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Staying Motivated

"Only a person with a Best Seller mind can write Best Sellers." —Aldous Huxley
 
“Even when you’re sick to death of your story, keep telling it—because no one else will.”
—William Kowalski
 
"Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way." — E. L. Doctorow
 
“What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he’s staring out the window.”
—Rudolph Erich Rascoe

“If I just write the story I set out to write, I’ve learned nothing in the writing, I’ve felt no excitement of discovery, and the reader will sense that.” —Tobias Wolff

“I always get involved with my characters. As soon as I name them I believe them.” —Ellen Gilchrist

 “The first draft of anything is shit.” —Ernest Hemingway

“I end up writing a different story than the one I started out to write, and if I don’t, it’s usually not very good.”
—Tobias Wolff

“I just write the way I write, but when I read other people’s novels, sometimes I think to myself, “Oh, I wish I were more like that.” —Zadie Smith

"A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author."
—G. K. Chesterton