“The professional respects his craft. He does not consider himself superior to it. He recognizes the contributions of those who have gone before him. He apprentices himself to them.”

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.

When we see others beginning to live their authentic selves, it drives us crazy if we have not lived out our own.

The most pernicious aspect of procrastination is that it can become a habit. We don’t just put off our lives today; we put them off till our deathbed.

When we’re living as amateurs, we’re running away from our calling – meaning our work, our destiny, the obligation to become our truest and highest selves.

Defeating Resistance is like giving birth. It seems absolutely impossible until you remember that women have been pulling it off successfully, with support and without, for fifty million years.

Ignorance and arrogance are the artist’s and entrepreneur’s indispensable allies. She must be clueless enough to have no idea how difficult her enterprise is going to be and cocky enough to believe she can pull it off anyway.”

The amateur believes he must first overcome his fear; then he can do his work. The professional knows that fear can never be overcome. He knows there is no such thing as a fearless warrior or a dread-free artist.

Resistance by definition is self-sabotage.

What finally convinced me to go ahead was simply that I was so unhappy not going ahead.

The amateur tweets. The pro works.

Every sun casts a shadow, and genius’s shadow is Resistance.

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.

This man has conquered the world! What have you done?” The philosopher replied without an instant’s hesitation, “I have conquered the need to conquer the world.

A cavalryman’s horse should be smarter than he is. But the horse must never be allowed to know this.

In my experience, depth of work consists of two components. The first is recklessness; the second is discipline.

The critic hates most that which he would have done himself if he had had the guts.

I would teach children music, physics, and philosophy; but most importantly music, for the patterns in music and all the arts are the keys to learning.

Beauty perishes in life, but is immortal in art.

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.

Art is something that nobody laughs at and nobody makes any money out of is the attitude, which I would dispute.

In your light I learn how to love. In your beauty, how to make poems. You dance inside my chest where no-one sees you, but sometimes I do, and that sight becomes this art.

I don’t wish power, only art -art and passion.

Being a leader, it’s the art of trying to find the balance, the right times with each individual and what they need at that moment. It requires looking outward as opposed to looking inside.

Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.