Slay that dragon once, and he will never have power over you again.
Figure out what scares you the most and do that first.
I wrote in the War of Art that I could divide my life neatly into two parts: before turning pro and after. After is better.
We come into this world with a specific, personal destiny. We have a job to do, a calling to enact, a self to become. We are who we are from the cradle, and we’re stuck with it.
You don’t need to take a course or buy a product. All you have to do is change your mind.
It’s not the writing part that’s hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write.
Stay stupid. Follow your unconventional crazy heart.
The professional respects his craft. He does not consider himself superior to it. He recognizes the contributions of those who have gone before him. He apprentices himself to them.
It is a commonplace among artists and children at play that they’re not aware of time or solitude while they’re chasing their vision. The hours fly. The sculptress and the tree-climbing tyke both look up blinking when Mom calls, ‘Suppertime!’
Writers think in metaphors. Editors work in metaphors. A great reader reads in metaphors.
Writers think in metaphors. Editors work in metaphors. A great reader reads in metaphors. All are continually asking, “What does this represent? What does it stand for?” They are trying to take everything one level deeper. When they get to that level, they will try to go deeper again.
The athlete knows the day will never come when he wakes up pain-free. He has to play hurt.
No industry is immune and no occupation is safe. All of us need to begin to think in terms of our own inner strengths, our resilience and resourcefulness, our capacity to adapt and to rely upon ourselves and our families.
Picasso painted with passion, Mozart composed with it. A child plays with it all day long. You may think you’ve lost your passion, or that you can’t identify it, or that you have so much of it, it threatens to overwhelm you. None of these is true.
We are all warriors. Each of us struggles every day to define and defend our sense of purpose and integrity, to justify our existence on the planet and to understand, if only within our own hearts, who we are and what we believe in.
No matter how great a writer, artist, or entrepreneur, he is a mortal, he is fallible. He is not proof against Resistance. He will drop the ball; he will crash. That’s why they call it rewriting.
What finally convinced me to go ahead was simply that I was so unhappy not going ahead.
If you were meant to cure cancer or write a symphony or crack cold fusion and you don’t do it, you not only hurt yourself, even destroy yourself. You hurt your children. You hurt me. You hurt the planet.
Research can become Resistance. We want to work, not prepare to work.
Playing the game for money produces the proper professional attitude. It inculcates the lunch-pail state of mind that shows up for work despite rain or snow or dark of night and slugs it out day after day.