The Message Pub

What inspires you? I’m writing novels, so inspiration has become more important to me than ever. Whether you’re writing your own novel, a press release, blog post or news article, giving a speech or planning a project, your best work shines through when you’re inspired. You just know. You can feel it.

Quotes and stories can inspire you. Heroes are often inspiring. Movies, TV shows, books, pictures, and even commercials can be sources of inspiration. Many people would list religion as their number one source of inspiration. How about watching Mother Nature – waves crashing or mountains touching the sky. I seem to derive a lot of inspiration from seemingly random conversations or unexpected comments from friends, colleagues, or even strangers. Too bad you never know when a potential source of inspiration is at hand.

Some of my favorite quotes are listed below. I hope you find some of them to be inspiring; feel free to add your own.

General Quotes

“You are never given a dream without the power to make it come true.” – Anon

 “Scars remind us where we’ve been, they don’t have to dictate where we’re going.” – Steve Forbes

“You gotta put something in before you can get something out.” – Zig Ziglar

“Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goals.” – Anon

 “Whether you think you can or think you can’t – you are right.” – Henry Ford

“Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear – not absence of fear.” – Mark Twain

“Nothing is impossible to a willing heart.” – John Heywood

“All our dreams can come true – if we have the courage to pursue them.” – Walt Disney

 “You see things and you say ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were and say ‘Why not?’”—George Bernard Shaw

“When you cease to dream, you cease to live.” – Malcolm Forbes

Quotes on Writing

“There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you.” — Z.N. Hurston

“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.” — Robert Frost

“I write for the same reason I breathe – because if I didn’t, I would die.” — Isaac Asimov

“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.” — Kurt Vonnegut

“Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don’t see any.” — Orson Scott Card

“You never learn how to write a novel. You just learn how to write the novel that you’re writing.” — Gene Wolfe

 “Just keep writing. Keep reading. If you are meant to be a writer, a storyteller, it’ll work itself out. You just keep feeding it your energy, and giving it that crucial chance to work itself out. By reading and writing.” — Robin McKinley

 “We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to.” — Somerset Maugham

Why I write ~ via @esmithrakoff on Twitter:

“I do it to share my thoughts, because I can’t meet the entire world for a beer.”