First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right. We must earn life once it has been awarded us. Life asks for rewards back because it has favored us with animation. (Location 59)
if he did not practice every day he would know, if he did not practice for two days, the critics would know, after three days, his audiences would know. (Location 65)
if you are writing without zest, without gusto, without love, without fun, you are only half a writer. (Location 112)
Every time you hear an echo from your Subconscious, you know yourself a little better. A small echo may start an idea. A big echo may result in a story. (Location 432)
Ten years of doing everything wrong suddenly became the right idea, the right scene, the right characters, the right day, the right creative time. I wrote the story sitting outside, with my typewriter, on the lawn. At the end of an hour the story was finished, the hair on the back of my neck was standing up, and I was in tears. I knew I had written the first really good story of my life. (Location 688)
A good idea should worry us like a dog. We should not, in turn, worry it into the grave, smother it with intellect, pontificate it into snoozing, kill it with the death of a thousand analytical slices. (Location 1095)
We all are rich and ignore the buried fact of accumulated wisdom. (Location 1203)
We think in an emergency all you’ve got to do is open the Bible or Shakespeare or Emily Dickinson, and we think, “Wow! They know all the secrets.” (Location 1330)
Beginning now you should become not its slave, which is too mean a term, but its partner. Once you are really a co-sharer of existence with your work, that word will lose its repellent aspects. (Location 1361)
Quantity gives experience. From experience alone can quality come. (Location 1425)
But work, without right thinking, is almost useless. (Location 1453)
