Mary Oliver Quotes

When you wake up, instead of checking emails on your phone, or counting your retweets, pick up a pen and scratch a few sentences into a notebook.

When I write I find a quiet place.

I have a little pocket journal. I just put the pen on the paper and just go.

I think walking is very useful, like sleeping and dreaming, as something that's important to my ability to write.

I have always kept notebooks and I go back to them over and over. They are my compost pile of ideas.

Always write your ideas down however silly or trivial they might seem. Keep a notebook with you at all times.

I've learned never to try and force words to come.

I have met so many people who say they've got a book in them, but they've never written a word. To be a writer - this may seem trite, I realize - you have to actually write.

The great fun in my life has been getting up every morning and rushing to the typewriter because some new idea has hit me.

When I write notes in my journal, I'm just trying to scribble down as much as possible. Later on, I decide whether to follow some of those first impressions or whether to abandon them.

The way you get better is putting words on the page and getting them behind you.

At the moment, I'm toying with a new idea for a book, but fully engaged with writing screenplays, so the book idea - which needs empty space in my head - is barely formed yet.

I have an ideas book at home with far more ideas than I will ever be able to write.

I mostly write on my own, walking, outside.

I write to express my thoughts, my feelings. I want people to think.

I'm addicted to creating and writing.

All I know is that I have way more stuff that I want to write about than I possibly have time to.

I keep threatening to keep a formal journal, but whenever I start one it instantly becomes an exercise in self-consciousness. Instead of a journal I manage to have dozens of notebooks with bits and pieces of stories, poems, and notes. Almost every thing I do has its beginning in a notebook of some sort, usually written on a bus or train.

I can't write unless I'm overlooking water.

If I have a writing problem, the minute I step away, there's a solution.

Fluency can be a sign that nothing is happening; fluency can actually be my signal to stop, while being in the dark from sentence to sentence is what convinces me to go on.

I often spend the majority of my time thinking and writing down notes.

Writing is a sufficiently lonely and mysterious pastime that I don't begrudge myself a talisman or two, so long as they don't become ways of distracting myself from the glum inescapability of actual work.

It is on these (20min) walks that my best ideas come to me. It is while walking that difficult clarity emerges. It is while walking that I experience a sense of well-being and connection, and it is in walking that I live most prayerfully.

When I was kid, they always used to tell me to keep notebooks. I look at my shelves now and it's just nothing but notebooks. And if I haven't gotten an idea but I have time to work, I'll pull one out and I bet there will be five or six sentences that will kick me off.