If you wait, all that happens is that you get older.
~ Larry McMurtry

When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, I used everything you gave me.
~ Erma Bombeck

No matter how big or soft or warm your bed, you still have to get out of it.
~ Grace Slick

"Now" is the operative word. Everything you've put in your way is just a method of putting off the hour when you could actually be doing your dream.
~ Barbara Sher

It's never too late to be what you might have been.
~ George Eliot

If you have a dream of writing, that's wishful thinking. If you have a commitment to writing, that's the way to make dreams come true.
~ Nancy Pickard

To think too long about doing a thing often becomes its undoing.
~ Eva Young

You cannot do good work if you take your mind off of work to see how the community is taking it.
~ Dorothy L. Sayers

Perfectionism is self-abuse of the highest order.
~ Anne Wilson Schaef

You can't build a reputation on what you are going to do.
~ Henry Ford

You don't need endless time and perfect conditions. Do it now. Do it today. Do it for twenty minutes and watch your heart start beating.
~ Barbara Sher

You may be disappointed if you fail, but you're doomed if you don't try.
~ Beverly Sills

All you have to do is look straight and see the road and when you see it, don't sit looking at it – walk.
~ Ayn Rand

The most effective way to do it, is to do it.
~ Toni Cade Bambara

And if not now, when?
~ The Talmud

Hope is putting faith to work when doubting would be easier.
~ Anonymous

If you're never scared or embarrassed or hurt, it means you never take any chances.
~ Julia Sorel

Yes, risk-taking is inherently failure-prone. Otherwise, it would be call sure-thing-taking.
~ Tim McMahon

Action may not always be happiness but there is no happiness without action.
~ Benjamin Disraeli

Perseverance is not a long race; it's many short races one after another.
~ Walter Elliott

By perseverance the snail reached the arc.
~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Fall seven times; stand up eight.
~ Japanese proverb

You take your material where you find it, which is in your life, at the intersection at past and present. The memory-traffic feeds into a rotary up in your head, where it goes in circles for awhile, then pretty soon imagination flows in and the traffic merges and shoots off down a thousand different streets. As a writer, all you can do is pick a street and go for a ride.
~ Tim O'Brien

When a teacher (and still dear friend) of mine in graduate school suggested I ought to be a writer, I was appalled. "I don't want to add another mediocre writer to the world," I said. She helped me (it took years of nudging) to understand that if I wasn't willing to risk mediocrity, I would never accomplish anything. There are simply no guarantees. It takes courage to lay your insides out for people to examine and sneer over. But that's the only way to give what is your unique gift to the world. I have often noted that it takes the thinnest skin in the world to be a writer; it takes the thickest to seek out publication. But both are needed - the extreme sensitivity and the hippo hide against criticism. Send your inner critic off on vacation and just write the way little children play. You can't be judge and creator at the same time.
~ Katherine Paterson's advice to writers who are paralyzed by fear of failure

Success is not the result of spontaneous combustion.  You must set yourself on fire.
~ Reggie Leach

The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.
~ Mary Heaton Vorse

Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup
~ unknown

"Success is going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm."
~ Winston Churchill

Dr. Seuss received a rejection letter for And To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street saying, "It's too different from other juvenile books on the market to warrant its selling."
~ From It Takes a Certain Type to be a Writer by Erin Barrett

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.
~ Mark Twain

Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights but you can make the whole trip that way.
~ E.L. Doctorow

Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.
~ Groucho Marx