More Listing: Quotes to Inspire New Drafts

"There is no reason to write a book unless the process of imagining it changes one's life forever." -- Richard Manning

"Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top." -- Virginia Woolf

"Don't go through life with your eyes closed, even though you may have chosen photography as your vocation. The machine may see for you, but its eye is dead. Your eye should furnish it with life. But don't believe that all open eyes see. Seeing needs practice--just like photography itself." -- Alred Stieglitz

"The secret of seeing is, then, the pearl of great price. If I thought he could teach me to find it and keep it forever I would stagger barefoot across a hundred deserts after any lunatic at all." -- Annie Dillard

Thanks to Kevin Brockmeier for these:

“Nearly every writer has been given the advice, ‘Write what you know.’ This seems to me to rely too heavily on the narrow, limited ego and conscious mind I've already slandered. I prefer another piece of advice I have heard, ‘Write what you need to know.’” ‒‒ Susan Power

“Writers don't write from experience, though many are resistant to admit that they don't. I want to be clear about this. If you wrote from experience, you'd get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.” ‒‒ Nikki Giovanni

“If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupery

“I've never been in charge of my stories, they've always been in charge of me. As each new one has called to me, ordering me to give it voice and form and life, I've followed the advice I've shared with other writers over the years: jump off the cliff and build your wings on the way down.” ‒‒ Ray Bradbury

“Poems, even when narrative, do not resemble stories. All stories are about battles, of one kind or another, which end in victory and defeat. Everything moves toward the end, when the outcome will be known. Poems, regardless of any outcome, cross the battlefields, tending the wounded, listening to the wild monologues of the triumphant or the fearful. They bring a kind of peace. Not by anaesthesia or easy reassurance, but by the promise that what has been experienced cannot disappear as if it had never been. Yet the promise is not of a monument. (Who, still on a battlefield, wants monuments?) The promise is that language has acknowledged, has given shelter, to the experience which demanded, which cried out.” ‒‒ John Berger