrait.”—Jean-Paul Sartre

“Poetry is subconscious conversation; it is as much the work of those who understand it and those who make it.”—Sonia Sanchez

“The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That's what poetry does.”—Allen Ginsberg

In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite.”—Paul Dirac

“Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.”—Plato

“Poetry is not sought but received. The puritan habits of hard work are not much help. Oh, they may help you get in the chair, keep you at the task, but the real lure is the gift of the word, the line that surprises.”—Donald M. Murray

“The poet knows that he speaks adequately then only when he speaks somewhat wildly, or ‘with the flower of the mind’... not with the intellect alone but with the intellect inebriated with nectar.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Poetry is being, not doing.”—E.E. Cummings

Writing Quotes of the Day

“One must be pitiless about this matter of ‘mood.’ In a sense, the writing will create the mood...I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing card, when nothing seemed worth enduring for another five minutes...and somehow the activity of writing changes everything.”—Joyce Carol Oates

“Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators.”—Albert Camus

“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.”—Scott Adams

“Keep your fears to yourself, but share your inspiration with others.”—Robert Louis Stevenson

“Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be read once.”—Cyril Connolly

“Successful writers are not the ones who write the best sentences. They are the ones who keep writing. They are the ones who discover what is most important and strangest and most pleasurable in themselves, and keep believing in the value of their work, despite the difficulties.”—Bonnie Friedman

“Detail is the lifeblood of fiction.”—John Gardner

“All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.”—F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Learning to write may be a part of learning to read. For all I know, writing comes from a superior devotion to reading.”—Eudora Welty

“Probably, indeed, the larger part of the labor of an author composing his work is critical labor; the labor of sifting, combining, constructing, expunging, correcting, testing. This frightful toil is as much critical as creative.”—T.S. Eliot

Poetry Quotes of the Day

“Poets need not go to Niagara to write about the force of falling water.”—Robert Frost

“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”—Emily Dickinson

“Everywhere I go, I find a poet has been there before me.”—Sigmund Freud

“The business of the poet and the novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things, and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things.”—Thomas Hardy

“Don't ask a poet to explain himself. He cannot.”—Plato
“There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money either.”—Robert Graves

“Poetry should be like fireworks, packed carefully and artfully, ready to explode with unpredictable effects."—Lilian Moore

“Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You've got to go so far, so fast, in such a small space, that you've got to burn away all the peripherals.”—Sylvia Plath
“A poet ought not to pick nature’s pocket. Let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to the imagination than the memory.”—Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.”—Kahlil Gibran

Writing Quotes of the Day

“It is not enough merely to love literature, if one wishes to spend one's life as a writer. It is a dangerous undertaking on the most primitive level. For, it seems to me, the act of writing with serious intent involves enormous personal risk. It entails the ongoing courage for self-discovery. It means one will walk forever on the tightrope, with each new step presenting the possibility of learning a truth about oneself that is too terrible to bear.”—Harlan Ellison

“If you can't annoy somebody, there's little point in writing.”—Kingsley Amis

“In good writing, words become one with things.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Find the key emotion; this may be all you need know to find your short story.”—F. Scott Fitzgerald

“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.”—Robert Frost

“Writing is pretty crummy on the nerves.”—Paul Theroux

“Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.”—T. S. Eliot

“Writing, I explained, was mainly an attempt to out-argue one's past; to present events in such a light that battles lost in life were either won on paper or held to a draw.”—Jules Feifer

“How do I know what I think until I see what I say?”—E. M. Forster

“The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightening and the lightening bug.”—Mark Twain

Poetry Quotes of the Day

“The poet doesn't invent. He listens.”—Jean Cocteau

“The poet ... may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.”—Lionel Trilling

“By making us stop for a moment, poetry gives us an opportunity to think about ourselves as human beings on this planet and what we mean to each other.”—Rita Dove
“Poetry amounts to arranging words with the greatest specific gravity in the most effective and externally inevitable sequence.”—Joseph Brodsky

“A poet's work is to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it from going to sleep.”—Salman Rushdie

“Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words.”—Edgar Allan Poe

“The joy of poetry is that it will wait for you. Novels don't wait for you. Characters change. But poetry will wait.”—Sonia Sanchez

“Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement.”—Christopher Fry

“A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.”—Randall Jarell

“When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images.”—Niels Bohr

Poetry Quotes of the Day

“The true philosopher and the true poet are one, and a beauty, which is truth, and a truth, which is beauty, is the aim of both.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson

“A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it, by way of the poem itself, all the way over to the reader.”—Charles Olson

“A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.”—Jean Cocteau

“Everywhere I go, I find a poet has been there before me.”—Sigmund Freud

“Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.”—Percy Shelley

“You arrive at truth through poetry; I arrive at poetry through truth.”—Joubert

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

“I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.”—Robert Frost

“The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation.”—James Fenton

“No good poem, however confessional it may be, is just self-expression. Who on earth would claim that the pearl expresses the oyster.”—C. Day Lewis

What Gandhi Said

"The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong."

"What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?"

"The only tyrant I accept in this world is the still voice within."

"It may be long before the law of love will be recognized in international affairs. The machineries of government stand between and hide the hearts of one people from those of another."

"As soon as we lose the moral basis, we cease to be religious. There is no such thing as religion over-riding morality. Man, for instance, cannot be untruthful, cruel or incontinent and claim to have God on his side."

"There is more to life than simply increasing its speed."

"We must be the change we wish to see."

"The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others."

"The moment there is suspicion about a person's motives, everything he does becomes tainted."

"Suffering cheerfully endured, ceases to be suffering and is transmuted into an ineffable joy."

Poetry Quotes of the Day

"Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood."
Gabriel Garcia-Marquez

"Poetry is the music of the soul, and, above all, of great and feeling souls." Voltaire

"Poetry is plucking at the heartstrings, and making music with them."
Dennis Gabor

"Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech."
Simonides

"Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn."
Thomas Gray

Writing Quotes of the Day

“Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.”—Kurt Vonnegut

“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

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

“Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.”—Orson Scott Card

“I don't believe for a moment that creativity is a neurotic symptom. On the contrary, the neurotic who succeeds as an artist has had to overcome a tremendous handicap. He creates in spite of his neurosis, not because of it.”—Jack Kerouac

“Thank your readers and the critics who praise you, and then ignore them. Write for the most intelligent, wittiest, wisest audience in the universe: Write to please yourself.”—Harlan Ellison
“In nearly all good fiction, the basic—all but inescapable-—plot form is: A central character wants something, goes after it despite opposition, and so arrives at a win, lose or draw.”—John Gardner

“Never mistake motion for action.”—Ernest Hemingway

“In a longish life as a professional writer, I have heard a thousand masterpieces talked out over bars, restaurant tables and love seats. I have never seen one of them in print. Books must be written, not talked.”—Morris L. West

“Every writer is a frustrated actor who recites his lines in the hidden auditorium of his skull.”—Rod Serling

Writing Quotes of the Day

“The most solid advice . . . for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep, really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive, with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell, and when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.”—William Saroyan
“Write it, even if you think it's terrible. Don't prevent yourself from jotting down a word, phrase, or paragraph just because it "isn't quite right" or "it won't work." Maybe it will, maybe it won't, but it's better to write it down, you can always edit later. And you don't want to stop yourself before you even get started! The point isn't to use everything you write. You can't be expected to pop out perfect prose your first time out! Write now, edit later.”—Cristine Grace

“You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.”—Saul Bellow

“In the beginning you may be writing around what you want to say instead of getting to the core. Keep writing. The route may be circuitous but after you zero in on what you truly want to say, you'll see that during all those false starts and detoured storylines, you weren't wasting time, as you feared. You were developing as a writer, developing a discerning eye and ear, finding your own voice, learning to respect self-imposed deadlines.”—Madeleine Costigan

“Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one.”—Stella Adler

“How can I write a war novel if I've never been in a war? In fiction, what counts is not expertise at all, but the illusion of expertise. All art is illusion, accomplished with stage effects that seem more real than reality. With enough accurate detail to stay ahead of the reader, the fiction writer can tackle any subject.”—Arthur Plotnik

“There is no perfect time to write. There is only now.”—Barbara Kingsolver

“I write at eighty-five for the same reasons that impelled me to write at forty-five; I was born with a passionate desire to communicate, to organize experience, to tell tales that dramatize the adventures which readers might have had. I have been that ancient man who sat by the campfire at night and regaled the hunters with imaginative recitations about their prowess. The job of an apple tree is to bear apples. The job of a storyteller is to tell stories, and I have concentrated on that obligation.”—James Michner

"Ring the bells that can still ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in.”—Leonard Cohen

"I honestly think I would rather be a failure at something I love than to be a success at something I hate.”—George Burns

Poetry Quotes of the Day

"Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary."
-Kahlil Gibran

"Poetry begins in delight and ends in wisdom."
-Robert Frost

"Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world."
-Percy Bysshe Shelley

"Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history."
-Plato

"A poet's object is not to tell what actually happened but what could or would happen either probably or inevitably ....For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths
while history gives particular facts."
-Aristotle

"The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty and delicacy. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes."
-William Sumerset Maugham

"As naturally as the oak bears an acorn and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done."
-Henry David Thoreau

"Poets are soldiers that liberate words from the steadfast possession of definition."
-Eli Khamarov

"A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote."
-Yevgeny Yentushenko

"A poem is a construction of inner space. Language is to inner space as light is to material space."
-Sven Birkerts

Poetry Quotes of the Day

"A poem is an instant of lucidity in which the entire organism participates."
Charles Simic

"Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content."
Alfred de Musset

"Poetry is a language pared down to its essentials."
Ezra Pound

"Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful."
Rita Dove

"Poetry allows one to speak with a power that is not granted by our culture."
Linda McCarriston

Writing Quotes of the Day

“Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. . . But amusing? Never.”—Edna Ferber

“I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.”—A. J. Liebling

“What has a writer to be bombastic about? Whatever good a man may write is the consequence of accident, luck, or surprise, and nobody is more surprised than an honest writer when he makes a good phrase or says something truthful.”—Edward Dahlberg

“We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.”—Ray Bradbury

“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

“Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by reason.”—Andre Gide

“Put it before them briefly so they will read it, clearly so they will appreciate it, picturesquely so they will remember it and, above all, accurately so they will be guided by its light.”—Joseph Pulitzer

“Just get it down on paper, and then we'll see what to do with it.”—Maxwell Perkins

“…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

“Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.”—Truman Capote

"The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark."—Michelangelo

Writers on Writing