I came across the following in an old issue (Fall 2005) of the Author’s Guild Bulletin:
The late E.B. White wrote to Linda H. Davis, young author of a biography about White’s wife, Katherine White: “Advice from this elderly practioner is to forget publishers and just roll a sheet of copy paper into your machine and get lost in the project. Write about it by day, and dream about it by night.”
Practical advice is a good thing. Proverbial wisdom, on the other hand, is more difficult to apply:
If you want your dreams to come true, don’t sleep. – Yiddish proverb
If you want your eggs hatched, sit on them yourself. – Haitian proverb