“A creative mess is better than idle tidiness.”— Michael J Fox, amazon.comTagged: Creativity, Hard Work
“Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.”— Andy Warhol, amazon.comTagged: Art, Creation, Creativity
“Husband runs off with a politician? Make good art. Leg crushed and then eaten by mutated boa constrictor? Make good art. IRS on your trail? Make good art. Cat exploded? Make good art. Somebody on the Internet thinks what you do is stupid or evil or it's all been done before? Make good art. Probably…”— Neil Gaiman, amazon.comTagged: Art, Depression, Creativity
“Have pity on those who are fearful of taking up a pen, or a paintbrush, or an instrument, or a tool because they are afraid that someone has already done so better than they could...”— Paulo Coelho, amazon.comTagged: Creativity, Art, Artistic Growth, Self-Expression, Self-Confidence
“Success isn’t a result of spontaneous combustion. You must set yourself on fire.”— Arnold Glasgow, brainyquote.comTagged: Success, Work, Self-Expression, Creativity, perseverance
“Trust in what you love, continue to do it, and it will take you where you need to go. And don't worry too much about security. You will eventually have a deep security when you begin to do what you want. How many of us with our big salaries are actually secure anyway?”— Natalie Goldberg, amazon.comTagged: Passion, Writing, Doing What You Love
“You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”— Jack London, brainyquote.comTagged: inspiration, Creativity, Work, Concentration, motivation
“A poem...begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.”— Robert Frost, en.wikiquote.orgTagged: Poetry, poem, Writing, Words
“The one thing you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can. The moment that you feel that just possibly you are walking down the street naked… That’s the moment you may be starting to get…”— Neil Gaiman, amazon.comTagged: Writing, drawing, Dancing, Passion
“Write hard and clear about what hurts.”— Ernest Hemingway, goodreads.comTagged: Writing, Creativity, Pain, Self-Expression, Poetry
“Here’s my advice for anybody out there who is creative and scared: Shout until they fucking hear you. And then shout even louder.”— Chris Gethard, youtube.comTagged: Creativity, Writing, Fear, Self-Expression
“If by intellectual you mean somebody who works only with his head and not with his hands, then the bank clerk is an intellectual and Michelangelo is not. And today, with a computer, everybody is an intellectual. So I don’t think it has anything to do with someone’s profession or with someone’s socia…”— Umberto Eco, theparisreview.orgTagged: Intellect, Creativity, Knowledge, Production
“If you ever find that you’re the most talented person in the room, you need to find another room.”— Austin Kleon, goodreads.comTagged: Creativity, Talent, Mentors, Artistic Growth
“Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign. But stories can also be used to empower, and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people. But stories can also repair that broken dignity.”— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, globalcitizen.orgTagged: dignity, Pride, Stories, Writing, humanity
“Scare the world. Be exactly who you say you are and tell the truth.”— Iain Cain Thomas, goodreads.comTagged: Writing, Self-Expression, Creativity, Self-Promotion, Ambition
“Writing is hard....Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.”— Cheryl Strayed, amazon.comTagged: Writing, Working, Working Hard, Passion
“Art is about making decisions.”— Juliet Patterson, iowasummerwritingfestival.orgTagged: Eleventh Hour Lecture Series, Iowa Summer Writing Festival 2016, Writing, Being A Writer, Writing Tips
“Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.”— Natalie Goldberg, amazon.comTagged: Writing, Pain, Trauma, Healing, Honesty
“That's why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. You can't control life, at least you can control your version.”— Chuck Palahniuk, barnesandnoble.comTagged: Writing, Words, Life, Living, Reflection
“My work as a sculptor has trained me to write in the same way. When I start a piece I work it from all directions. I jump back and forth from section to section in no particular order. I leave broad ideas and impressions everywhere. I make notations and draw charts. I don’t write in complete sentenc…”— Annie Weatherwax, blog.pshares.orgTagged: Writing, Being A Writer, The Craft Of Writing, The Art Of Writing, Art And Writing
“Why did people ask "What is it about?" as if a novel had to be about only one thing.”— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, amazon.comTagged: Writing, Novels, Meaning, purpose
“I’m never not working on material. Every second of my existence, I am thinking, ‘Can I do something with that?'”— , thoughtcatalog.comTagged: Writing, How to be a writer, Transparency
“No one ever gets talker's block. No one wakes up in the morning, discovers he has nothing to say and sits quietly, for days or weeks, until the muse hits, until the moment is right, until all the craziness in his life has died down. Why then, is writer's block endemic? The reason we don't get talker…”— Seth Godin, sethgodin.typepad.comTagged: Writing, Psychology, Philosophy, Breakdown = Breakthrough
“The scariest moment is always just before you start.”— Stephen King, kristinoffiler.wordpress.comTagged: Writing, Fear, Inspirational, Courage, Wisdom
“The honest to god truth? In the year prior to becoming a full-time producer and writer, I wrote over 350 pieces for various publications. I worked to get where I am today. It wasn’t just lucky. It was work. But I’d do it all over again.”— Kendra Syrdal, kendrasyrdal.tumblr.comTagged: Writing on the internet, Writing, feminism, Career, How to be a writer
“Being an artist means forever healing your own wounds and at the same time endlessly exposing them.”— Annette Messager, goodreads.comTagged: Artist, Self-Expression, Writing, Poetry
“Yet writing a poem about something painful, she has discovered, can be her way of digesting it. 'One of the things I’ve learned is, if we try and put sadness off, it just waits. And in my experience, running away from sadness doesn’t do anybody any good.'”— Frieda Hughes, theguardian.comTagged: Poetry, Writing, Literature, Pain, Sad
“Life was not to be sitting in hot amorphic leisure in my backyard idly writing or not-writing, as the spirit moved me. It was instead, running madly, in a crowded schedule, in a squirrel cage of busy people.”— Sylvia Plath, amazon.comTagged: Life, Writing, Career, Growing Pains, Passion
“I thought about the notebooks I filled up in high school, the ones that I’m still too scared to open up and revisit, not because I think my bad writing will make me cringe, but because I’m afraid my bad writing will make me yearn to write like that again—and I don’t mean writing poems that compare m…”— Jenny Zhang, rookiemag.comTagged: Writing, Art, Creation, Innocennce, Freedom
“All you have to do is write one true sentence.”— Ernest Hemingway, amazon.comTagged: Writing, Finding The Right Words