The awakening an artist must be ruthless, not only with herself but with others.

Rule of thumb: The more important a call or action is to our soul's evolution, the Resistance we will feel toward pursuing it.

The most important thing about art is to work. Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying.

Nothing is as empowering as real-world validation, even if it's for failure.

The professional learns to recognize envy-driven criticism and to take it for what it is: the supreme compliment. The critic hates most that which he would have done himself if he had had the guts.

To yield to Resistance deforms our spirit. It stunts us and makes us less than we are and were born to be.

...she (the artist, the writer) doesn't wait for inspiration, she acts in the anticipation of its apparition.

The professional has learned that success, like happiness, comes as a by-product of work. The professional concentrates on the work and allows rewards to come or not come, whatever they like.

We must do our work for its own sake, not for fortune or attention or applause.

The sign of the amateur is overglorification of and preoccupation with the mystery. The professional shuts up. She doesn't talk about it. She does her work.

Next morning I went over to Paul’s for coffee and told him I had finished. “Good for you, ” he said without looking up. “Start the next one today.

God is light of the world.

I was sometimes jeered by black soldiers who wanted me to sing something besides country music.

Terrorists have failed in what is arguably al Qaida's most important objective - to trigger revolutions.

For things to change, you have to change.

Birds were like dinosaurs' better selves. They had short lives and long summers. We all should be so lucky as to leave behind such heirs.

Religion was their meat and their excitement, their mental food and their emotional pleasure.

Thousands and thousands of colors paint the bosom of the earth so gaily.

We learn to love our sweat, we discover our passion to move and connect it to effort, we discover both the animal in us and the power of our imagination

I do a great deal of research, especially in the apartments of tall blondes.

I sit at the piano for a couple of hours and tinker away until I get something. I am a nocturnal spirit, like an owl.