Nancy's quotes

(showing 1-50 of 83)

"There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you."
— Maya Angelou

tags: inspirational, stories, writing
2,774 people liked it

"Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be."
— Mark Twain

tags: humor, writing
1,584 people liked it

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

tags: books, writing
1,142 people liked it

"We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect."
— Anaïs Nin

tags: anais, nin, qoutes, writing
620 people liked it

"We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down."
— Kurt Vonnegut

tags: creativity, invention, quip, wings, writing
398 people liked it

"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

tags: writing
594 people liked it

"I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions."
— James A. Michener

tags: writing
186 people liked it

"Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen."
— Willa Cather

tags: life, writing
142 people liked it

"Always be a poet, even in prose."
— Charles Baudelaire

tags: poetry, prose, writing
173 people liked it

"Don't say it was delightful; make us say delightful when we've read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers Please will you do the job for me."
— C.S. Lewis

tags: words, writing
81 people liked it

"Put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it."
— Colette

tags: editing, writing
51 people liked it

"Write what should not be forgotten."
— Isabel Allende

tags: forgotten, writing
185 people liked it

"Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money."
— Virginia Woolf

tags: writing
351 people liked it

"Learning to write may be part of learning to read. For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading."
— Eudora Welty

tags: inspirational, writing
67 people liked it

"The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself."
— Eleanor Roosevelt

tags: writing
197 people liked it

"Nothing's a better cure for writer's block than to eat ice cream right out of the carton."
— Don Roff

tags: humor, inspirational, writing
94 people liked it

"Writer’s block is only a failure of the ego."
— Norman Mailer

tags: humor, writing
34 people liked it

"Once you start thinking about the lies people tell when they don't know they're telling them, the truths people reveal when they think they're lying, then you can start to build a world."
— Sarah Rees Brennan

tags: on-writing
13 people liked it

"The imagination needs moodling,--long, inefficient happy idling, dawdling and puttering. "
— Brenda Ueland

tags: writing
26 people liked it

"Toby: All right. It couldn't have gone far, right?

Sam: No.

Toby: Somewhere in this building...is our talent. "
— Aaron Sorkin

tags: writing
9 people liked it

"There are books by which the backs and covers are by far the best parts."
— Charles Dickens

tags: books, writing
350 people liked it

"And there was that poor sucker Flaubert rolling around on his floor for three days looking for the right word."
— Dorothy Parker

tags: author, humor, writing
25 people liked it

"Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass."
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

tags: moon, writing
122 people liked it

"She doesn't quite chop his head off.
She makes a Pez dispenser out of him."
— Frank Miller (Sin City, Vol. 3: The Big Fat Kill)

tags: writing
13 people liked it

"Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away."
— Maya Angelou

tags: life
11,556 people liked it

"Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life."
— Mark Twain

tags: books, friends, friendship, life
3,997 people liked it

"If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day."
— E.B. White

tags: activism, humor, life, pleasure
1,881 people liked it

"I'm not afraid of death; I just don't want to be there when it happens."
— Woody Allen

tags: death, fear, humor, life
2,827 people liked it

"How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world."
— Anne Frank

tags: activism, life, optimism, philosophy, world
1,449 people liked it

"We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are."
— Anaïs Nin

tags: life, philosophy
3,782 people liked it

"The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom."
— Isaac Asimov

tags: life, science, wisdom
813 people liked it

"I'm selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best."
— Marilyn Monroe

tags: best, life, love, mistakes, out-of-control, truth, worst
11,223 people liked it

"The trouble with being in the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat."
— Lily Tomlin

tags: humor, life, race, rat
490 people liked it

"Everything you can imagine is real."
— Pablo Picasso

tags: art, imagination, inspirational, life
2,121 people liked it

"Our lives are not as limited as we think they are; the world is a wonderfully weird place; consensual reality is significantly flawed; no institution can be trusted, but love does work; all things are possible; and we all could be happy and fulfilled if we only had the guts to be truly free and the wisdom to shrink our egos and quit taking ourselves so damn seriously."
— Tom Robbins

tags: life
165 people liked it

"A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving."
— Laozi

tags: life, travel
345 people liked it

"No sympathy for the devil; keep that in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride...and if it occasionally gets a little heavier than what you had in mind, well...maybe chalk it off to forced conscious expansion: Tune in, freak out, get beaten."
— Hunter S. Thompson

tags: life
193 people liked it

"Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much"
— Helen Keller

tags: collaboration, life, teamwork
147 people liked it

"Do your own thing on your own terms and get what you came here for"
— Oliver James

tags: inspirational, life
76 people liked it

"If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there."
— Lewis Carroll

tags: life
1,311 people liked it

"...what are these barriers that keep people from reaching anywhere near their real potential? The answer to that can be found in another question, and that’s this: Which is the most universal human characteristic - fear or laziness?"
— Waking Life

tags: fear, inspirational, life
35 people liked it

"Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful and good things are."
— Anaïs Nin

tags: life
213 people liked it

"My body is my journal, and my tattoos are my story."
— Johnny Depp

tags: life
89 people liked it

""In a time of destruction, create something.""
— Maxine Hong Kingston

tags: creation, destruction, hope, life
69 people liked it

"Tell the truth, or someone will tell it for you."
— Stephanie Klein (Straight up and Dirty)

tags: humor, life, memoir, truth
373 people liked it

"Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music-the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself."
— Henry Miller

tags: life
166 people liked it

"If you can't change your fate, change your attitude."
— Amy Tan

tags: life
377 people liked it

"All we have is to decide what to do with the time that is given to us. "
— J.R.R. Tolkien (The Fellowship of the Ring)

tags: adventuring, death, screenplay
802 people liked it

"I live my life in widening circles That reach out across the world."
— Rainer Maria Rilke (Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God)

tags: inspirational, life
44 people liked it

"There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action."
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

tags: ignorance, life
40 people liked it

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