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." Reprinted in J. Reeve, Practical Authorship (1905).
Quotations by:
London, Jack
The very poor can always be depended upon. They never turn away the hungry. Time and again, all over the United States, have I been refused food at the big house on the hill; and always have I received food from the little shack down by the creek or marsh, with its broken windows stuffed with rags and its tired-faced mother broken with labor. Oh! you charity-mongers, go to the poor and learn, for the poor alone are the charitable. They neither give nor withhold from the excess. They have no excess. They give, and they withhold never, from what they need for themselves. A bone to the dog is not charity. Charity is the bone shared with the dog when you are just as hungry as the dog.
Jack London (1876-1916) American novelist
“My Life in the Underworld,” Cosmopolitan Magazine (May 1907)
(Source)
Republished in The Road, Part 1, ch. 1 (1907). Recalling his days as a hobo in 1892.
Age is never so old as youth would measure it.
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)