Ro James Quotes

With just enough of learning to misquote.

Young writers should read books past bedtime and write things down in notebooks when they are supposed to be doing something else.

When I was a kid, the punishment I disliked the most was writing sentences. My mother loved to make me record my transgressions--always a minimum of five hundred times--and she even bought special spiral notebooks for me to fill up.... No matter how many notebooks I went through, there was always another one waiting in the kitchen drawer.

There is no surer or more painful way to learn a rule than to be penalized once for breaking it.

First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you're inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won't. Habit is persistence in practice.

Many adults feel that every children's book has to teach them something.... My theory is a children's book... can be just for fun.

I wore glasses, no music, and I won - I think it was - fifth place. I got a whipping the same day. My mother whipped me for something. Destroyed my ego completely.

You sit down and you do it, and you do it, and you do it, until you have learned to do it.

The thing about writing is that if you have the impulse, you will find the time.

You can't be a writer if you don't write, it's just that simple.

Basketball is an intricate, high-speed game filled with split-second, spontaneous decisions. But that spontaneity is possible only when everyone first engages in hours of highly repetitive and structured practice--perfecting their shooting, dribbling, and passing and running plays over and over again--and agrees to play a carefully defined role on the court. This is the critical lesson of improve, too, and it is also a key to understanding a puzzle of Millennium Challenge: spontaneity isn't random.

This tree house became our galleon, our spaceship, our Fort Apache...Ours was a learning tree. Through it we learned to trust ourselves and our abilities.

Play is the royal road to childhood happiness and adult brilliance.

The purpose of discipline is not to punish, but to correct.

When I was a child, adults would tell me not to make things up, warning me of what would happen if I did. As far as I can tell so far, it seems to involve lots of foreign travel and not having to get up too early in the morning.

You learn from music, from watching great athletes at work - how disciplined they are, how they move. You learn these things by watching a shortstop at work, how he concentrates on one thing at a time. You learn from classic music, from the blues and jazz, from bluegrass. From all this, you learn how to sustain a great line without bringing in unnecessary words.

All the kids made their own git-tars. Made mine out of a box and bit of stick for a neck. Couldn't do much with it, but that's how you learn.

I won't be fining players for getting sent off.

If you want to be a writer, write. Write and write and write. If you stop, start again. Save everything that you write. If you feel blocked, write through it until you feel your creative juices flowing again. Write. Writing is what makes a writer, nothing more and nothing less.

All kids, I think, are creative, but they get it pounded out of them in school.

There is a brilliant child locked inside every student.

The very essence of success is practice.

You must write every single day of your life... You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads... may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.

Practice is the hardest part of learning, and training is the essence of transformation.

What is full of redundancy or formula is predictably boring. What is free of all structure or discipline is randomly boring. In between lies art.