What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters, compared to what lies within us.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, quoted in Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity, 6.

Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss it you will land among the stars.

Les Brown, motivational speaker, quoted in The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, page 123

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.

Eugene Delacroix, French Romantic artist, quoted in The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, page 73.

I’m quite imperfect at regularly updating this site, but I’ll try to avoid perfection and just do something…

Remember, your artist is a child. Find and protect that child. Learning to let yourself create is like learning to walk. The artist child must begin by crawling. … Give yourself permission to be a beginner. By being willing to be a bad artist, you have a chance to be an artist, and perhaps, over time, a very good one.

Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way, page 29-30

The artist’s language is a sensual one, a language of felt experience. When we work at our art, we dip into the well of our experience and scoop out images.

Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way, 21

• Stop telling yourself, “It’s too late.”
• Stop waiting until you make enough money to do something you’d really love.
• Stop telling yourself, “It’s just my ego” whenever you yearn for a more creative life.
• Stop telling yourself that dreams don’t matter, that they are only dreams and that you should be more sensible.
• Stop fearing that your family and friends would think you crazy.
• Stop telling yourself that creativity is a luxury and that you should be grateful for what you’ve got.

Julia Cameron, in The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity, page 7

I’ve been moving, among other things, for the few of you who check this page and have been wondering. In the coming weeks, I’m going to be reading Julia Cameron’s book. I’m going to try to let go of my fears in the process. I don’t intend to post my responses to her writing prompts on this site, but we’ll see!

“The light of genius expressed in literature does not fail with the death of the author. His galleries are still displayed for our instruction and enjoyment. But the magic key which could have opened new ones to our eager desire has gone forever. Let us, then, guard the treasures which he has bequeathed.”

Sir Winston Churchill, tribute to Rudyard Kipling, 17 November 1937, quoted in Never Give In! The Best Winston Churchill Speeches.

Whether a man writes well or ill, has much to say or little, if he cares about writing at all, he will appreciate the pleasures of composition. To sit at one’s table on a sunny morning, with four clear hours of uninterruptible security, plenty of white paper, and a Squeezer pen – that is true happiness. The complete absorption of the mind upon an agreeable occupation – what more is there than that to desire? What does it matter what happens outside? … Never mind, for four hours, at any rate, we will withdraw ourselves from a common, ill-governed and disorderly world, and with the key of fancy unlock that cupboard where all the good things of the infinite are put away.

Sir Winston Churchill, from speech entitled “The Pen: Liberator of Man and of Nations” given 17 February 1908, Author’s Club, London (quoted in Never Give In: The Best of Winston Churchill’s Speeches, selected and edited by Winston S. Churchill, page 29-30)

I started writing when I was sixteen. I’m thirty now. I get my ideas from fourteen years of thinking about it.

Markus Zusak, author of I Am the Messenger and The Book Thief, on how he gets his ideas; Q&A for Random House

One of the most helpful tools a writer has is his journals. Whenever someone asks how to become an author, I suggest keeping a journal. A journal is not a diary, where you record the weather and the engagements of the day. A journal is a notebook in which one can, hopefully be ontological. [A journal is] a place where you can unload, dump, let go. A journal is also a place in which joy gets recorded, because joy is too bright a flame in me not to burn if it doesn’t get expressed in words.

Madeleine L’Engle, A Circle of Quiet, page 197