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

—Anna Held Audette

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No one should drive a hard bargain with an artist.

—Ludwig van Beethoven

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Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression.

—Isaac Bashevis Singer

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The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.

—Friedrich Nietzsche

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As I look back on what I have written, I can see that the very persons who have taken away my time are those who have given me something to say.

—Katherine Paterson

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When Alexander the Great visited Diogenes and asked whether he could do anything for the famed teacher, Diogenes replied: "Only stand out of my light." Perhaps someday we shall know how to heighten creativity. Until then, one of the best things we can do for creative men and women is to stand out of their light.

—John W. Gardner

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Discontent is at the root of the creative process: the most gifted members of the human species are at their creative best when they cannot have their way.

—Eric Hoffer

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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

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

—Igor Stravinsky

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

—Bonnie Friedman

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There is no immaculate conception in art.

—Walter Kuhn

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Writer's block is what you get if you're too full of yourself and trying to be García Márquez. You sit and stare at the wall and nothing happens for you. It's like imagining you're a tree and trying to sprout leaves. Once you come to your senses and accept who you are, then there's no problem. I'm not García Márquez. 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

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A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.

—Charles Péguy

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I didn't have to think up so much as a comma or a semicolon; it was all given, straight from the celestial recording room. Weary, I would beg for a break, an intermission, time enough, let's say, to go to the toilet or take a breath of fresh air on the balcony. Nothing doing!

—Henry Miller

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I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her.

—Anne Lamott

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