WIST

Don’t loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club, and if you don’t get it you will nonetheless get something that looks remarkably like it.

Jack London (1876-1916) American novelist
“Getting into Print,” The Editor Magazine (1903)
Often misquoted as "You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club."

Don’t loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club, and if you don’t get it you will nonetheless get something that looks remarkably like it.

Jack London (1876-1916) American novelist
“Getting Into Print,” in J. Reeve, Practical Authorship (1905)
Full text.

I met men who invoked the name of the Prince of Peace in their diatribes against war, and who put rifles in the hands of Pinkertons with which to shoot down strikers at their own factories. I met men incoherent with indignation at the brutality of prizefighting, and who, at the same time, were parties to the adulteration of food that killed each year more babies than even red-handed Herod had killed.

Jack London (1876-1916) American novelist
“What Life Means to Me” (1906)