Aspiring Quotes

1. "What people want to read often seems incongruous. A pair of biker-types taking away Thoughts of the Dalai Lama. People without access to instruments requesting sheet music. Aspiring poets sharing their work and then borrowing horror stories."
Author: Alan Bennett

2. "Advice? I don't have advice. Stop aspiring and start writing. If you're writing, you're a writer. Write like you're a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there's no chance for a pardon. Write like you're clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last breath, and you've got just one last thing to say, like you're a bird flying over us and you can see everything, and please, for God's sake, tell us something that will save us from ourselves. Take a deep breath and tell us your deepest, darkest secret, so we can wipe our brow and know that we're not alone. Write like you have a message from the king. Or don't. Who knows, maybe you're one of the lucky ones who doesn't have to."
Author: Alan Wilson Watts

3. "'Dial Star' is about an aspiring actress who finds the cell phone of AnnaLynne McCord and impersonates her."
Author: AnnaLynne McCord

4. "(The new boyfriend) knows I write every day for hours but has no idea that all I'm writing about is me. It seems wiser to let him think I'm an aspiring novelist instead of just an alcoholic with a year of sobriety who spends eight hours a day writing about the other 16."
Author: Augusten Burroughs

5. "Strike all the adjectives from your bio. If you take photos, you're not an 'aspiring' photographer, you're not an 'amazing' photographer either. You're a photographer. Don't get cute. Don't brag. Just state the facts."
Author: Austin Kleon

6. "Edward:Well Mortimer, ile make thee rue these words,Beseemes it thee to contradict thy king?Frownst thou thereat, aspiring Lancaster,The sworde shall plane the furrowes of thy browes,And hew these knees that now are growne so stiffe.I will have Gaveston, and you shall know,What danger tis to stand against your king.Gaveston:Well doone, Ned."
Author: Christopher Marlowe

7. "When you are aspiring to the highest place, it is honorable to reach the second or even the third rank."
Author: Cicero

8. "What I want is to live of that initial and primordial something that was what made some things reach the point of aspiring to be human."
Author: Clarice Lispector

9. "The single best piece of advice I give to aspiring writers is to always write about things that they know. I suggest that they write about people and places and events and conflicts they are familiar with. That way their writing will be real and hopefully readers will respond to it. I try to take my own advice."
Author: D. J. MacHale

10. "Operating by trial and error mostly, we've evolved a tacitly agreed upon list of the elements that make for a good fantasy. The first decision the aspiring fantasist must make is theological. King Arthur and Charlemagne were Christians. Siegfried and Sigurd the Volsung were pagans. My personal view is that pagans write better stories. When a writer is having fun, it shows, and pagans have more fun than Christians. Let's scrape Horace's Dulche et utile off the plate before we even start the banquet. We're writing for fun, not to provide moral instruction. I had much more fun with the Belgariad/Malloreon than you did, because I know where all the jokes are.All right, then, for item number one, I chose paganism. (Note that Papa Tolkien, a devout Anglo-Catholic, took the same route.)"
Author: David Eddings

11. "With my somewhat vague aspiring mind, to be imprisoned in the rude details of a most material life was often irksome."
Author: Edward Carpenter

12. "(aspiring journalist to Carl Kolchak)'Andy knows I want to be a reporter. Like you'This took me by surprise. 'Sallie, my dear, nobody wants to be a reporter like me."
Author: Elizabeth Massie

13. "Usefulness! It is not a fascinating word, and the quality is not one of which the aspiring spirit can dream o' nights, yet on the stage it is the first thing to aim at."
Author: Ellen Terry

14. "(From FORTUNE'S SON)"Philip had long ago begun drinking to excess, simply to obliterate the reality that he was half a man, living half a life. He had a title without the fortune, a wife that was no lover, and a lover, the only light in his darkened existence, who could never be his wife; thus, he drank...drink and despair had made him reckless and rash. He'd gambled and he'd lost. Sunk in self-denigration, the cycle began anew; he drank. Though aspiring for oblivion, he had only achieved piss-faced, when Lady Hastings had arrived after the race. The inevitable row had ensued, and then the world had retracted into blessed blackness."
Author: Emery Lee

15. "Summer-we all have seen-A few of us-believed-A few the more aspiringUnquestionably loves... ."
Author: Emily Dickinson

16. "Being a woman is of special interest only to aspiring male transsexuals. To actual women it is merely a good excuse not to play football."
Author: Frances Ann Lebowitz

17. "When George Plimpton asked Ernest Hemingway what the best training for an aspiring writer would be in a 1954 interview, Hem replied, "Let's say that he should go out and hang himself because he finds that writing well is impossibly difficult. Then he should be cut down without mercy and forced by his own self to write as well as he can for the rest of his life. At least he will have the story of the hanging to commence with."
Author: Hemingway Ernest

18. "Oh, trebly hooped and welded hip of power! Oh, high aspiring, rainbowed jet!—that one strives, this one jettest all in vain! In vain, oh whale, dost thou seek intercedings with yon all-quickening sun, that only calls forth life, but gives it not again. Yet dost thou, darker half, rock me with a prouder, if a darker faith All thy unnamable imminglings float beneath me here; I am buoyed by breaths of once living things, exhaled as air, but water now."
Author: Herman Melville

19. "I have a sewing machine that I adore, and I spend a lot of time sitting in front of it when I'm not working. And any excuse to paint or draw or do something artistic with my hands really gets me going. Definitely aspiring."
Author: India De Beaufort

20. "Dear Aspiring Writer, you are not ready. Stop. Put that finished story away and start another one. In a month, go back and look at the first story. RE-EDIT it. Then send it to a person you respect in the field who will be hard on you. Pray for many many many red marks. Fix them. Then put it away for two weeks. Work on something else. Finally, edit one last time. Now you are ready to sub your first work.Criticism is hard to take at first. Trust me, I've been there. But learn to think of crit marks as a knife. Each one is designed to cut away the bad and leave a scar. Scars prove you've lived, learned and walked away a winner. Any writer who tells you they don't need edits is lying. I don't care if they have 100 books out. Edits make you grow and if you aren't growing as a writer, you are dead."
Author: Inez Kelley

21. "I'm an aspiring writer.' I hate that phrase. You're either a writer or you're not."
Author: Jake Black

22. "Some of my educated Filipino friends were aspiring poets, but their aspirations were all in the direction of the United States. They had no desire to learn from the bardic tradition that continued in the barrios. Their ideal would have been to write something that would get them to Iowa, where they would study creative writing."
Author: James Fenton

23. "Bloomsbury lost Fry, in 1934, and Lytton Strachey before him, in January 1932, to early deaths. The loss of Stracheywas compounded by Carrington's suicide just two months after, in March. Another old friend, Ka Cox, died of a heart attack in 1938. But the death, in 1937, of Woolf 's nephew Julian, in the Spanish Civil War, was perhaps thebitterest blow. Vanessa found her sister her only comfort: ‘I couldn't get on at all if it weren't for you' (VWB2 203). Julian, a radical thinker and aspiring writer, campaigned all his life against war, but he had to be dissuaded by hisfamily from joining the International Brigade to fight Franco. Instead he worked as an ambulance driver, a role that did not prevent his death from shrapnel wounds. Woolf 's Three Guineas, she wrote to his mother, waswritten ‘as an argument with him"
Author: Jane Goldman

24. "I told her I'd rather talk about her, instead of listening to her drone on about the weather. Little did I know she was an aspiring meteorologist."
Author: Jarod Kintz

25. "As an artist, I'm aspiring for a Triple George—being compared to George Orwell, George Carlin, and Curious George."
Author: Jarod Kintz

26. "My ambition is as deep as your pockets. I'm an aspiring politician."
Author: Jarod Kintz

27. "But there were some things I believed in. Some things I had faith in. And faith isn't about perfect attendance to services, or how much money you put on the little plate. It isn't about going skyclad to the Holy Rites, or meditating each day upon the divine. Faith is about what you do. It's about aspiring to be better and nobler and kinder than you are. It's about making sacrifices for the good of others - even when there's not going to be anyone telling you what a hero you are."
Author: Jim Butcher

28. "The only advice I can give to aspiring writers is don't do it unless you're willing to give your whole life to it. Red wine and garlic also helps."
Author: Jim Harrison

29. "It's not easy making a living as a writer, and for many years I worked at a Waterstones in Dublin. It was a good environment for an aspiring writer, with lots of events and authors appearing."
Author: John Boyne

30. "'Shun security,' I advise aspiring novelists when they complain to me that they are stuck. 'Get disoriented. Maybe your agonizing writing block isn't agonizing enough. Your enemy is comfort.'"
Author: John Burdett

31. "Aspiring to a souffle, he achieves a pancake at which the reader saws without much appetite."
Author: John Leonard

32. "Despite its successes, in the end, philosophical thinking always falls short of its real goal. It involves both the wonder of aspiring toward the Truth and the distress of falling short of that Truth. In this way, philosophy can be characterized as wondrous distress."
Author: John Marmysz

33. "Acting is really not what I'm interested in. I'm not an aspiring actor and you should be able to tell."
Author: Keith Hernandez

34. "I would give them (aspiring writers) the oldest advice in the craft: Read and write. Read a lot. Read new authors and established ones, read people whose work is in the same vein as yours and those whose genre is totally different. You've heard of chain-smokers. Writers, especially beginners, need to be chain-readers. And lastly, write every day. Write about things that get under your skin and keep you up at night."
Author: Khaled Hosseini

35. "But she was one of those skanky skanks who looked cool. Who worked her skankedness. Who made skankdom something you'd consider aspiring to."
Author: Kristen Ashley

36. "Don't stop aspiring. Just learn to duck. . ."
Author: Leif Herrgesell

37. "Don't whine to your spouse about your daily troubles. He's had a harder day providing for you and your children. This is what you're aspiring to?"
Author: Lindsey Leavitt Going Vintage

38. "The promise of aspiration is that it is evolutionary. The human condition is such that we are always aspiring to be something more, something better, something nobler. It starts as a thought, a want, a need, or a desire and then grows and evolves with intention and direction, upward with lust and hunger. The continued drive feeds the rise."
Author: Lorii Myers

39. "The barriers are not erected which can say to aspiring talents and industry, 'Thus far and no farther.'"
Author: Ludwig Van Beethoven

40. "Newsweek never hired women as writers and only one or two female staffers were promoted to that rank no matter how talented they were...Any aspiring journalist who was interviewed for a job was told, "If you want to be a writer, go somewhere else--women don't write at Newsweek."
Author: Lynn Povich

41. "His was the profession at that era in which intellectual ability displayed itself far more than in political life; for—leaving a higher motive out of the question it offered inducements powerful enough in the almost worshipping respect of the community, to win the most aspiring ambition into its service. Even political power—as in the case of Increase Mather—was within the grasp of a successful priest."
Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne

42. "Aristotle wrote the 'Poetics' 2,400 years ago. It's really an instruction manual for aspiring filmmakers. It's as valid today as it was then."
Author: Nicholas Jarecki

43. "I would tell any aspiring designer to take the time to experience everything they can to really get a feel for what direction they want to go in. And most importantly, let your passion and your gut lead you."
Author: Prabal Gurung

44. "There are many eyes that can detect and honor the prudent and household virtues; there are many that can discern Genius on his starry track, though the mob is incapable; but when that love which is all-suffering, all-abstaining, all-aspiring, which has vowed to itself, that it will be a wretch and also a fool in this world, sooner than soil its white hands by any compliances, comes into our streets and houses, --only the pure and aspiring can know its face, and the only compliment they can pay it, is to own it."
Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson

45. "'Fight Master' is a proving ground for young, aspiring fighters who want a chance to play on a bigger stage. That's something it has in common with 'The Ultimate Fighter,' which has always been like a farm league for the UFC, a place to develop new talent."
Author: Randy Couture

46. "I tell aspiring writers that you have to find what you MUST write. When you find it, you will know, because the subject matter won't let you go. It's not enough to write simply because you think it would be neat to be published. You have to be compelled to write. If you're not, nothing else that you do matters."
Author: Rick Riordan

47. "Possibly, mrs. laird...i'd say. except he's dead, you see. well, not completely dead. he's more of a resurrected god. he judges mortal spirits and feeds the hearts of the wicked to his pet monster.oh, and he has blue skin. i'm sure he'd make quite an impression on career day, for all those students aspiring to grow up and become ancient egyptian deities"
Author: Serpent's Shadow Rick Riordan

48. "Silence is not silent. Silence speaks. It speaks most eloquently. Silence is not still. Silence leads. It leads most perfectly.Silence awakens the sleeping seeker in me.Silence enlightens the aspiring seeker in me.Silence fulfills the self-giving seeker in me."
Author: Sri Chinmoy

49. "The modern picture of the artist began to form: The poor, but free spirit, plebeian but aspiring only to be classless, to cut himself forever free from the bonds of the greedy bourgeoisie, to be whatever the fat burghers feared most, to cross the line wherever they drew it, to look at the world in a way they couldn't see, to be high, live low, stay young forever -- in short, to be the bohemian."
Author: Thomas Wolfe

50. "As an aspiring actress, having casual one-nighters, doing drugs and travelling to foreign locales at the drop of a dime was simply part of the landscape. One which Charm wholeheartedly and enthusiastically embraced. Peaches was far too familiar with Charm's wild escapade's to do more than raise an eyebrow to her casual gutter talk. One story had involved two Egyptian police officers, half a pound of weed, and if there were such a thing, one of the minor pyramids."
Author: Tirumalai S. Srivatsan

Aspiring Quotes Pictures