Category: Quotes

In an interview in the February 2014 issue of The Writer magazine, interviewer Alicia Anstead asked Monica Wood, “One of the nuns who taught you as a child said explorers should have courage, goals, imagination and, finally, humility. Which of these is most important for a writer, and why?”

Monica answered: “I have a sign in my studio:  Run your own race. Some other writer will always write lovelier books, reach more readers, make more money, win more awards. the writing trade – which is full, full, full of rejections and failure – is a lifelong lesson in humility, and we are wise to take that lesson into the other arenas of our life. Writing is engaging, gratifying and often profoundly discouraging and difficult. But not as discouraging and difficult as coal mining or warfare.”

Monica Wood is the author of When We Were the Kennedys: A Memoir from Mexico, Maine, her story about growing up in the 1960s in a Catholic family in a mill town in northern New England.

Hard work got me here and only hard work will keep me here.  —   Brandon Stanton, photographer and author of Humans of New York.  Brandon is the amazing young man who founded the Humans of New York Project.

Q & A with Brandon and Lee Shearer:

Why did you start Humans of New York?

The idea for HONY came very organically from a love of photography. It wasn’t really modeled on anything. It emerged from many small evolutions rather than coming from a fully formed idea. For my first year or so of doing HONY full time, there weren’t even captions or interviews. It was just a photography blog.

What kept you going in the first months of HONY?

Obsession, really. I just truly loved doing it, and I thought the work was unique and important. Even early on, I had a lot of confidence that if I kept working, an audience would eventually develop. I didn’t expect it to be easy. I knew that I was going to have to put a ton of work into HONY before it would be fair to ask anyone to pay attention to it. I feel like one mistake new artists make is that they expect people to care about their work before they’ve really demonstrated that they care about it themselves.

How is your new fame affecting your life and work?

Obviously it’s very nice to have your work appreciated on such a large stage. I try my best not to change as HONY gets bigger. I think I’m doing a pretty good job of it. Main thing is just to remember that hard work got me here and only hard work will keep me here.

Click here for more about Brandon Stanton and the Humans of New York Project

Humans of New York on a little table in my writing room.

You can build a career as an author by playing to your strengths, following your true passion, going at your own pace and never shying away from your unique voice. — David Sedaris    Writers Digest Magazine, October 2013

 

 

What percentage of being an Olympic champion would you attribute to hard work versus natural talent?

Kristi Yamaguchi answers:

“I think it’s drive over talent for sure. I was not the quickest learner. When I was 7, my mom said, ‘You need to work harder because everyone else is learning faster than you.’ Skating taught me to have a work ethic—in order to improve, you have to put the time in.” Quote from Parade magazine, January 19, 2014.

Same with writing, right?  You know the drill . . . butt in chair.  Warm up with a freewrite, using a prompt. Then keep going. Just write.

 

“The problem, often not discovered until late in life, is that when you look for things in life like love, meaning, motivation, it implies they are sitting behind a tree or under a rock. The most successful people in life recognize, that in life they create their own love, they manufacture their own meaning, they generate their own motivation. For me, I am driven by two main philosophies, know more today about the world than I knew yesterday. And lessen the suffering of others. You’d be surprised how far that gets you. ” — Neil deGrasse Tyson.

 Neil deGrasse Tyson is an American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author, and science communicator. He is currently the Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space and a research associate in the department of astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History.