Encouragement; Or, Dear God I Want to Quit

"I can’t write a book commensurate with Shakespeare, but I can write a book by me." - Sir Walter Raleigh

"Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself." - William Faulkner

"Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way." - E.L. Doctorow

"When I write, I feel like an armless legless man with a crayon in his mouth." - Kurt Vonnegut

"Most editors are failed writers—but so are most writers." - T.S. Eliot

"Writing can give you what having a baby can give you: it can get you to start paying attention, can help you soften, can wake you up. But publishing won't do any of those things; you'll never get in that way." - Anne Lamott (Bird By Bird)

"The first draft of anything is shit." - Earnest Hemingway

And what could quite possibly be my motto for the month of November:

"Don't be afraid of your material or your past. Be afraid of wasting any more time obsessing about how you look and how people see you. Be afraid of not getting your writing done." - Anne Lamott (Bird By Bird)

Or another good one:

"You simply keep putting down one damn word after the other, as you hear them, as they come to you." - Anne Lamott (Bird By Bird)