For those days when you just want to give up, here is some comforting advice from leading writers and artists …
It is perfectly okay to write garbage—as long as you edit brilliantly.~ C. J. Cherryh
If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor.~ Edgar Rice Burroughs
If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn’t matter a damn how you write.~ Somerset Maugham
Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it’s the only way you can do anything really good.~ William Faulkner
Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up.~ Jane Yolen
“If I waited for perfection… I would never write a word.”~ Margaret Atwood
“A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.”~ Richard Bach
“It is by sitting down to write every morning that one becomes a writer.”~ Gerald Brenan
“Prowling about the rooms, sitting down, getting up, stirring the fire, looking out the window, teasing my hair, sitting down to write, writing nothing, writing something and tearing it up…”~ Charles Dickens
“Not writing at all leads to nothing.”~ Anna Quindlen
“As a writer, I need an enormous amount of time alone. Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials. It’s a matter of doing everything you can to avoid writing, until it is about four in the morning and you reach the point where you have to write. Having anybody watching that or attempting to share it with me would be grisly.”~ Paul Rudnik
“It is better to write a bad first draft than to write no first draft at all.”~ Will Shetterly
“Perseverance is failing 19 times and succeeding the 20th.”~ Julie Andrews
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit.”~ Aristotle
“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
