Nora Roberts quotes: the high-output author’s best quotes.
“If you don’t go after what you want, you’ll never have it. If you don’t ask, the answer is always no. If you don’t step forward, you’re always in the same place.”
“There’s no reward without work, no victory without effort, no battle won without risk.”
“Once you considered failure you were one step farther away from success.”
“Know what you want, work to get it, then value it once you have it.”
“Be yourself. Be true to that, to your heart. Patience. See what happens if you step back instead of bounding forward.”
“Because when you hate something, you stop doing it.”
“You have to believe in it to get it.”
“We make destiny with every turn, every choice.”
“It takes a lot of spine and stomach to make yourself into something when no one gives you a foundation.”
“You spend your life getting walked on, you learn to recognize the tread.”
“We’re all victims of what life deals out. It’s how we handle it that’s important.”
“Things have a way of falling into place.”
“Sometimes a wind comes up, blows you off course. You’re not ready for it, but if you’re lucky, you end up in a more interesting place than you’d planned.”
“When something comes easy, you usually let it go the same way.”
“Luck is luck. What we do with it determines whether it’s good or bad.”
“Grab it while you can because tomorrow could suck you dry.”
“Knowledge is a great gift, and the thirst to seek it even greater. Use what you know – head and heart – you are not made to give greater weight to one than the other.”
“When you find nothing… it means you’re eliminating what surrounds the something.”
“Fate rules. You follow the steps and you plan and you work. Then fate slips in laughing and makes fools of us. Sometimes we can trick it or out-guess it but most often it’s already written. For some it’s written in blood. That doesn’t mean we stop, but it does mean we can’t comfort ourselves with blame. It’s easier to take the blame than to admit there was nothing you could do to stop whatever happened.”
“Nothing worthwhile is ever without complications.”
“There are no dead-ends, just detours.”
“What’s the point of playing if winning isn’t the goal? Winning can be addictive.”
“We make our own choices and we’re each responsible for them. Blame and credit belong to the individual. You haven’t the right to claim either from someone else.”
“Some things in life are out of your control. You can make it a party or a tragedy.”
“Feeling too much is a hell of a lot better than feeling nothing.”
“You have to trust or you’re only living half a life.”
“People and relationships never stop being a work in progress.”
“People are as much a source of entertainment as they are a source of irritation. It keeps things balanced.”
“Magic exists. Who can doubt it, when there are rainbows and wildflowers, the music of the wind and the silence of the stars? Anyone who has loved has been touched by magic. It is such a simple and such an extraordinary part of the lives we live.”
“Love and magic have a great deal in common. They enrich the soul, delight the heart. And they both take practice.”
“My own sense of family, where I came from and what I made for myself, is an important part of my life.”
“I was educated by the nuns. Guilt and discipline – combine those and you’ll be pretty productive.”
“I never had a plan, except to write. I love what I do, and have from the beginning. Loving what you do makes it a lot easier to work, every day, to face the tough spots and heel in for the long haul. Nothing against plans; they work for some people. But for me, if I’d been planning, worrying about numbers, trying to micro-manage my career, I wouldn’t have focused on the writing. If you don’t write, you’re not read. If you’re not read, you don’t sell. So that’s my master plan, I guess.”
“When I started out I just wanted to write books. I still do. It’s the best job in the world for so many reasons. I wanted the thrill of seeing my books on the shelves in bookstores. I still do. The idea of someone reading my work, enjoying it, was just amazing – and it still is. The bar rises, and that’s a good thing. It pushes us to write smarter, write better, to dig deeper creatively. The bestseller lists, the awards, the sales or movies, they’re all really delicious icing. But the work – the stories, the books – that’s the cake. Too much icing without a really good, solid cake? It’s going to make you fat, lazy and maybe a little bit sick. It’s always about the cake first.”
“I need to write to be happy. I loved the process of writing.”
“You don’t find time to write. You make time. It’s my job.”
“You can’t edit a blank page.”
“Every writer has to figure out what works best – and often has to select and discard different tools before they find the one that fits.”
“As a writer you have to have the three D’s: drive, discipline and desire. If you’re missing any one of those three, you can have all the talent in the world, but it’s going to be really hard to get anything done.”
“The most important thing is you can’t write what you wouldn’t read for pleasure. If it doesn’t entertain you, it’s not going to entertain anyone else. It’s a mistake to analyze the market thinking you can write whatever is hot. You can’t say you’re going to write romance when you don’t even like it. You need to write what you would read if you expect anybody else to read it.”
“I don’t let myself believe in writer’s block. I feel very strongly writing is habit as much as an art or a craft. And if you write crap, you’re still writing.”
“I think writer is a word without gender, and a good writer observes, absorbs, hopefully empathizes, then translates that into character and story. You don’t have to do or be or have experienced, traveled to, but you have to imagine all of that, very well – and believe it completely during the bubble of the work.”
“What is technology? It’s another God.”
“Anything worth anything can be found in books.”
“If I don’t have 20 or 30 books right here, waiting to be read, I start jonesing. That’s my compulsion.”
“I guess money can’t buy happiness if you shop in the wrong places.”
“Half-full, half-empty, what the hell difference does it make? If there’s something in the damn glass, drink it.”
“Life is full of circles.”
“Life – you have to live it as it comes.”
“Life is never as long as we want it to be, and wasted time can never be recovered.”
“You can’t just hope for happy endings. You have to believe in them. Then do the work, take the risks.”
Betcha a Busch Light you’d like Danielle Steel quotes too.
