And so, we end the month on a hopeful note.
“Whatever you want to do, if you want to be great at it, you have to love it and be able to make sacrifices for it.”
— Maya Angelou
And so, we end the month on a hopeful note.
“Whatever you want to do, if you want to be great at it, you have to love it and be able to make sacrifices for it.”
— Maya Angelou
“Writing is the act of failing at something all the time. Do it with a sense of humor, and it ain’t no big deal. Life is just about falling on stage and getting up, and that’s what writing is all about, too.”
— James McBride, The Writer, February 2014
Interviewer Stephanie Stephens: “Is there one thing in life you’d like to undo?”
Actor Jeffrey Tambor: “No, and I’ll tell you why. All merits and all mistakes produce all the colors on your palette, and the interesting thing about acting or any art is that the mistakes are as valuable as the merits. So I’ve gotten great lessons from errors in my life. You have to make mistakes.”
– Jeffrey Tambor, interviewed in Parade, May 7, 2017
(Photo by Leslie: the bridge over the Swan River, at Bigfork)
Maybe it’s because I’m working on something completely new, writing a novel without a contract for the first time in six years, that all the quotes in my collection that jump out at me are about failure. < sigh > Reading them is helpful — as was the sight of a hillside full of my favorite wildflower, the arrowleaf balsamroot. I hope the quotes are useful to you, too.
“[Successful novelists] know that success is never a sure thing and that failure is always an option. Writing is intimidating and scary, but also exciting, because the most important things we do in life involve some risk.”
– John Freeman, author of How to Read a Novelist, in The Writer, Oct 2013