Inspiration Quotes from Writers I Admire (on the date of my birth!)

Ernest Hemingway: "The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places."

Today, I’m cheating. No desserts—my glucose levels told me to go to hell and I’m pretty sure that’s where I’ll end if I eat any more flourless chocolate cake. But every now and then, while I’m hammering away at a novel (as I am right now), I do like me a good inspirational writing quote from some writer out there I admire. Today, on Vladimir Nabokov, Immanuel Kant, Vladimir Lenin, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Charles Mingus, Aaron Spelling, Jack Nicholson, Janet Evanovich, Louise Glück, John Waters, Peter Frampton, Marshawn Lynch, and MY birthdays, that’s what I’m posting—writing quotes!

So, get to writing, my friends. Time be short!

"Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it's the only way you can do anything really good."

- William Faulkner

“You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club." - Jack London

"If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it." - Toni Morrison

“First, find out what your hero wants, then just follow him!" - Ray Bradbury

"The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order to write. A man will turn over half a library to make a book."

-Samuel Johnson

“To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme." - Herman Melville

"If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot." - Stephen King

"My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying." - Anton Chekhov

"Half my life is an act of revision." - John Irving

"Anyone and everyone taking a writing class knows that the secret of good writing is to cut it back, pare it down, winnow, chop, hack, prune, and trim, remove every superfluous word, compress, compress, compress..." - Nick Hornby

"If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster." - Isaac Asimov

"And by the way, everything in life is writable about 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

"The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words." - William H. Gass

“I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn." - Anne Frank

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.” - Stephen King

“When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.” —George Orwell

“What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you.” — Anne Lamott

“If you are not afraid of the voices inside you, you will not fear the critics outside you.” — Natalie Goldberg

“Writing is supposed to be difficult, agonizing, a dreadful exercise, a terrible occupation.” — Ray Bradbury

“Examine every word you put on paper. You'll find a surprising number that don't serve any purpose.” — William Zinsser

“The purpose of the first draft is not to get it right, but to get it written.” --John Dufresne

I love Inspiration Quotes from Writers I Admire (on the date of my birth!)

Cully Perlman is a novelist, short story writer, Substantive Editor, and blogger. He can be reached at Cully@novelmasterclass.com but not today. Today he'll be ignoring everyone.

Me. Doing nothing. Today. On the day of my birth.