Eager to find some words of wisdom that might give us food for thought and fuel for our creative engines, I came across these nuggets and wanted to share them with you:

“If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed quickly, to trap them before they escape.”   Ray Bradbury

“The only obligation any artist can have is to himself. His work means nothing, otherwise.
It has no meaning.”   Truman Capote

“Two questions form the foundation of all novels: ‘What if?’ and ‘What next?’ (A third question, ‘What now?’ is one the author asks himself every 10 minutes or so; but it’s more of a cry than a question.) Every novel begins with the speculative question, What if ‘X’ happened? That’s how you start.”   Tom Clancy

“I make a very tight outline of everything I write before I write it…By writing an outline you really are writing in a way… you’re creating the structure of what you’re going to do. Once I really know what I’m going to write, I don’t find the actual writing takes that long.
Tom Wolfe

“Beginning a novel is always hard. It feels like going nowhere. I always have to write at least 100 pages that go into the trashcan before it finally begins to work.  It’s discouraging, but necessary to write those pages. I try to consider them pages -100 to zero of the novel.”
Barbara Kingsolver

“…False straining yourself to put something into a book where it doesn’t really belong, it’s not doing anybody any favors. And the reader can tell.”   Margaret Atwood

“I like to say there are three things that are required for success as a writer: talent, luck, discipline…[Discipline] is the one that you have to focus on controlling, and you just havve to hope and trust in the other two.   Michael Chabon

May these musings inspire us today as we all write on!