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

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.

...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.

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

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.

Wouldn't take nothing for my journey now.

A secret is a truth, hiding behind a mouth.

Time goes you say? Ah no! Alas Time stays we go.

I had my two front teeth knocked out by a sixth grader in first grade.

Africa north of the Sahara, from a zoological point of view, is now, and has been since early Tertiary times, a part of Europe. This is true both of animals and of the races of man.

Commerce is the great civilizer.

Her friendship . . . still existed, as if it was a living, breathing thing, something that came to life the moment it happened and didn't just go away because they no longer acknowledged it.

A rich, multi-dimensional tour of Naples, most brilliant, battered, and bewildering of cities, here fixed to the page with wit and élan. Splendid.

I don't spend a lot of time feeling sorry for myself, trying to compare how many records I've sold or how much money I've made.