ALL WRITERS HAVE DONE IT. THE PROJECT. THE PLAN. A COMPUTER SCREEN, CURSOR BLINKING, KEYS SILENT. AND THEN NOTHING. AND MORE NOTHING.
Great writers have curious minds. They face the 'block' with determination because they know what waits on the other side is genius.
When we are stuck, we seek inspiration from brilliant minds who say it with more eloquence and poetry than our struggled words. Discover some of our favourites below.
WRITERS WRITING
“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”
― Anaïs Nin
“The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”
― Mark Twain
“A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity."
― Franz Kafka
“I’m not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.”
― Cormac McCarthy
“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 Jarrell
“Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.”
― Cyril Connolly
“Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by reason.”
― André Gide
“Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted.”
― Jules Renard
LIFE
“Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.”
― Cormac McCarthy
“The greatest risk to man is not that he aims too high and misses, but that he aims too low and hits.”
― Michaelangelo
“Often it isn't the mountains ahead that wear you out, it's the little pebble in your shoe.”
― Muhammad Ali
“The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.”
― Emily Dickinson
“Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.”
― Flannery O'Connor
THE PROCESS
“In writing, you must kill all your darlings.”
― William Faulkner
“A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.”
― Graham Greene
“There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story.”
― Frank Herbert
“Poems are never finished - just abandoned”
― Paul Valéry
“A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it.”
― Mark Twain
“Fiction is the truth inside the lie.”
― Stephen King
