Ben Jonson Quotes

The only advice I can give to aspiring writers is don't do it unless you're willing to give your whole life to it. Red wine and garlic also helps.

If you want to be good at anything, you have to work hard at it. It doesn't just fall from the sky. I work every day at trying to improve my writing, and I really enjoy it. Nothing fascinates me more than putting words together, and seeing how a collection of words can produce quite a profound effect.

Writing is mainly perspiration, not inspiration.

I realized poetry's the thing that I can do 'cause I can stick at it and work with tremendous intensity.

It is a happy thing that there is no royal road to poetry. The world should know by this time that one cannot reach Parnassus except by flying thither.

Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are.

I'm always trying. Between every book, I think, 'Well now, it's time to get down to the serious stuff.'

There's nothing more special than intellect and labour that makes painting work. There's no magic there; it's information, and it's work.

If you want to write, just believe that you can, because it's about perseverance.

Inspiration is for amateurs.

What I try to do is write. I may write for two weeks ‘the cat sat on the mat, that is that, not a rat,’.... And it might be just the most boring and awful stuff. But I try. When I’m writing, I write. And then it’s as if the muse is convinced that I’m serious and says, ‘Okay. Okay. I’ll come.

Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.

Talent is extremely common. What is rare is the willingness to endure the life of the writer.

Genius is the father of a heavenly line, but the mortal mother, that is industry.

Don't loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club, and if you don't get it you will nonetheless get something that looks remarkably like it.

All makers must leave room for the acts of the spirit. But they have to work hard and carefully, and wait patiently, to deserve them.

What do you want? What are you willing to give up to get it? Writing requires you make sacrifices. Be prepared to work hard to be a writer.

Art, whatever form it takes, requires hard work, craftsmanship and creativity. As a writer, I know my grammar, cadence, the music of prose, and the art of the narrative.

Art doesn't spring from the muses alone, but from hard work.

It has taken me years of struggle, hard work and research to learn to make one simple gesture, and I know enough about the art of writing to realize that it would take as many years of concentrated effort to write one simple, beautiful sentence.

As a writer, I've always been somebody who's been productive and hustled hard.

The main thing about writing is... writing. Sitting your butt down in the chair and doing the work.

You don't know how much artists go through to make it look so easy. It's all in the practice.

You have to have heart's passion to write a novel.

You become a great writer by writing.