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Emerson

Emerson: Enthusiasm

May 15, 2014

Enthusiasm is one of the most powerful engines of success. When you do a thing, do it with all your might. Put your whole soul into it. Stamp it with your own personality. Be active, be energetic, be enthusiastic and be faithful, and you will accomplish your objective. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Filed Under: Odds & Ends Tagged With: Emerson, quotes for writers

Emerson: Finish each day and be done with it

September 22, 2012

Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day, you shall begin it serenely with too high a spirit to be encumbered by your old nonsense.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Filed Under: Odds & Ends Tagged With: Emerson, quotes

Three thoughts on starting a new novel

April 24, 2011

Tomorrow is D-day: I start writing the new novel, ready or not (which is to say: not ready). Fortuitously (I hope) these three quotes cross my path. Maybe they will help. Keep in mind, in no particular order:

“The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.”

— Jonathan Franzen (via)

“I love writing, but hate starting. The page is awfully white and it says ‘You may have fooled some of the people some of the time, but those days are over, giftless. I’m not your agent and I’m not your mommy, I’m a white piece of paper, you wanna dance with me?’ And I really, really don’t. I don’t want any trouble. I’ll go peaceable-like.”

— Aaron Sorkin (via)

“So much of our time is preparation, so much is routine, and so much retrospect, that the pith of each man’s genius contracts itself to a very few hours. The history of literature — take the net result of Tiraboschi, Warton, or Schlegel — is a sum of very few ideas and of very few original tales; all the rest being variation on these.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Experience”

Filed Under: Writing Tagged With: Aaron Sorkin, Emerson, Jonathan Franzen

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