"What’s so hard about that first sentence is that you’re stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you’ve laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone."

Joan Didion (via theparisreview)

"Writing, at its best, is a lonely life."

Ernest Hemingway, Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech 1954

(Source: stoweboyd, via parislemon)

"High up in the North in the land called Svithjod, there stands a rock. It is a hundred miles high and a hundred miles wide. Once every thousand years a little bird comes to this rock to sharpen its beak. When the rock has thus been worn away, then a single day of eternity will have gone by."

Hendrik Willem Van Loon

"I’ve learned that by doing things, things get done"

Ray Bradbury (via thinknorth)

"Writing is a concentrated form of thinking."

Don DeLillo (via theparisreview)

"Writing is its own act, not its rewards, not its pitfalls—like the whale is the whale and not its metaphor."

Mary Lee Settle (via theparisreview)

"A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper."

E.B. White

"Alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life."

George Bernard Shaw

"I am not young enough to know everything."

Oscar Wilde