About Me:

I am a member of the United Church of Christ, and very proud of it.

I took a writing class while in college. My teacher from that class handed out pages of quotes about writing...and other things like painting, dancing, etc. I decided to post these quotes here so I could share them with everyone.

Most of the pages had quotes from several different people:

Contrary to what many people think, a career in writing is not without its drawbacks--chief among them the unpleasant fact that one is frequently called upon to sit down and write.
--Fran Lebowitz

I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon, I put it back in again.
--Oscar Wilde

A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
--Thomas Mann

Writer's block is what you get if you're too full of yourself and trying to be Garcia Marquez...It's like imagining you're a tree and trying to sprout leaves. Once you come to your senses and accept who you are, there's no problem. I'm not Garcia Marquez. I'm a late-middle-aged midlist fair-to-middling writer with a comfortable midriff, and it gives me quite a bit of pleasure.
--Garrison Keillor

Just as appetite comes by eating, so work brings inspiration.
--Igor Stravinsk

Successful writers are not the ones who write the best sentences. They are the ones who keep writing.
--Bonnie Friedman

What am I in the eyes of most people? A good-for-nothing, an eccentric and disagreeable man, somebody who has no position in society and never will have. Very well, even if that were true. I should want to show by my work what there is in the heart of such an eccentric man, of such a nobody.
--Vincent Van Gogh

What you have to do now is work. There's no right way to start.
--Anna Held Audette

You don't have to be somebody else to write well.
--David Huddle

How can you go out on a limb if you don't know your own tree? No art ever came out of not risking your own neck.
--Eudora Welty

Poetry is not a way of depicting the world, but a way of conversing with it, trying to know it.
--Jorie Graham

Talent is long patience, and originality is an effort of will and of intense observation.
--Gustave Flaubert

If you don't sit there every day, the day it would come well, you won't be sitting there.
--Flannery 'Connor

The hard work you do on one poem is put in on all poems.
--Richard Hugo

Writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.
--Eudora Welty

We are not judged by what we are basically. We are judged by how hard we use what we have been given.
--Flannery O'Connor

Writing...is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
--E. L. Doctorow

Tell all the Truth, but tell it slant.
--Emily Dickenson

Stare. It is the way to educate your eye, and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.
--Walker Evans

The key to the treasure is the treasure.
--John Barth

You have to be available to both the cheapest and the deepest things that play on you.
--Harold Guskin

I never have anything balanced in my mind when I set out; if I did I'd resign this profession from boredom and operate a hatchery.
--Flannery O'Connor

Stop looking at your feet and dance.
--Anne Lamott

Aim, but not too hard
--Anne Lamott

Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around a lake.
--Wallace Stevens

The intellect wants to know; the soul likes to be surprised.
--Thomas Moore

If you've never been corny, then you aren't even in the ball game.
--Richard Hugo

Fall seven times, get up eight.
--Japanese proverb

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

The imagination is like a car battery: when you leave it inactive is when it runs down.
--Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Despair is the desire to be other than oneself.
--Kierkegaard

Anyone can be a fisherman in May.
--Hemingway

The best way to know life is to love many things.
--Van Gogh

There is another world, and it is in this world.
--Paul Eluard

I may not be good lookin', but I'm some woman's angel child.
--Willie McTell

It's easu being a writer. What's hard is staying a writer.
--Harlan Ellison

There were also pages of sayings all by the same person.

Sayings from Picasso:

Art is a lie that allows us to uncover the truth.

Everything that can be imagined is real.

I always try to do what I don't know how to do; that's how I learn to do it.

If you know exactly what you're going to do, what good is doing it?

When I don't have any blue, I use red.

Good taste is the enemy of creativity.

It takes a long time to become young.

I've spent my whole life learning to draw like a child.

A painting lives only through the person who looks at it.

Any act of creation is first an act of destruction.

Trying to avoid accidents--it's impossible. Accidents reveal the human being.

Some of my favorite (not writing related) quotes:

Change the words, don't change the meaning;
Change the hands, don't change the healing;
Change the tune, don't change the feeling;
Change the heart, don't change the needing;
--Maire Brennan; Whisper to the Wild Water

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going.
I do not see the road ahead of me.
I cannot know for certain where it will end.
Nor do I really know myself
and the fact that I think that I am following your will
does not mean that I am actually doing so.
But I believe that the desire to please you
does in fact please you.
And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing.
I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.
And I know that if I do this
you will lead me by the right road
though I may know nothing about it.
Therefore will I trust you always
though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death.
I will not fear, for you are ever with me
and you will never leave me
to face my perils alone.
--Thomas Merton; Thoughts in Solitude

Never Place a period where God has placed a comma
--Gracie Allen