“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.”

Courage is inseparable from love and leads to what may arguably be the noblest of all warrior virtues: selflessness.

We will have to choose between the life we want for our future and the life we have left behind.

Do you love your idea? Does it feel right on instinct? Are you willing to bleed for it?

It is one thing to study war and another to live the warrior’s life.

It’s one thing to lie to ourselves. It’s another thing to believe it.

Resistance will tell you anything to keep you from doing your work.

Creative work is not a selfish act or a bid for attention on the part of the actor. It’s a gift to the world and every being in it. Don’t cheat us of your contribution. Give us what you’ve got.

We feed it [Resistance] with power by our fear of it. Master that fear and we conquer Resistance.

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

Long-term, we must begin to build our internal strengths. It isn’t just skills like computer technology. It’s the old-fashioned basics of self-reliance, self-motivation, self-reinforcement, self-discipline, self-command.

Research can become Resistance. We want to work, not prepare to work.

We fear discovering that we are more than we think we are… That we actually have the guts, the perserverance, the capacity… because, if it’s true, then we become estranged from all we know.

Never forget: This very moment, we can change our lives. There never was a moment, and never will be, when we are without the power to alter our destiny.

Be too dumb to quit and too stubborn to back off.

The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death.

If you were meant to cure cancer or write a symphony or crack cold fusion and you don’t do it, you not only hurt yourself, even destroy yourself. You hurt your children. You hurt me. You hurt the planet.

What I appreciate is acknowledging to the audience that I think they have brains.

To count – really and truly to count – a woman must have goodness or brains.

It is essential to understand our brains in some detail if we are to assess correctly our place in this vast and complicated universe we see all around us.

If I’m not writing about myself, then I sit down with people I really dig writing with and throw ’em out and see if something sticks. Their brain plus mine hopefully will make something interesting and cool and it will just snowball and we’ll have a unique song by the end of it.

The brain may take advice, but not the heart.

My two fingers on a typewriter have never connected with my brain. My hand on a pen does. A fountain pen, of course. Ball-point pens are only good for filling out forms on a plane.

Your brain has the power to modify your pain perception.

She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain.