Quotes to Help Overcome Creative Frustration

I keep a notebook on my desk of quotes I actually return to when the work isn’t working. The original post below is from years ago and was kind, hopeful, and short. I’m leaving it intact because the spirit of it is still right. Underneath, I’ve added the much bigger collection I’ve accumulated since: real attributed quotes I have personally tested in working creative crises, organized by what kind of crisis, with a brief note on each. Most “motivational quote” lists on the internet are misattributed Hemingway and recycled Pinterest fluff. The collection at the bottom is the version I would actually hand to a friend in a slump.

Skip to the bottom for the curated vault, or read straight through.

Some of the most frustrating things that people experience stem from creative projects. Artists of all kinds, especially, are never truly satisfied with what they produce. I’ve been told once that a work of art is never finished – just abandoned. And sometimes, it doesn’t matter which of the two you do. Whether you return to the piece or abandon it, you’re throwing yourself off a cliff – endless frustration from the former, and haunting from the latter. Meanwhile, you spend copious amounts of time on your piece, while others watch on and think you’re wasting your time. These ideas, though, are formed under the impression that creative projects are not worth doing. Not to sound like I’m excluding certain kinds of people, but sometimes we find it true when we say that artists understand each other better than most people. It is inevitable to feel frustrated, though, and so I step in armed with a few quotes from artists themselves, in the hopes of inspiring. Here is one from Dilbert creator Scott Adams:

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.

Another, this time from American poet Langston Hughes:

An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he might choose.

Japanese author, Haruki Murakami:

For me, writing a novel is like having a dream. Writing a novel lets me intentionally dream while I’m still awake. I can continue yesterday’s dream today, something you can’t normally do in everyday life.

And finally, from English author, Michael Morpurgo:

Encouraging young people to believe in themselves and find their own voice whether it’s through writing, drama or art is so important in giving young people a sense of self-worth.

Going through the quotes, we can get a general idea: art is an expression of the self, filled with mistakes and pitfalls, fueled by passion and pushing yourself further. So, like what the Adams quote says, being creative means making mistakes. Your creative output will be a mistake, not to everyone, certainly, but there will be people who will look at what you’ve done and say that they don’t get it. That they don’t see the value in it. It bears repeating, though, that creative ideas stem from the self, and end with the self, and creative frustration stems from – among other things – attempting to meet your own expectations while attempting to meet the projected expectations of others. Whatever you do, you will get mad, you will arrive at a point where you wouldn’t want to continue. But that’s part of life, and that’s part of the creative process. It’s an idea that this site has repeated over and over again, in several posts, over the past several weeks, but constant reminder is a wonderful thing. Creative projects exist because you feel that they have to. Creative projects must be done because you have envisioned them. The idea is brilliant, it’s in your head – it’s in the translation that the work becomes arduous, the hours long. Finally, keep in mind that it’s okay to be frustrated. It’s okay to feel like you want to give up, it’s okay to look at what you’ve written, and say, “I don’t like it.” But always keep the quotes in mind: that you have a choice in your creative output, you have the final say, it is your sandbox, it is your dream. It is the ocean for you, the one that only you can explore – sometimes, you just get stranded in the middle, sometimes you just feel hopeless because you’ve been sailing for hours but cannot see the land. So feel frustrated, but also work hard to overcome that frustration. Besides, your story won’t write itself. PS Here’s some quotes on solitude.

The Curated Quote Vault (organized by what kind of stuck you are)

The trouble with most motivational-quote roundups is that they are organized as if all creative frustration is the same frustration, when it is in fact at least six different frustrations with at least six different antidotes. The vault below is organized by what is actually wrong. Use the section that fits your week.

When you can’t even start

“First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not.”
Octavia Butler

The single most useful quote about starting that I’ve encountered. Butler is naming the dependency on inspiration as the actual problem. Habit is the answer. Build the habit. Stop waiting for the visit from the muse.

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

I have this on a Post-It above my desk. It is a brutal sentence. It is also the correct sentence. The day you don’t write is a day in the life you are not writing in. There is no separate “real life” the writing is being saved for. This is the life. Today is the day.

“You don’t start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it’s good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it.”
Octavia Butler again, in an interview

When the work feels pointless

“If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”
Toni Morrison

The Morrison quote is the cleanest answer to the question “why bother.” You bother because the specific thing you want to read does not yet exist, and the only person who can produce it is you. The pointlessness vanishes the moment you take the question seriously.

“Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”
Gustave Flaubert, in a letter to Louise Colet, 1853

The single best piece of writing-life advice ever recorded, and almost nobody quotes it because it doesn’t fit the tortured-artist fantasy. Boring infrastructure, violent work. The boredom is what produces the violence. The chaos that pretends to be the source of the creativity is, almost always, the thing that’s destroying it.

When you’re paralyzed by perfectionism

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho

The Beckett line is the most-quoted because it is structurally perfect: short enough to remember, honest enough to use. The “fail better” is doing all the work. Failure is not the obstacle to the work; failure is the medium of the work. Better failures are the actual progress markers.

“Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life.”
Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.”
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

When you’re burned out

“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light

Lorde wrote this while dying of cancer. The quote has been Pinterest-flattened in the last decade, but the original context restores it. Self-care as political act, not self-indulgence. Rest as resistance. Saying no as a creative discipline. The burnout is the system; the rest is the refusal of the system.

“Things take the time they take. Don’t worry.”
Mary Oliver

Oliver in four words. Most creative-frustration crises are crises of timing rather than crises of substance. The work is going to take what it takes. The worry adds nothing to the work. Subtract the worry. Keep the work.

When you’ve lost the why

“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.”
Ursula K. Le Guin, 2014 National Book Awards speech

Le Guin gave this speech at 84, after a working life of taking the question of why creative work matters seriously. The “art of words” is, here, not romantic flourish; it is a structural claim about the historical role of imaginative work in collapsing systems that seemed permanent. The “why” answer for working writers, in the most concrete possible form.

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
James Baldwin

“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”
Joan Didion, Why I Write

When you’re afraid of being judged

“You can either write something that has a chance of being remarkable, or you can ensure that it is safe and ordinary. Pick one.”
Seth Godin

“Be serious, be passionate, wake up.”
Susan Sontag, in advice to writers

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
Maya Angelou

When you’ve been at it for years and don’t know if it matters

“I want to make a poem that says everything I want to say. Not a poem that means something. A poem that has a meaning, and the meaning is alive, like an animal in your hand.”
Jane Hirshfield

“Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.”
Anne Sexton

“It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment?”
Vita Sackville-West, in a letter to Virginia Woolf

FAQ: how to actually use creative-frustration quotes

Why are most motivational quotes wrong (or at least unreliable)?

A substantial fraction of the most-circulated writing quotes are misattributed (the “write drunk, edit sober” one is not Hemingway; the “kill your darlings” one is most likely Quiller-Couch, not Faulkner; the “first draft of anything is shit” one has no documented source before the 1980s). They get repeated because they sound right and confirm romantic assumptions about how writers worked. The actual quotes from the actual writers (the ones above) are more useful, less neat, and almost never feature on Etsy posters.

How do I actually use these quotes when I’m in a slump?

Pick the section that matches your specific stuck-state. Read the three or four quotes in that section slowly, out loud if you can. Pick the one that hits hardest and write it on a Post-It above your workspace. Re-read it daily for the next week. The repetition matters more than the discovery; the quote does its work over time, not on first reading.

What’s the difference between using quotes for inspiration and using them for procrastination?

The difference is whether you go back to the work. If reading the quotes returns you to the desk and the page, the quotes are doing their job. If reading the quotes is itself the activity (and the desk is still empty an hour later), the quotes have become procrastination cosplay. The cure is not better quotes; the cure is closing the tab and writing the next sentence.

Are these quotes good for non-writers (artists, designers, musicians)?

Almost all of them apply across creative disciplines because the underlying frustrations (paralysis, perfectionism, burnout, lost meaning) are not medium-specific. Substitute “draw” or “compose” or “paint” for “write” wherever it appears and the quotes still work. The Octavia Butler line about habit, in particular, has been quoted to me by working musicians, painters, and software engineers; the principle is the principle regardless of the medium.

What’s one quote to remember if I forget all the others?

Octavia Butler: “First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable.” The whole working creative life is contained in those two sentences. Build the habit. The inspiration will sometimes show up to support the habit, and sometimes it won’t, and the habit is what produces the work either way.

If you found this useful, the longer essay version of this argument is over here: Inspirational Quotes on Creative Frustration (And Why Most of Them Are Lies). The companion piece on the lies that have been ruining writing motivation for decades.