We've been inspired by these inspirational quotes about writing, comedy and the creative process and we hope you are too. 

"Find out who you are, then do it on purpose" - Dolly Parton

"Will awakens enthusiasm" - I Ching, the Book of Changes

"If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh. Otherwise they'll kill you." - Oscar Wilde

"There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories." - Ursula K. LeGuin

"In humor, as in golf, the follow-through is as important as the swing." - John Lahr, New Yorker reviewer

"Sometimes when I think how good my book can be, I can hardly breathe." - Truman Capote

"Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing." - Benjamin Franklin

"If a story doesn't give you a hard-on in the first couple of scenes, throw it in the goddamned garbage." - Sam Fuller

"Your style is a function of your limitations, more than a function of your skills." - Roseanne Cash

"Free speech carries with it some freedom to listen. Life is one big road with lots of signs. So when you're riding through the ruts, don't complicate your mind. Flee from hate, mischief and jealousy. Don't bury your thoughts, put your vision to reality. Wake Up and Live!" - Bob Marley

"I can't write without a reader. It's precisely like a kiss—you can't do it alone." - John Cheever

"Nothing changes until something moves." - Albert Einstein

"If a man could mount to heaven and survey the mighty universe, his admiration of its beauties would be much diminished unless he had someone to share in his pleasure" - Cervantes

"The rhythm of your voice is the wave your inner truth surfs on." - Beth Lapides

"The heavier subjects are the ones that are most loaded with opportunity because they have the most — you know, the difference between potential and kinetic energy? — they have the most potential energy, so to delve into that gives you the largest combustion, the most interest. I don’t mean for the audience. I mean for us. Everyone here is working too hard to do stuff we don’t care about."- Jon Stewart

"My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living." - Anais Nin

"Happiness is a choice that requires effort at times." - Aeschylus

"Nothing is less real than realism. Details are confusing.Only by selecting, omitting and emphasizing do we advance to the true meaning of things" - Georgia O'Keeffe

"Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow." - Mark Twain

"I think it's funny to play the sloppiest, most humiliating moments." - Tina Fey

"Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him." - Mel Brooks

"The question isn't if you're selling sex, it's what kind of sex are you selling?" - Sting

"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." - R. Buckminster Fuller

"If you think you're boring your audience, go slower not faster." - Gustav Mahler

"The human brain is a wonderful thing. It starts working the moment you are born and never stops until you stand up to speak in public." - George Jessel

"I merely took the energy it takes to pout & wrote some blues." - Duke Ellington

"We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false, which was not accompanied by at least one laugh." - Friedrich Neitzsche, comedian and dancer?

"You can fake an orgasm, but you can't fake laughter." - Bob Dylan

"Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite." - C.S. Lewis

"There’s nothing worse than playing a really a great concert and the next day saying, ‘I’m going to do exactly the same thing.’ It always falls flat.” - Yo Yo Ma

"To have great poets, there must be great audiences." - Walt Whitman

"I suppose I have a really loose interpretation of "work," because I think that just being alive is so much work at something you don't always want to do. The machinery is always going, even when you sleep." - Andy Warhol

"Art is making something out of nothing and selling it." - Frank Zappa

"I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realizes an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past." - Virginia Woolf

"To Live Near Art Is Enough....Ask Art's Wife" - Bette Midler

"The unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means he has to stop dwelling on himself and start paying attention to the universe. Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence. When you're unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. You
get to take yourself oh so very seriously." - Tom Robbins

"If you do not tell the truth about yourself, you can not tell it about other people." - Virginia Woolf

"If the scene bores you when you read it, rest assured it *will* bore the actors, and will, then, bore the audience, and we're all going to be back in the breadline." - David Mamet

"If you want to succeed, increase your rate of failure." - Tom Watson, founder of IBM

"Don't tell jokes only the band laughs at." - Milton Berle

"Happiness is a byproduct of function, purpose, and conflict; those who seek happiness for itself seek victory without war." - William S. Burroughs

"Easy reading is damn hard writing." - Nathaniel Hawthorne

"A lot of people come to me with a great opening. I don't want a great opening. I want a great ending because with most stories you can't find a good ending." - William Wyler

"If you're writing a mystery, let it be a mystery to you too." - Joe Eszterhas

"Screenwriting is like ironing. You move forward a little bit and go back and smooth things out." - Paul Thomas Anderson

"I'm not funny. What I am is brave." - Lucille Ball

"All scripts are too long, all written scnes are too long, all dialog is too wordy." - Michael Tolkin

"One way of looking at speech is to say it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness." - Harold Pinter

"You never know how tough you are until somebody knocks you down and you decide whether you wanna get yourself up or not." - Sugar Ray Robinson

"Have a touch of cynicism, but only a touch." - Raymond Chandler

"Work is the only thing which makes life endurable to me." - Charles Darwin

"The conscious mind is the editor, and the subconscious mind is the writer. And the joy of writing, when you're writing from your subconscious, is beautiful – it's thrilling. When you're editing, which is your conscious mind, it's like torture." - Steve Martin

"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act." -George Orwell

"It is much more difficult not to be myself." - Ani DiFranco

"A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation." - Saki (H. H. Munro)

"In fact, naturalness is the greatest requisite of comedy. It must be real and true to life. People want the truth. You must give them the truth in comedy." - Charlie Chaplin

"With the possible exceptiion of the equator, everything begins somewhere." - C.S. Lewis

"I regard the piece of paper as my employer. I have to fill that piece of paper. How I feel - whether it is difficult or not, whether I I am stuck or not - is irrelevant. What the difficulties are is irrelevant. They are my problem and I will solve it." - Ayn Rand

"I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody." - Bill Cosby

"A person should set his goals as early as he can and devote all his energy and talent to getting there. With enough effort, he may achieve it. Or he may find something that is even more rewarding. But in the end, no matter what the outcome, he will know he has been alive." - Walt Disney

"What I go through in the last ten minutes before a performance I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy." - Liciano Pavarotti

"Eighty percent of success is showing up." - Woody Allen

"A lotta cats copy the Mona Lisa, but people still line up to see the original." - Louis Armstrong

"There is a right physical size for every idea." - Henry Moore

"If the writers came up dry, I would ask: anything happen in your family lately, to your wife, your kids, your partners, anything? Things that actually happened to people made the best shows." – Carl Reiner

"Waking up is the riskiest part of the day" - Franz Kafka

"It is extremely arrogant and very foolish to think that you can ever outwit your audience." - Twyla Tharp

"The story is the essential progression of incidents that occur to the hero in pursuit of his one goal." - David Mamet

"What we are looking for is Who is looking." - St. Francis of Assisi

"The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself." - James Thurber

"The trick is in what one emphasizes. We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves happy. The amount of work is the same." - Carlos Castaneda

"To this day, if you ask me how I became a writer, I cannot give you an answer. To this day, if you ask me how a book is written, I cannot answer. For long periods, if I didn't know that somehow in the past I had written a book, I would have given up." - V. S. Naipaul

"One doesn't have a sense of humor. It has you." - Larry Gelbart

"A desire to be observed, considered, esteemed, praised, beloved, and admired by his fellows is one of the earliest as well as the keenest dispositions discovered in the heart of man." - John Adams

"Never mistake motion with action." - Albert Einstein

"I write down whatever would be funny, and get as many 'whatever would' funnies in a row and find a way to make them all fit. In a relatively small period of time you want it to be, That's funny, that's funny, that's funny, that's funny." - Daniel Dumile (Rapper MF Doom)

"And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt." - Sylvia Plath

"Humor is the only test of gravity, and gravity of humor; for a subject which will not bear raillery is suspicious, and a jest which will not bear serious examination is false wit." - Aristotle

"I don't think anyone ever gets over the surprise of how differently one audience's reaction is from another." - Dick Cavett

"Any writer, and especially the talented writer, needs an audience. The more immediate that audience is the better for him because it stimulates him in his work; he gets a better view of himself." - Truman Capote

"“If there's anything I hate more than being taken seriously, it's being taken too seriously.” - Billy Wilder

"You have to kill the bad guy." - Dino De Laurentiis

"I am almost at the end of all possible effects. Everything has been done, in almost every way that it can be done. For instance: I started a new piece with a scene coming through a door. What's funny about that? I've got to get on the set and I must get a laugh as I come on. I can't wait until the middle of a reel for a laugh. It is absolutely necessary for me to start in high and keep going every moment. The people expect it. All the old funny tricks of entrance are out, because they no longer contain any element of surprise. I laid awake nights thinking out how to come through that door. I jumped out of bed at two and three in the morning, jotting down ideas. I took long walks at midnight, thinking, thinking, thinking. I shunned my friends, because they broke my concentration. And did I finally get it? I did not! After three weeks, and ten actual takes, I cut out the whole episode because the problem simply could not be solved." - Charlie Chaplin

"The highest level of creativity unfolds through play." - Albert Einstein

"No music plus bad TV equals bad mood and no pages." - Hunter S. Thompson

"It takes little talent to see what is under one's nose, a good deal of it to know in what direction to point that organ." - W.H. Auden

"When the audience comes in, it changes the temperature of what you've written." - Stephen Sondheim

"Nonsense wakes up the brain cells. And it helps develop a sense of humor, which is awfully important in this day and age." - Dr. Seuss

"It isn't what I do, but how I do it. It isn't what I say, but how I say it, and how I look when I do it and say it." - Mae West

"Small rooms or dwellings set the mind in the right path, large ones cause it to go astray." - Leonardo da Vinci

"Most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one." - Flannery O'Connor

"Perhaps it’s true that I’m very hard on myself, but that’s better than exhibiting mediocre work." - Claude Monet

"If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn." - Charlie Parker

"Your characters get angry at you if you speak about them and stop you from giving birth to them on the page in revenge. Real writers sit down and write. Wannabe writers sit around and talk." - Joe Eszterhas

"Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it." - Truman Capote

"Funny is an attitude." - Flip Wilson

"We create happiness." - Walt Disney

"Writing is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public." - Winston Churchill

"A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others." - William Faulkner

"All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know." - Ernest Hemingway

"A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us." - Franz Kafka

"“An audience is never wrong. An individual member of it may be an imbecile, but a thousand imbeciles together in the dark - that is critical genius.” - Billy Wilder

"Words are the most powerful drug used by mankind." - Rudyard Kipling

"You can't wait for inspiration, you have to go after it with a club." - Jack London

"Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money." - Moliere

"The most solid advice . . . for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep, really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive, with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell, and when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough." - William Saroyan

"If I ignore my work, I start having anxiety attacks." - Rasanne Cash

"Too much gibble-gabble. Show the action, for Chrissakes, don't describe it! It's a motion picture you're making, not a goddamned radio show. A motion picture with emotion, so let your characters speak from their hearts." - Sam Fuller

"An absolutely necessary part of a writer's equipment, almost as necessary as talent, is the ability to stand up under punishment, both the punishment the world hands out and the punishment he inflicts on himself." - Irwin Shaw

"Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing." - Ben Franklin

"If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it." - Toni Morrison

"Where words leave off, gesture begins. Don't we speak of a person being speechless with rage, dancing with impatience, setting his teeth? The final motions of the soul are speechless, animal, grotesque, or of an incomparable beauty." - Charlie Chaplin

"A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people." - Thomas Mann

"I do not like to write - I like to have written." - Gloria Steinem

"If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you." - Oscar Wilde

"The main thing is to keep yourself awake." - Margaret Atwood

"Ability is what you're capable of doing. Motivation determines what you do. Attitude determines how well you do it." - Raymond Chandler

"The wastebasket is a writer's best friend." - Isaac Bashevis Singer

"A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end... but not necessarily in that order." - Jean Luc Godard

Preston Sturges's 11 Rules for Writing a Hit Movie:
1. A Pretty girl is better than an ugly one.
2. A leg is better than an arm.
3. A bedreeom is better than a living room.
4. An arrival is better than a departure.
5. A birth is better than a death.
6. A chase is better than a chat.
7. A dog is better than a landscape.
8. A kitten is better than a dog.
9. A baby is better than a kitten.
10. A kiss is better than a baby.
11. A pratfall is better than anything.

“Unless you're ashamed of yourself now and then, you're not honest.” - William Faulkner

"Attitude is more important than the past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than what people do or say. It is more important than appearance, giftedness, or skill" - W.C. Fields

"If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry." - Emily Dickinson

"Creativity is that marvelous capacity to grasp mutually distinct realities and draw a spark from their juxtaposition." - Max Ernst

"Talent is like the marksman who hits a target which others cannot reach; genuis is like the marksman who hits a target which others cannot even see." - Arthur Schopenhauer

"A hunch is creativity trying to tell you something." Frank Capra

"Nothing changes until something moves." - Albert Einstein

"The Queen dies, then the King dies is a plot. The Queen dies, then the King dies of a broken heart is a narrative." - E.M. Forster

"There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you." - Maya Angelou

"The four great motives for writing prose are sheer egoism, esthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose." - George Orwell

"The writer's first job is not to have opinions but to tell the truth... and refuse to be an accomplice of lies and misinformation." - Susan Sontag

"A disciplined eye and a wild mind." - Dorothy Parker defines humor

"I shut my eyes in order to see." - Paul Gauguin

"The ideal attitude is to be physically loose and mentally tight." - Arthur Ashe

"There are some books that refuse to be written. They stand their ground year after year and will not be persuaded. It isn't because the book is not there and worth being written – it is only because the right form of the story does not present itself." - Mark Twain

"Nobody can be exactly like me. Even I have trouble doing it." - Tallulah Bankhead

"You must be ready to piss blood in order to find the right tone" - Jean Malaquais

"If you told me to write a love song tonight, I'd have a lot of trouble. But if you tell me to write a love song about a girl with a red dress who goes into a bar and is on her fifth martini and is falling off her chair, that's a lot easier, and it makes me free to say anything I want." - Stephen Sondheim

"I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil." - Truman Capote

"Worry is the Devil. But don't worry about it or the Devil wins." - Beth Lapides

"It is the first line that gives the inspiration and then it's like riding a bull. Either you just stick with it, or you don't." - Bob Dylan

"A picture is worth a thousand words." - Napoleon Bonaparte

“Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory.” - Tennessee Williams

"The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt." - Sylvia Plath

"The only honest art form is laughter, comedy. You can't fake it... try to fake three laughs in an hour - ha ha ha ha ha - they'll take you away, man. You can't." - Lenny Bruce

"The beauty of the soul shines out when a man bears with composure one heavy mischance after another,  not because he does not feel them, but because he is a man of high and heroic temper." - Aristotle

"I laugh to keep myself from going mad." - Voltaire

"If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There's no point in being a damn fool about it" - W.C. Fields

"Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot." - Charlie Chaplin

"Wanting to be someone else is a waste of the person you are." - Kurt Cobain

"Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered pre-existing world. The writer’s job is to use the tools in his or her toolbox to get as much of each one out of the ground intact as possible. Sometimes the fossil you uncover is small; a seashell. Sometimes it’s enormous, a Tyrannosaurus Rex with all those gigantic ribs and grinning teeth. Either way, short story or thousand page whopper of a novel, the techniques of excavation remain basically the same" - Stephen King

"How often I found where I should be going only by setting out for somewhere else" - R. Buckminster Fuller

"Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm." - Winston Churchill

"From the living fountain of instinct flows everything that is creative; hence the unconscious is not merely conditioned by history, but is the very source of the creative impulse." - Carl Jung

"No beginner should write without an outline. Most writing problems - the psychological barriers, setbacks, discouragements - come from the absence of a proper outline... But while you are writing, do not act as an editor at the same time. Do not be self-conscious while writing. When you begin to write your first draft, let the words come automatically. Do not think over your sentences in advance and do not censor yourself." - Ayn Rand

"The easiest thing to do on earth is not write."- William Goldman

"The difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between the lightning and the lightning-bug.” - Mark Twain

"If you are in difficulties with a book, try the element of surprise – attack it at an hour when it isn't expecting it." - H.G. Wells

"You grow up the day you have your first real laugh at yourself." - Ethel Berrymore

"A healthy attitude is contagious but don't wait to catch it from others. Be a carrier." - Tom Stoppard

"We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don't like?" - Jean Cocteau

"If you're going through hell, keep going." - Winston Churchill

"You have to write badly in order to write well." - William Faulkner

"The Four Levels of Comedy: Make your friends laugh, Make strangers laugh, Get paid to make strangers laugh, and Make people talk like you because it's so much fun." - Jerry Seinfeld

"The artist must train not only his eye but also his soul." - Wassily Kandinsky

"Nothing is more difficult than to become comfortable writing about yourself in the first person." - Norman Mailer

"I try to avoid looking forward or backward, and try to keep looking upward." - Charlotte Bronte

"This life is a hospital where every patient is possessed with the desire to change beds." - Charles Beaudelaire

"Writing is turning one's worst moments into money" - J.P. Donleavy

"If you want to make an audience laugh, you dress a man up like an old lady and push her down the stairs. If you want to make comedy writers laugh, you push an actual old lady down the stairs." - Tina Fey

"I never got a job I didn't create for myself." - Ruth Gordon

"Ability is what you're capable of doing. Motivation determines what you do. Attitude determines how well you do it." - Raymond Chandler

"I'm coming round to the view that there's only a personal view of the world." - David Hockney

"There are some things so serious you have to laugh at them." - Niels Bohr

"There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed." - Ernest Hemingway

"In the end, everything is a gag. Laughter is the tonic, the relief, the surcease for pain." - Charlie Chaplin

"Laughter allows us to get past the fear of death." - Deepak Chopra

"If I had no sense of humor, I would long ago have committed suicide." - Mahatma Gandhi

"All humor is rooted in pain." - Richard Pryor

"Writers aren't exactly people...they're a whole lot of people trying to be one person." - F. Scott Fitzgerald

"Once a word has been allowed to escape, it cannot be recalled." - Horace

"Writing is like giving birth to a piano sideways. Anyone who perseveres is either talented or nuts." - Flannery O'Connor

"I always say, keep a diary and some day it'll keep you." - Mae West

"I haven't failed, I've found 10,000 ways that don't work." - Thomas Edison

"Political activism is seductive because it seems to offer the possibility that one can improve society, make things better, without going through the personal ordeal of rearranging one's perceptions and transforming one's self." - Tom Robbins

"Comedy is tragedy plus time." - Carol Burnett

"Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact" - William S. Burroughs

"Almost always, the creative dedicated minority has made the world better." - Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Never interrupt an enemy when he is making a mistake." - Napoleon Bonaparte

"To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else." - Emily Dickenson

"Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats." - George Orwell

"When I'm near the end of a book, I need to sleep in the same room with it." - Joan Didion

"More often than not, I've found, a rut is the consequence of sticking to tried and tested methods that don't take into account how you or the world has changed." - Twyla Tharp

"Without comedy as a defense mechanism I wouldn't be able to survive." - Garry Shandling

"Love is metaphysical gravity" - R. Buckminster Fuller

"If I had to give young writers advice, I'd say, don't listen to writers talking about writing." - Lillian Hellman

 

For more inspiration, check out our blogs at uncabaret.com and bethlapides.com. For more personalized inspiration and guidance in your creative process think about our workshop, The Comedian's Way and/or our private creative consulting.