Quotes About Dedication

Work every day. No matter what has happened the day or night before, get up and bite on the nail.

You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or rather you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love.

A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.

For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

Since I had started to break down all my writing and get rid of all facility and try to make instead of describe, writing had been wonderful to do.

You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know

In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you'll dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dull and know I had to put it to the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well-oiled in the closet, but unused.

There is nothing you can do except try to write it the way that it was. So you must write each day better than you possibly can and use the sorrow that you have now to make you know how the early sorrow came. And you must always remember the things you believed because if you know them they will be there in the writing and you won't betray them. The writing is the only progress you make.

The shortest answer is doing the thing.

Have faith in the Yankees my son. Think of the great DiMaggio.

Work could cure almost anything

You're my religion. You're all I've got.

Be patient, hand, he said. I do this for you.

I'm going to stay with you. If you go to jail, we might as well both go.

Why do they have to be such damned fanatics? We chased good and we will always fight. But I hope we are not fanatics.

I don't have to be proud of it. I only have to do it well. – Thomas Hudson

There is no such thing as great writing - there is only great re-writing!

Think about after the war and when you will paint again. There are so many good ones to paint and if you paint as well as you really can and keep out of all other things and do that, it is the true thing. You can paint the sea better than anyone now if you will do it and not get mixed up in other things. Hang on good now to how you truly want to do it. You must hold hard to life to do it.

I am like a blind pig when I work.

In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dull and know I had to put it on the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well-oiled in the closet, but unused.

Writing is a hard business, but nothing makes you feel better

Scott took LITERATURE so solemnly. He never understood that it was just writing as well as you can and finishing what you start.

He talked of his work as something altogether apart from himself. There was nothing conceited or braggartly about him.

If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written. Up in that room I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about. I was trying to do this all the time I was writing, and it was good and severe discipline.