• "Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Did any of it? Why do I keep a notebook at all? It is easy to deceive oneself on all those scores. The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle. Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss." - Joan Didion
  • "You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should've behaved better." - Anne Lamott
  • "And by the way, everything in life is writable if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt." - Sylvia Plath
  • "If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word." - Margaret Atwood
  • "Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self." - Cyril Connolly
  • "A writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, or because everything she does is golden. A writer is a writer because, even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway." - Junot Diaz
  • "The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame." - Oscar Wilde
  • [Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink.] Drink and be filled up. - Stephen King
jul 4 2014 ∞
aug 18 2014 +