Don’t prepare. Begin. Our enemy is not lack of preparation. The enemy is resistance, our chattering brain producing excuses. Start before you are ready.
The professional does not wait for inspiration; he acts in anticipation of it.
I’m superstitious. I keep mum while I’m working on something.
There’s a secret that real writers know that wannabe writers don’t, and the secret is this: It’s not the writing part that’s hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write. What keeps us from sitting down is Resistance.
The amateur tweets. The pro works.
The most important thing about art is to work. Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying.
Our job in this life is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it.
Resistance cannot be seen, touched, heard, or smelled. But it can be felt.
The song we’re composing already exists in potential. Our work is to find it.
Every artist has to face his own demons and evolve his own method of working.
When we’re living as amateurs, we’re running away from our calling – meaning our work, our destiny, the obligation to become our truest and highest selves.
It’s better to be in the arena, getting stomped by the bull, than to be up in the stands or out in the parking lot.
To yield to Resistance deforms our spirit. It stunts us and makes us less than we are and were born to be.
The part we create from can’t be touched by anything our parents did, or society did. That part is unsullied, uncorrupted; soundproof, waterproof, and bulletproof. In fact, the more troubles we’ve got, the better and richer that part becomes.
Socrates demonstrated long ago, that the truly free individual is free only to the extent of his own self-mastery.
The great thing about writing about the ancient Spartans or Athenians is that so much knowledge is no longer extant that no one, except maybe a Cambridge or Oxford don, can call you out and prove you wrong.
The best and only thing that one artist can do for another is to serve as an example and an inspiration.
The professional arms himself with patience, not only to give the stars time to align in his career, but to keep himself from flaming out in each individual work.
A contemporary or near-future book is much harder because you can’t fake the facts. There are people alive who know much more than you do about the subject. You have to really have your research together – and of course no one can know everything about a topic.
He who whets his steel, whets his courage.