A Dose of Inspiration

This is a scheduled post, while I enjoy a little city break in Berlin. Hope this massages your muses a little:

• In most branches of human endeavor there is said to be a right and a wrong way of doing things. In writing there can only be your way, whether you pose as an aesthete, or whether you frankly admit you write for money. - Jack Woodford
• Do not hesitate to give your hero lusts of the flesh, dark passions, impulses to evil; for these dark powers, fused with their opposites - the will to good, the moral impulses, the power of the spirit - will do to your character precisely what the opposite powers of fire and water do to the sword blade. - William Foster-Harris
• Writing is very much like bricklaying. You learn to put one brick on top of another and spread the mortar so thick. - Red Smith
• The novel of a thousand pages begins with a single scene. - James Scott Bell
• When you steal from one author it's plagiarism; if you steal from many, it's research. - Wilson Mizner
• Let your characters have their way. Let your secret life be lived. Then at your leisure, in the succeeding weeks, months or years, you let the story cool off and then, instead of rewriting, you relive it. - Ray Bradbury