With discipline, you are able to maintain a higher tolerance for frustration, obstacles and negative emotions. Self-discipline allows you to obtain better health, better finances and a good work ethic, and it allows you to reach your most difficult g...
Unlike Alice, Garp was a real writer —not because he wrote more beautifully than she wrote but because he knew what every artist should know: as Garp put it, 'You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.' Even if...
Art, even the art of fullest scope and widest vision, can never really show us the external world. All that it shows us is our own soul, the one world of which we have any real cognisance. And the soul itself, the soul of each one of us, is to each o...
A first impression works like a magic mirror; it reflects what intrigues us rather than echoing a truthful picture. A first impression is the creating of an imagined character, born from personal desires, perceptions, and biases. Though sparked by an...
Fiction may be about lying – on the surface, anyway – but fiction is about hiding the truth behind those lies. It's about using those lies to say something true and real. It's about showing the reader something. It's about making them feel. And h...
I believe you have to write every day–make the time. It’s about having an organized mind instead of a chaotic and untidy one. There is a myth that writers are bohemian and do what they like in their own way. Real writers are the most organized pe...
I write because I have an innate need to. I write because I can't do normal work. I write because I want to read books like the ones I write. I write because I am angry at everyone. I write because I love sitting in a room all day writing. I write be...
Pete: Crazy! No one's ever gonna believe we're a real band. Ulysses Everett McGill: No, it's gonna work. I just gotta get close enough to talk to her. Takin' off with us has got more future than marryin' a guy named Waldrip. I'm Goddamned bona fide! ...
The question is whether they can find a way out and remain what they are. To adapt themselves to real life, they borrow from each other. Christianity , which has become a church, began to talk about work, wealth, power, education, science, marriage, ...
Perhaps the perusal of such works may, without injustice, be compared with the use of opiates, baneful, when habitually and constantly resorted to, but of most blessed power in those moments of pain and of langour, when the whole head is sore, and th...
I see myself as a Scottish sky: there are rain clouds, rainbows and sunrays that run and overtake one another, mingle together and dance with each other! You see all of this within seconds of looking up! It’s a living sky, it breathes and it’s re...
A book no more contains reality than a clock contains time. A book may measure so-called reality as a clock measures so-called time; a book may create an illusion of reality as a clock creates an illusion of time; a book may be real, just as a clock ...
You can almost always find chains of coincidence to disprove magic. That's because it doesn't happen the way it does in books. It makes those chains of coincidence. That's what it is. It's like if you snapped your fingers and produced a rose but it w...
Love is a word that is overused these days, due to other lesser feelings often being mistaken for it. Infatuation, admiration, and attraction can pose as love, and can sometimes overwhelm us and fool us into thinking that we have found the real thing...
You might think of the barrier between fiction and reality as being a bit like a blood-brain barrier, which allows only some kinds of molecules to pass from the bloodstream into the brain. Emotions can easily pass from the fictional world into the re...
When Marconi suggested the possibility of wireless transmission of sound (the radio),he was committed to a mental institution. But people like Lincoln, Edison, and Marconi were strongly motivated. So they didn't give up. They somehow knew that the on...
Sometimes, I think our lifestyle has become the victim of a “World of Kinkcraft” gamer mentality, where people just want to download a cheat sheet or a step-by-step walk-through. Many newcomers yearn to "learn the rules" of the lifestyle as quick...
Can we talk real for a minute then? Do you "really" think that your problem is that you just need to gather more information and data before you start to "do" better with your commitment to yourself? Or isn't the real truth more like -> you are alrea...
Men crawl in slime and wallow in the mud; The Realist groans: "All life is mud ans slime!" Men lie and steal and shed each other's blood; And Realism sees but blood and crime. Yet Right is just as real as Wrong, The mountain peak is real as the ooze,...
I'm an all-or-nothing guy. When I'm working, I work, work, work, work, work, and when I'm not, I'm the laziest sloth this planet has ever provided us.
Work out of your work. Don't work out of anybody else's work.