Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It’s the one and only thing you have to offer.

Barbara Kingsolver (via amandaonwriting)

Screw poetry, it’s you I want, your taste, rain on you, mouth on your skin.

margaret atwood (via theartofhiding)

The other afternoon, when you fell asleep on my shoulder, I drifted off, too. But before I did, it occured to me looking around at all of your things and your work and going through years of work in my mind, that of all your work, you are still your most beautiful. The most beautiful work of all.

Patti Smith to Robert Mapplethorpe, Letters of Note (via leopoldgursky)

What she was finding also was how one book led to another, doors kept opening wherever she turned and the days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.

Alan Bennett; The Uncommon Reader (via wordpainting)

Your poetry is lonely. And yet, you write to feel less alone.

I Wrote This For You: The Infinite Distance (via kari-shma)

Let them see that their words can cut you, and you’ll never be free of the mockery. If they want to give you a name, take it, make it your own. Then they can’t hurt you with it anymore.

Tyrion Lannister, A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin

You can’t get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.

C. S. Lewis

We cannot become what we need to be by remaining what we are.

Max De Pree (via tylerknott)

I’d be smiling and chatting away, and my mind would be floating around somewhere else, like a balloon with a broken string.

Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (via jusellietokitoinkee)

(Source: quote-book)

To write something you have to risk making a fool of yourself.

Anne Rice (via pavorst)