“You and your words flooded my senses. Your sentences left me defenseless. You built me palaces out of paragraphs. You built cathedrals.”— Phillipa Soo, play.spotify.com
“There is no secret password to being a writer. There is no secret code. You just do it.”— Lynee Tillman, thecreativeindependent.com
“I know writers who say they take little pleasure in writing but they love having written. I'm not like that. I'm more like the athlete who enjoys practicing as much as playing the actual game.”— Twyla Tharp, amazon.com
“Give me a writer who thinks he has all the time in the world and I'll show you a writer who never delivers.”— Twyla Tharp, amazon.com
“In order to be habitually creative, you have to know how to prepare to be creative.”— Twyla Tharp, amazon.com
“Art is not about minimizing risk and delivering work that is guaranteed to please.”— Twyla Tharp, amazon.com
“I'm often asked, 'Where do you get your ideas?' This happens to anyone who is willing to stand in front of an audience and talk about his or her work. The short answer is: everywhere. It's like asking 'Where do you find the air you breathe?' Ideas are all around you.”— Twyla Tharp, amazon.com
“The first steps of a creative act are like groping in the dark: random and chaotic, feverish and fearful, a lot of busy-ness with no apparent or definable end in sight.”— Twyla Tharp, amazon.com
“Writing is not like chemical engineering. We shouldn’t learn the figures of speech the way we learn the periodic table of elements. We shouldn’t because we are learning not about hypothetical structures in things, but about real potentialities within our language, within ourselves.”— Arthur Quinn, amazon.com
“In this universe we are given two gifts: the ability to love, and the ability to ask questions. Which are, at the same time, the fires that warm us and the fires that scorch us.”— Mary Oliver, amazon.com
“To me, being a beauty editor was better than being president of the United States.”— Cat Marnell, amazon.com
“I have a mess in my head sometimes, and there’s something very satisfying about putting it into words.”— Carrie Fisher, avclub.com
“I always wrote. I wrote from when I was 12. That was therapeutic for me in those days. I wrote things to get them out of feeling them, and onto paper. So writing in a way saved me, kept me company. I did the traditional thing with falling in love with words, reading books and underlining lines I lik…”— Carrie Fisher, avclub.com
“I'm not sure how to do it: a problem, obviously, but we're not talking about constructing the Brooklyn Bridge. If you try and it doesn't work, you'll try a different way next time. Doing is better than not doing, and if you do something badly you'll learn to do it better.”— Twyla Tharp, amazon.com
“The working, concentrating artist is an adult who refuses interruption from himself, who remains absorbed and energized in and by the work -- who is thus responsible to the work.”— Mary Oliver, amazon.com
“Advice? I don’t have advice. Stop aspiring and start writing. If you’re writing, you’re a writer. Write like you’re a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there’s no chance for a pardon. Write like you’re clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last br…”— Alan Watts, twitter.com