Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

Don't worry about trying to develop a style. Style is what you can't help doing. If you write enough, you draw enough, you'll have a style, whether you want it or not. Don't worry about whether you're "commercial". Tell your own stories, draw your own pictures. Let other people follow you.

Great writers create; writers of smaller gifts copy

When I teach writing, I have a mantra: 'Be a first-rate version of yourself, and not a second-rate version of another writer.'

I had no ghost writers for the books - I wrote every line myself.

To write a book is for all the world like humming a song—be but in tune with yourself, madam, 'tis no matter how high or how low you take it.

That's all you have to ask from yourself writing a book. That it's the best you can do and that you did it without any ego involved and that you did it for somebody else. That's the best you can do.

I can't write a book commensurate with Shakespeare, but I can write a book by me.

Books are an attempt to control something that's uncontrollable.

You have to surrender to your mediocrity, and just write. Because it's hard, really hard, to write even a crappy book. But it's better to write a book that kind of sucks rather than no book at all, as you wait around to magically become Faulkner. No one is going to write your book for you and you can't write anybody's book but your own.

You've got to concentrate on the business of entertaining and writing songs. Always think different from the next person. Don't ever do a song as you heard somebody else do it.

It has no meaning, what do you use to write, the only thing that is important is: what do you write. A machine to write a book instead of a writer is not invented yet, and probably will never be.

When I write a page that reads badly I know that it is myself who has written it. When it reads well it has come through from somewhere else.

I'm a writer who likes to be influenced.

If you copy then it is not self-expression.

There's actually nothing interesting about me except what I write.

I think that I've just kind of found my niche, if that makes sense. I still write the same, but I feel like I've found what separates me, and I always try to stay in that when I write. It took me a long time to discover that, so I try to be protective.

I thought I was clever enough to write as well as these people and I didn't realize that there is something called originality and your own voice.

As an artist, I try not to sound the same as others. Or even as myself.

A unique style comes from not being able to do things in a conventional manner. If David Byrne could have sung like Paul McCartney, he would have.

Don't be 'a writer'. Be writing.

Lena Dunham or Miranda July, those people are sort of thinking about their work in a slightly different way than I do, where their whole body is a seed of what they're creating. I can't imagine watching Miranda's movies with anybody else playing her role, she's so integral. But for me, it feels more like every story is really individual. If I thought of something else, or thought it should be my body representing it, I'd fold my body into it. But most of the time I'm writing to get something out of my body.

A good writer does not write as people write, but as he writes.

Writing a book is incredibly pleasurable, but very solitary. You have total control, but sometimes that can drive you insane.

A book, while it is being written, has an intense life of its own which you share.

You can’t learn your craft by copying me or anyone else. I hope what I do can do is in some way inspire others but I would be appalled if I thought my work was being studied as ‘the right way to do the job’. My way is just one of an infinite number of ways to do the job.