Wise Words by Joylene M Bailey

 

In January 2023, at the very beginning of these alphabet prompts, I wrote a post entitled Advice from Admired Artists. It was a collection of writing quotes I'd gathered over the years. It seems fitting, as we near the end of the alphabet, that I gather a few more here today.

The only connecting thread in the following quotes is that each of them was spoken or written by a successful writer. At first glance, you may think that a few of them have nothing to do with writing. However, I suggest that all of these can be applied to our writing life. I hope that you will find some inspiration here and maybe even a smile or two.

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Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid.

- Frederick Buechner

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You can change someone's life in three minutes with the right song ... You can bend the course of their development, what they think is important, how vital and alive they feel.

- Bruce Springsteen

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I turn sentences around. That's my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around. Then I read the two sentences together and turn them both around. Then I lie down on my sofa and think. Then I get up and throw them out and start from the beginning.

- Philip Roth

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Do anything else rather than striving on a [work in progress]. You free your mind to make connections not otherwise made.

- Terry & Eric Fan

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The book happens in you before you start saying the words ... Any writer would say, the thing has to be done if the messenger in you tells you to do it ... And every writer, including myself, is always waiting for that messenger.

- Edna O'Brien

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No day is so bad it can't be fixed with a nap.

- Carrie Snow

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Writing is useful because it is hard. It's the effort that goes into writing a clear sentence that leads to better thinking.

- James Clear

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A writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, or because everything she does is golden. A writer is a writer because, even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway.

- Junot Diaz

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I want to see what happens if I don't give up.

- Terrie Todd

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For after all, if attentiveness should be measured in minutes and discipline measured in hours, then indomitability must be measured in years.

- Amor Towles

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I can't play bridge. I don't play tennis. all those things that people learn, and I admire, there hasn't seemed time for. But what there is time for is looking out the window.

- Alice Munro

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The earth has music for those who listen.

- Shakespeare

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People constantly make the mistake of thinking that their words on a page should be the equivalent of dress-up clothes. Completely different from everyday.

- Anna Quindlen

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I want to say small things intensely.

- W.S. diPiero

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The best thing one can do when it's raining is to let it rain.

- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

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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

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God wanted you to be perpetually valuable so He made you permanently rare.

- Christine Caine

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Always show up knocking, otherwise the door will not open.

- Kate diCamillo

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Authors are not celebrities but they're kind of often magical, eccentric humans.

- Shawna LeMay

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Perhaps that is the draw of books. To show us the way even when we think the path is too dark to see. 

- Madeline Martin

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I can be a light in someone's darkness; I can be a patch of blue sky in someone's grey day; I can be the pink surprise of one hydrangea bloom on an October morning; I can be present to my world today.

- Brenda Leyland

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All photos from Pixabay

Joy writes and collects quotes from her home in lake country, Alberta, where she lives and writes and quilts and entertains five young grandkids once in awhile, while The Cowboy and his livestock (a dog and two cats) keep the place running. Find more of her joy-infused writing at Scraps of Joy.