Writing is a lonely business and sometimes it feels as if you are alone in a wilderness without a map. When these times comes the best solution is to turn to those who have come before you. One of the best ways to do this is to consider their words of simple advice. Often the most important thing that these words can do is to remind you that you are not alone in these frustrations. Every writer who has ever lived has faced the solitude of the writer's office at some point and wondered if he could do it.

Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old-fashioned virtues of hard, constant labor, he'll eventually make some kind of career for himself as writer. - Ray Bradbury

I have been successful probably because I have always realized that I knew nothing about writing and have merely tried to tell an interesting story entertainingly. - Edgar Rice Burroughs

Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen. - Willa Cather

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous. - Robert Benchley

Only a mediocre writer is always at his best. - Somerset Maugham

A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people - Thomas Mann

Don't get discouraged because there's a lot of mechanical work to writing...I rewrote the first part of Farewell to Arms at least fifty times. - Ernest Hemingway

Success comes to a writer as a rule, so gradually that it is always something of a shock to him to look back and realize the heights to which he has climbed. - P.G. Wodehouse

Even once you understand that it is possible to become a writer, that you have the desire and ability it is still difficult. You can often sit and wonder if it is worth it to follow a dream that may never come and will always be hard. Yet it is worth remembering that all of those writers who you admire were once in that same position. Consider what they said about following your dreams.

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined.
Henry David Thoreau

The end of wisdom is to dream high enough not to lose the dream in the seeking of it. William Faulkner

To unpathed waters, undreamed shores. William Shakespeare

It may be that those who do most, dream most. - Stephen Leacock

Some men see things as they are and say, "Why?" I dream of things

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