Up: [[Personal Writing Genres - Essay, Memoir and Myth]] Created: 2024-07-12 Updated: 2025-11-19 > [!Orbit] Louis L’Amour > Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on. > [!Orbit] Susan Sontag > Love words. Agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world. > [!Orbit] Nathaniel Hawthorne > Easy reading is damn hard writing. > [!Orbit] Truman Capote > Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself. > [!Orbit] Kurt Vonnegut > When I write I feel like an armless legless man with a crayon in his mouth. > [!Orbit] [[Anne Lamott]] > Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. > [!Orbit] William Faulkner > Don’t be a ‘writer’. Be writing. > [!Orbit] Kenko, written in 1331 > What a strange folly, to beguile the tedious hours like this all day before my ink stone, jotting down at random the idle thoughts that cross my mind… > [!Orbit] Natalie Goldberg > We are a part of everything. When we understand this, we see that we are not writing, but everything is writing through us. > [!Orbit] Anais Nin > When I don’t write, I feel my world shrinking. I feel I am in a prison. I feel I lose my fire and my colour. It should be a necessity, as the sea needs to heave, and I call it breathing. > [!Orbit] James Michener > I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions. > [!Orbit] Ellen Bass in course *The Image: Heart of the poem* > If you have an idea and your writing has an idea, follow your writing. It's often smarter than you are. > [!Orbit] Natalie Goldberg in *Writing Down the Bones* > We must continue to work the compost pile, enriching it and making it fertile so that something beautiful may bloom and so that our writing muscles are in good shape to ride the universe when it moves through us. > [!Orbit] Edgar Rice Burroughs > If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favour. > [!Orbit] David Foster Wallace > Good writing isn’t a science. It’s an art, and the horizon is infinite. You can always get better. > [!Orbit] Susan Sontag > A writer is someone who pays attention to the world. > [!Orbit] Don Delillo > A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it.