“I wrote in the War of Art that I could divide my life neatly into two parts: before turning pro and after. After is better.”

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.

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.

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.

Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.

Art lives from constraints and dies from freedom.

Is politics nothing other than the art of deliberately lying?

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art. It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.

Art is never finished, only abandoned.

Your life is already artful-waiting, just waiting, for you to make it art.

All art is knowing when to stop.

Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.