What are the most inspiring quotes ever?
Great writers and artists sum up life truths in sentences that inspire us, that move us to tears, and that let us understand our humanity.
Here below is a growing list of famous quotes that will lift your creative spirit.
Neil Gaiman:
“I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You’re doing things you’ve never done before, and more importantly, you’re Doing Something. So that’s my wish for you, and all of us, and my wish for myself. Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody’s ever made before. Don’t freeze, don’t stop, don’t worry that it isn’t good enough, or it isn’t perfect, whatever it is: art, or love, or work or family or life. Whatever it is you’re scared of doing, Do it. Make your mistakes, next year and forever.”
(“My New Year Wish” by Neil Gaiman, journal.neilgaiman.com. December 31, 2011.)
Jane Yolen:
“Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up.”
Samuel Johnson:
“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 one book.”
Neil Gaiman:
“You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we’re doing it.”
Joan Didion:
“Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.”
William Zinsser:
“One of the underestimated tasks in nonfiction writing is to impose narrative shape on an unwieldy mass of material.”
Nora Ephron:
“You can repair anything but a blank page.”
Ray Bradbury:
“Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old-fashioned virtues of hard, constant labour, he’ll eventually make some kind of career for himself as a writer.”
Erica Jong:
“I went for years not finishing anything. Because, of course, when you finish something you can be judged.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald:
“All good writing is swimming underwater and holding your breath.”
Oscar Wilde:
“Books are never finished. They are merely abandoned.”
Neil l Gaiman:
“Whatever it takes to finish things, finish. You will learn more from a glorious failure than you ever will from something you never finished.”
Seth Godin:
“Ship often. Ship lousy stuff, but ship. Ship constantly.”
Charles Baudelaire:
“Always be a poet, even in prose.”
Robert Frost:
“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”
Anais Nin:
“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”
Octavia E. Butler:
“You don’t start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it’s good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That’s why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.”
Isaac Asimov:
“It is the writer who might catch the imagination of young people, and plant a seed that will flower and come to fruition.”