MOTIVATION

Every composer knows the anguish and despair occasioned by forgetting ideas which one had no time to write down.
Hector Berlioz (1803 - 1869)

Your manuscript is both good and original, but the part that is good is not original and the part that is original is not good.
Samuel Johnson (1709 - 1784), (attributed)

Read over your compositions, and whenever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.
Samuel Johnson (1709 - 1784), from Boswell's Life of Johnson

Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.
Stephen King (1947 - ) "Everything You Need to Know about Writing Successfully - in Ten Minutes". 1988

What's another word for thesaurus?
Steven Wright (1955 - )

A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
Thomas Mann (1875 - 1955)

I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.
Truman Capote (1924 - 1984)

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832)

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.
John Steinbeck (1902 - 1968)

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.
Douglas Adams (1952 - 2001)

Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.
Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809 - 1894)

The human mind treats a new idea the same way the body treats a strange protein; it rejects it.
P.B. Medawar (1915 - 1987)

A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor.
Ring Lardner (1885 - 1933). "How to Write Short Stories"

An author spends months writing a book, and maybe puts his heart's blood into it, and then it lies about unread till the reader has nothing else in the world to do.
W. Somerset Maugham (1874 - 1965). The Razor's Edge, 1943

I am among those who think that science has great beauty. A scientist in his laboratory is not only a technician: he is also a child placed before the natural phenomena which impress him like a fairy tale.
Marie Curie (1867 - 1934)

Statistician: A man who believes figures don't lie, but admits that under analysis some of them won't stand up either.
Evan Esar (1899 - 1995)

I could prove God statistically.
George Gallup (1901 - 1984)

In mathematics you don't understand things. You get used to them.
Johann von Neumann (1903 - 1957)

I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning.
Plato (427 - 347 B.C.) The Republic

Something unknown is doing we don't know what.
Sir Arthur Eddington (1882 - 1944), comment on the Uncertainty Principle in quantum physics, 1927