Courage is inseparable from love and leads to what may arguably be the noblest of all warrior virtues: selflessness.
The last element in drama is high stakes. War, of course, is life and death – survival, not only for the story’s characters, but often for the society itself. That’s why I’m drawn to stories that are built around wars, even if they’re not technically “war stories.”
Seeking support from friends and and family is like having people gathered around at your deathbed. It’s nice, but when the ship sails, all they can do is stand on the dock waving goodbye.
To labor in the arts for any reason other than love is prostitution.
When a novelist or screenwriter is looking for a subject, the element he’s seeking is conflict. Conflict makes drama. Conflict produces great characters and memorable scenes. So war is a natural topic.
Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance.
Be too dumb to quit and too stubborn to back off.
When you’re a working writer, sooner or later friends and acquaintances will get you alone and confide that they, too, have a book in them.
Do you love your idea? Does it feel right on instinct? Are you willing to bleed for it?
A work-in-progress generates its own energy field. You, the artist or entrepreneur, are pouring love into the work; you are suffusing it with passion and intention and hope.
I believe in previous lives and the Muse – and that books and music exist before they are written and that they are propelled into material being by their own imperative to be born, via the offices of those willing servants of discipline, imagination and inspiration whom we call artists.
We will have to choose between the life we want for our future and the life we have left behind.
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.