“I’d say what you should do is probably make all the fucking mistakes that you are capable of.”- Alan Moore

“It’s impossible to write 52 bad short stories in a year.”- Ray Bradbury

“I’m begging you, let me work!”- last words of Osamu Tezuka

“In the arts, ‘good enough’ is not good enough.” – Ursula K. Le Guin

“A day without work is a day without food.” – Zen master Hyakujo

“There are no technical, electronic, or financial limitations; one only has to work harder to improve.” – Chris Ware on comics

“Do it the hard way.” – Alfred Bester

“May the fantastic imagery of Hoffmann and Dostoevski, of Goya, Chagall and Mayakovski (the most socialist realist of all), and of many other realists and nonrealists teach us how to be truthful with the aid of the absurd and the fantastic.” – Abram Tertz, On Socialist Realism

“… if you have so earth-creeping a mind, that it cannot lift itself up to look to the sky of poetry […] thus much curse I must send you in the behalf of all poets; that while you live, you live in love, and never get favour, for lacking skill of a sonnet; and when you die, your memory die from the earth for want of an epitaph.” – Sir Philip Sidney, Defence of Poetry

“The recipe for how someone can become a good novelist can easily be given, for example, but following it presupposes qualities that we tend to overlook when we say, ‘I do not have enough talent.’ Just make a hundred or more outlines for novels, none longer than two pages, yet of such clarity that every word in them is necessary; write down anecdotes daily until you learn to find their most pregnant, effective form; be indefatigable in collecting and depicting human types and characters; above all, tell and listen to stories as often as possible, keeping a sharp eye and ear upon how they affect others who are present; travel like a landscape painter and costume designer; excerpt from the individual sciences everything that has an artistic effect when it is well represented; and finally, reflect upon the motives of human actions, scorn no instructive hints about this, and be a collector of such things day and night. Allow some ten years to go by in practicing these various things: what is then created in the workshop can even be permitted out into the light of day.But how do most people proceed? They begin not with the part, but instead with the whole. At one point, perhaps, they hit the right tone, arouse some attention, and from then on hit worse and worse notes, for good and natural reasons. Sometimes, if the reason and character to shape this sort of artistic career are lacking, fate and necessity take their place lead the future master step-by-step through all the requirements of his craft.” – Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

“You’d probably do better in law school than writing your fantasy novels.” -relative of your choice