Persian envoy our arrows will black out the sun... Dienekes of the Spartans..Good, then we'll fight in the shade.
Our job in this lifetime 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.
I asked what he was laughing at. I was just wondering if it was possible to get any more miserable. He chuckled darkly. I suppose if a river snake crawled up my ass and gave birth to quintuplets…
The critic hates most that which he would have done himself if he had had the guts.
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...
Once we turn pro, we're like sharks who have tasted blood, or renunciants who have glimpsed the face of God. For us, there is no finish line. No bell ends the bout. Life is the pursuit. Life is the hu...
The highest treason a crab can commit is to make a leap for the rim of the bucket.
In other words, any act that rejects immediate gratification in favor of long-term growth, health, or integrity. Or, expressed another way, any act that derives from our higher nature instead of our l...
How many pages have I produced? I don't care. Are they any good? I don't even think about it. All that matters is I've put in my time and hit it with all I've got. All that counts is that, for this da...
What we get when we turn pro is we find our power. We find our will and our voice and we find our self-respect. We become who we always were but had, until then, been afraid to embrace and live out.
Start before you're ready.
Sometimes on Wednesday I’ll read something that I wrote on Tuesday and I’ll think, This is crap. I hate it and I hate myself. Then I’ll re-read the identical passage on Thursday. To my astonishment, i...
The paradox seems to be, as Socrates demonstrated long ago, that the truly free individual is free only to the extent of his own self-mastery. While those who will not govern themselves are condemned...
For what can be more noble than to slay oneself? Not literally. Not with a blade in the guts. But to extinguish the selfish self within, that part which looks only to its own preservation, to save its...
Fundamentalism is the philosophy of the powerless, the conquered, the displaced and the dispossessed. Its spawning ground is the wreckage of political and military defeat, as Hebrew fundamentalism aro...
Each man recalls not the enemy he hated, but the champion who engaged him with such valor.
The Spartan king Agesilaus was still fighting in armor when he was eighty-two. Picasso was painting past ninety, and Henry Miller was chasing women (I'm sure Picasso was too) at eighty-nine.Once we tu...
I thought of you when I read this quote from The War of Art by Steven Pressfield, Shawn Coyne -Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resis...
The rancor I once bore recedes, supplanted by admiration and a sense even of loss at the mates we might have been and the times we might have shared.
To labor in the arts for any reason other than love is prostitution.
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