This post is for my fellow writers this morning, but I think these sentiments apply to all of the arts...

"The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always.”  - Arthur Miller

''You can’t put much on paper before you betray your secret self, try as you will to keep things civil.''
- Patricia Hampl

“Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.”  - Virginia Woolf

"All the stories I would like to write persecute me. When I am in my chamber, it seems as if they are all around me, like little devils, and while one tugs at my ear, another tweaks my nose, and each says to me, 'Sir, write me, I am beautiful.”   - Umberto Eco

"I would write ads for deodorants or labels for catsup bottles, if I had to. The miracle of turning inklings into thoughts and thoughts into words and words into metal and print and ink never palls for me."  - John Updike

“A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.” ― Gaston Bachelard

Art above: "Reverie" by János László Áldor (Hungarian, 1895-1944); "Woman Writing at a Secretaire" by James McBey (Scottish, 1883-1959); "Woman Writing" by Rupert Shephard (English, 1909-1992); "Girl Writing" by Henriette Brown (a.k.a. Mme Jules de Saulx, French, 1829-1901); "All Are But Stories, from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayam," by Edmund Dulac (French, 1882-1953); "Young Man Writing" by Jean-Louis-Ernest Messonier (French, 1815-1891); and a detail from "Girl Writing a Letter" by Johannes Vermeer (Dutch, 1632-1674).