FOUR QUOTES ON THE WRITING LIFE

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Writing is by its nature a solitary game. You sit down and go it alone. And yet, when you do so, you’re accompanied by the myriad voices in your head and heart practicing your art right there along with you, offering you the stuff of language, syntax, and music. Often, those voices also supply advice on how to live the life of writing, and we dutifully record these nuggets on screens and post-it notes and napkins. Some become our mantras. Here are four that provide me with inspiration and consolation as I go about my work.  

  • "Don’t loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club, and if you don’t get it you will nonetheless get something that looks remarkably like it."—Jack London

  • "Pain and suffering. Give me the strength
    to bear it, to enter those places where the
    great animals are caged. And we can live
    at peace by their side."—John Wieners, "Acts of Youth”

  • "You have an appointment with life, an appointment that is in the here and now.” —Thich Nhat Hanh

  • “Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson