Quotes to inspire and reflect

Everyone needs a sense of shame, but no one needs to feel ashamed.

There’s a way to do it better—find it.

Though men pride themselves on their great actions, often they are not the result of any great design, but of chance.

In order to improve the mind, we ought less to learn, than to contemplate.

The laws of circumstance are abolished by new circumstances.

Logic: The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.

Is there anyone so wise as to learn by the experience of others?

Faultless to a fault.

As long as you live, keep learning how to live.

With self-discipline most anything is possible.

The human brain is a complex organ with the wonderful power of enabling man to find reasons for continuing to believe whatever it is that he wants to believe.

The difficulty is to try and teach the multitude that something can be true and untrue at the same time.

Truth, when not sought after, rarely comes to light.

The most important single ingredient in the formula of success is knowing how to get along with people.

A gem cannot be polished without friction, nor a man perfected without trials.

If you wish to live, you must first attend your own funeral.

Perseverance is a great element of success. If you only knock long enough and loud enough at the gate, you are sure to wake up somebody.

The only fence against the world is a thorough knowledge of it.

This is the highest wisdom that I own; freedom and life are earned by those alone who conquer them each day anew.

I N THE AFTERNOONS , Gertrude Stein and I used to go antique hunting in the local shops, and I remember once asking her if she thought I should become a writer. In the typically cryptic way we were all so enchanted with, she said, “No.” I took that to mean yes and sailed for Italy the next day.

Don’t ever write anything you don’t like yourself and if you do like it, don’t take anyone else’s advice about changing it. They just don’t know.

My experience with trying to help people to write has been limited but extremely intensive. I have done everything from giving would-be writers money to live on to plotting and rewriting their stories for them, and so far I have found it all to be a waste. The people whom God or nature intended to be writers find their own answers, and those who have to ask are impossible to help. They are merely people who want to be writers.

There is no advice to give young poets.

Nobody can advise and help you, nobody. There is only one single means. Go inside yourself. Discover the motive that bids you write; examine whether it sends its roots down to the deepest places of your heart, confess to yourself whether you would have to die if writing were denied you. This before all: ask yourself in the quietest hour of your night: must I write?

Keep your bones in good motion, kid, and quietly consume and digest what is necessary. I think it is not so much important to build a literary thing as it is not to hurt things. I think it is important to be quiet and in love with park benches; solve whole areas of pain by walking across a rug .

Someone once asked me whether I thought women artists should have children, and, since we were beyond discussing why this question is never asked of artists who are men, I gave my answer promptly. “Yes,” I said, somewhat to my surprise. And, as if to amend my rashness, I added: “They should have children— assuming this is of interest to them —but only one.” “Why only one?” this Someone wanted to know. “Because with one you can move,” I said. “With more than one you’re a sitting duck.”

It is not a good thing for an artist to marry. As the ancients used to say, if you serve a Muse, you must serve her and no one else. An unhappy marriage may perhaps contribute to the development of talent, but a happy one is no good at all.

It is hard to master both life and work equally well. So if you are bound to fake one of them, it had better be life.

Be regular and orderly like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.

When I hear about writer’s block, this one and that one! Fuck off! Stop writing, for Christ’s sake: You’re not meant to be doing this. Plenty more where you came from.

It would be wisest not to worry too much about the sterile periods. They ventilate the subject and instill into it the reality of daily life.

Any writer who has difficulty in writing is probably not onto his true subject, but wasting time with false, petty goals; as soon as you connect with your true subject you will write.

Ignore it: you never stop speaking; why stop writing?

My prescription for writer’s block is to face the fact that there is no such thing. It’s an invented condition, a literary version of the judicial “abuse excuse.” Writing well is difficult, but one can always write something . And then, with a lot of work, make it better. It’s a question of having enough will and ambition, not of hoping to evade this mysterious hysteria people are always talking about.

I don’t think that writer’s block exists really. I think that when you’re trying to do something prematurely, it just won’t come. Certain subjects just need time.… You’ve got to wait before you write about them.

If you are in difficulties with a book, try the element of surprise: attack it at an hour when it isn’t expecting it.

When I sit down in order to write, sometimes it’s there; sometimes it’s not. But that doesn’t bother me anymore. I tell my students there is such a thing as “writer’s block,” and they should respect it. You shouldn’t write through it. It’s blocked because it ought to be blocked, because you haven’t got it right now.

Very few authors are able to do actual writing for more than three hours a day. In fact, a good many very successful ones average no more than an hour.

The best regimen is to get up early, insult yourself a bit in the shaving mirror, and then pretend you’re cutting wood.

Now this is very important and can hardly be emphasized too strongly: You have decided to write at four o’clock, and at four o’clock write you must!

Write even when you don’t want to, don’t much like what you are writing, and aren’t writing particularly well.

Don’t work too hard. Fool around a bit. Be lazy. Don’t worry, Life is —forever.

Get up very early and get going at once, in fact, work first and wash afterwards.

There comes a moment in the day, when you have written your pages in the morning, attended to your correspondence in the afternoon, and have nothing further to do. Then comes the hour when you are bored; that’s the time for sex.

Our words must seem to be inevitable.

I never write metropolis for seven cents because I can get the same price for city . I never write policeman because I can get the same money for cop .

A word once let out of the cage cannot be whistled back again.

Short words are best and the old words when short are best of all.