When we drug ourselves to blot out our soul's call, we are being good Americans and exemplary consumers.

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.

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

Books have their idiosyncrasies as well as people, and will not show me their full beauties unless the place and time in which they are read suits them.

The whole notion of disruption is adolescent: It assumes that after the teenagers make a mess, the adults will come and clean it up. But there are no adults. We own this mess.

You are a perfect woman, a magical blend of beauty, intelligence, and spirit. Without you, my life is nothing.

Because When you write about people, you inevitably offend--but if you write about animals, the evil do not recognize themselves but the good understand immediately.

Don't sweat the small stuff.

Do we, holding that the gods exist, deceive ourselves with insubstantial dreams and lies, while random careless chance and change alone control the world?

All good men are international. Nearly all bad men are cosmopolitan. If we are to be international we must be national.

It is undoubtedly easier to believe in absolutes, follow blindly, mouth received wisdom. But that is self-betrayal.

Spring comes: the flowers learn their colored shapes.

Africans are not as tall as northern Europeans. But Manute Vol and other sports figures in basketball and football receive a lot of press coverage.