Writing is really just a matter of writing a lot, writing consistently and having

faith that you'll continue to get better and better. Sometimes, people think th
at if they don't display great talent and have some success right away, they won
't succeed. But writing is about struggling through and learning and finding out
what it is about writing itself that you really love.
A man of ordinary talent will always be ordinary, whether he travels or not; but
a man of superior talent will go to pieces if he remains forever in the same pl
ace.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
The real writer is one who really writes. Talent is an invention like phlogiston
after the fact of fire. Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than be
ing loved.
No matter our talent, we all know in the midnight of our souls that 90 percent of
what we do is less than our best.
The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work. mile
Zola
Every artist was first an amateur. Ralph Waldo Emerson
At one time I thought the most important thing was talent. I think now that the y
oung man or the young woman must possess or teach himself, train himself,
in infinite patience, which is to try and to try and to try until it comes right
. He must train himself in ruthless intolerance. That is, to throw away anything
that is false no matter how much he might love that page or that paragraph. The
most important thing is insight, that is ... curiosity to wonder, to mull, and t
o
muse why it is that man does what he does. And if you have that, then I don't th
ink the talent makes much difference, whether you've got that or not.
[Press conference, University of Virginia, May 20, 1957] William Faulkner
Everybody is talented because everybody who is human has something to express.
Talent develops in tranquility, character in the full current of human life. Johan
n Wolfgang von Goethe
You may be able to write a novel, you may not. You will never know until you have
worked very hard indeed and written at least part of it. You will never really
know until you have written the whole of it and submitted it for publication.
Mark Twain
When we set about accounting for a Napoleon or a Shakespeare or a Raphael or a Wa
gner or an Edison or other extraordinary person, we understand that the measure
of his talent will not explain the whole result, nor even the largest part of i
t; no, it is the atmosphere in which the talent was cradled that explains; it is
the
training it received while it grew, the nurture it got from reading, study, exa
mple, the encouragement it gathered from self-recognition and recognition from t
he
outside at each stage of its development: when we know all these details, then
we know why the man was ready when his opportunity came.
Mark Twain
Discipline and constant work are the whetstones upon which the dull knife of tale
nt is honed until it becomes sharp enough, hopefully, to cut through even the to

ughest meat and gristle.

Stephen King, Danse Macabre