You are a writer when you tell yourself you are. No one else’s opinion matters. Screw them. You are when you say you are.
The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death.
Rule of thumb: The more important a call or action is to our soul’s evolution, the Resistance we will feel toward pursuing it.
Those who will not govern themselves are condemned to find masters to govern over them.
The professional loves her work. She is invested in it wholeheartedly. But she does not forget that the work is not her.
Tomorrow morning the critic will be gone, but the writer will still be there facing the blank page. Nothing matters but that he keep working.
One thing I’ve found in any project is almost universally about three quarters of the way through – or maybe a little father, maybe seventh eighths on the way through – any project will explode.
It can pay off, being a hack. Given the depraved state of American culture, a slick dude can make millions being a hack. But even if you succeed, you lose, because you’ve sold out your Muse, and your Muse is you, the best part of yourself, where your finest and only true work comes from.
It’s one thing to lie to ourselves. It’s another thing to believe it.
Resistance really takes the shape, for me, in voices in my head telling me why I can’t do something or why I should put it off for another day, procrastinate for another day.
When we conquer our fears, we discover a boundless, bottomless, inexhaustible well of passion.
The opposite of fear is love – love of the challenge, love of the work, the pure joyous passion to take a shot at our dream and see if we can pull it off.
We must do our work for its own sake, not for fortune or attention or applause.
I had always been an enthusiastic reader of stuff about ancient Greece. I would read Herodotus and Thucydides just for fun.
Of any activity you do, ask yourself: If I were the last person on earth, would I still do it?
The artist cannot look to others to validate his efforts or his calling. If you don’t believe me, ask Van Gogh, who produced masterpiece after masterpiece and never found a buyer in his whole life.
Resistance is not a peripheral opponent. Resistance arises from within. It is self-generated and self-perpetuated. resistance is the enemy within.
The artist committing himself to his calling has volunteered for hell, whether he knows it or not. He will be dining for the duration on a diet of isolation, rejection, self-doubt, despair, ridicule, contempt, and humiliation.
In the hierarchy, the artist faces outward. Meeting someone new he asks himself, What can this person do for me? How can this person advance my standing? In the hierarchy, the artist looks up and looks down. The one place he can’t look is that place he must: within.
But nothing really clicked for me until I gave up completely on hitting the overlap and just did what I loved, even when I thought nobody else in the world would be interested.