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 that never were and say, "Why not?" George Bernard Shaw
I have learned, that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. Henry David Thoreau
If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time. -Marcel Proust
Once you have decided that a dream is worth following the only thing left to do is to become a better writer. This is where the motivation comes in the knowledge that we all start with the same blank page. That there is nothing stopping you from putting words down on paper as beautiful as anything else ever written except your own skill.
Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret. - Matthew Arnold
Bring all your intelligence to bear on your beginning. - Elizabeth Bowen
If you have other things in your life - family, friends, good productive day work - these can interact with your writing and the sum will be all the richer. - David Brin
If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor. - Edgar Rice Burroughs
I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil. - Truman Capote
It is perfectly okay to write garbage-as long as you edit brilliantly. - C. J. Cherryh
Books aren't written, they're rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn't quite done it... - Michael Crichton
There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are. - W. Somerset Maugham
The writing life is not always easy and the best quotes about it are not those that tell us that it will be a life of great joy and never ending happiness but those that remind us that those writers that we admire have the same successes and failures that we do. That others have faced those same struggles and succeeded and because they have we know we can.