If something inside of you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Risk being unliked.

I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so. Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises.

Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions for Writing and Life

We tell each other stories to help each other live. That’s why I read poetry. I read poetry to stay alive. That’s why I went to poetry in the first place, that’s why I stay with it, that’s why I’ll never leave it.                                     

Marie Howe

Every writer I know has two selves — one who records what is happening as the other experiences what it knows it will one day write about.

Maryanne O’Hara, Little Matches: A Memoir of Grief and Light

We can easily feel worn down and uninspired, so where can we find our spark or even the flicker of invention to lure us into our writing? If we wait, we could be sitting for a long time, becoming more convinced that no words are ever going to appear. So don’t wait. Don’t look for the muse. Practice recognition instead. Life is always happening, it will always show up.

Maureen Buchanan

You haven’t written anything until you say something you didn’t expect to say. That’s the beginning.

Jericho Brown

To write, you don’t need a big idea…You don’t even have to have a little idea. Just look around.

Naomi Shihab Nye

So coming back from a journey, or after an illness, before habits had spun themselves across the surface, one felt that same unreality, which was so startling; felt something emerge. Life was most vivid then. –

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

Everyone is involved, whether they like it or not, in the construction of their world. So it’s never as given as it actually looks. You are always shaping it and building it. And I feel that from that perspective, that each of us is an artist.

John ODonahue

If you’re waiting for the green light, the go-ahead the reassuring wand to tap your shoulder and anoint you as a writer, you’d better pull out your thermos and folding chair because you’re going to be waiting for a good long while…A writer who writes is one who finds a way to give herself permission.There is no magical place of arrival. There is only the solitary self facing the page.

Dani Shapiro

Considering the ways in which so many of us waste our time, what would be wrong with a world in which everybody were writing poems? After all, there’s a significant service to humanity in spending time doing no harm. And I’d like a world, wouldn’t you, in which people actually took time to think about what they were saying?

Ted Kooser, The Poetry Home Repair Manual

As soon as I have a deadline, I work much better. Time unbounded is hard to handle.

May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude

The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.

Zadie Smith

One thing I have learned about attention is that certain forms of it are contagious. When you spend enough time with someone who pays close attention to something (if you were hanging out with me, it would be birds), you inevitably start to pay attention to some of the same things.

Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing

Whether your purpose for writing is artistic expression, communication with friends and family, the healing of the inner life, or achieving public recognition for your art – the foundation is the same: the claiming of yourself as an artist/writer and the strengthening of your writing voice through practice, study, and helpful response from other writers.

Pat Schneider, Writing Alone and With Others