Monday morning inspiration

It is not always easy to write inspired blog posts regularly. For a book blog it depends on finishing
books to have something to write about. Although there are a lot of other 'bookish' matters that you can write about, but that depends entirely on inspiration. I have spent this - once again very windy - morning to read inspirational blog posts, recommendations, inspirations, good advice and so on, to start out this week in a good way.


So, since I am stuck with three books that I have promised to review, but not yet finished, I have no reviews to share today. I have to turn to inspirational quotes from writers on how you get inspired, about the handy craft of writing and how they look at their writing career. Here are some quotes that might inspire you. I think most of them can inspire bloggers as well.

I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp. 
W. Somerset Maugham

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

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

You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write. 
Saul Bellow

If, while writing your novel, it starts "speaking" to you, don't answer back, keep it talking. 
David John Griffin

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration.
Ernest Hemingway

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.
Robert Benchley

It is perfectly okay to write garbage—as long as you edit brilliantly.
C. J. Cherryh

Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.
Henry David Thoreau

I have been successful probably because I have always realised that I knew nothing about writing and have merely tried to tell an interesting story entertainingly.
Edgar Rice Burroughs

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.
Douglas Adams

Words are a lens to focus one’s mind.
Ayn Rand

Half my life is an act of revision.
John Irving

Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It’s the one and only thing you have to offer.
Barbara Kingsolver

Emily Dickinson

And the last one, beautiful words from Emily Dickinson

A word is dead
When it is said,
Some say.
I say it just begins
to live that day.

So many things are true in the quotes above. Some seem to be able to write without any effort at all, while others use blood, sweat and tears to produce something. Saul Bellow's words struck a cord with me. I don't know about you, but when I wake up in the middle of the night, it seems that this is the time when you get your best ideas! Or, you could remember something you have forgotten which might make you sleepless for the rest of the night, which is not good.

Barbara Kingsolver's words are also very good, especially for bloggers I think. Reading a lot of other blogs, it seems the most bloggers come up with the idea that they don't know what to write about and/or are unsure what their readers want to read. Here I agree that you really have to write about things that interests yourself. It is impossible to write for everyone.

I hope you have a lot of inspiration for the blog posts this week. What do you do to get inspiration?