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Quotes by Writer
"I think the most productive thing to do during times of change is to be your best self, not the best version of someone else."
"Being aware of your fear is smart. Overcoming it is the mark of a successful person."
"Art is what we call...the thing an artist does.It's not the medium or the oil or the price or whether it hangs on a wall or you eat it. What matters, what makes it art, is that the person who made it overcame the resistance, ignored the voice of doubt and made something worth making. Something risky. Something human.Art is not in the ...eye of the beholder. It's in the soul of the artist."
"Leadership, on the other hand, is about creating change you believe in."
"How can you squander even one more day not taking advantage of the greatest shifts of our generation? How dare you settle for less when the world has made it so easy for you to be remarkable?"
"Every single important thing we do is something we didn't use to be good at, and in fact, might be something we used to fear."
"It's all a risk. Always. That's not true, actually. The only exception: it's a certainty that there's risk. The safer you play your plans for the future, the riskier it actually is. That's because the world is certainly, definitely, and more than possibly changing."
"When you work under the cloud of anxiety, the best strategy is to play it safe, because if (when!) it fails, you'll be blameless."
"In a crowded marketplace, fitting in is a failure. In a busy marketplace, not standing out is the same as being invisible."
"In virtually every industry the most trusted brand is also the most profitable. Frequency led to awareness, awareness to familiarity, and familiarity to trust. And trust, almost without exception, leads to profit."
"In a battle between - two ideas, the best one doesn't necessarily win. No, the idea that wins is the one with the most fearless heretic behind it."
"So sure, start with a slogan. But don't bother wasting any time on it if you're merely going for catchy. Aim for true instead."
"You need editors, not brand managers,who will push the envelope to make [a brand media property] go forward."
"Permission marketing turns strangers into friends and friends into loyal customers. It's not just about entertainment - it's about education. Permission marketing is curriculum marketing."
"If a product's future is unlikely to be remarkable - if you can't imagine a future in which people are once again fascinated by your product - it's time to realize that the game has changed. Instead of investing in a dying product, take profits and reinvest them in building something new."
"Success comes from doing the hard part. When the hard part is all you've got, you're more likely to do it. And this is precisely why it's difficult to focus. Because focusing means acknowledging that you just signed up for the hard part."
"Leaders lead when they take positions, when they connect with their tribes, and when they help the tribe connect to itself."
"How was your day? If your answer was "fine," then I don't think you were leading."
"A genius looks at something that others are stuck on and gets the world unstuck. So the question is: Have you ever done that?"
"And it turns out that tribes, not money, not factories, that can change our world, that can change politics, that can align large numbers of people. Not because you force them to do something against their will. But because they wanted to connect."
"Great work is not created for everyone. If it were, it would be average work."
"At the age of four, you were an artist. And at seven, you were a poet."
"Generally, writers descend from a lesser tribe, and whatever claim to beauty we have shows up on the printed page far more often than it does in our mirrors. Even as I writer these words I think of dozens off writers, both male and female, who make a mockery of this generalization. But comeliness among writers is rare enough to be noteworthy."
"People give me looks of pity and ask me why I want to wallow in my disconnection from a very connected world. It is simple. The world seems way too connected to me now. It seems to be ruining the lives of teenagers and bringing out the bestial cruelty in those who can hide their vileness under the mask of some idiotic pseudonym. I like to sit alone and think about things. Solitude is as precious as coin silver and it takes labor to attain it."
"I consider the two years in Beaufort when I taught high school as perhaps the happiest time of my life. My attraction to melodrama and suffering had not yet overwhelmed me, but signs of it were surfacing. No one had warned me that a teacher could fall so completely in love with his students that graduation seemed like the death of a small civilization."
"Though I've never met a teacher who was not happy in retirement, I rarely meet one who thinks that their teaching life was not a grand way to spend a human life. The unhappy ones are the young ones, those who must teach in public schools when the whole nation seems at war with the very essence of teaching."
"I've always felt a vague sense of guilt that I search for plunder and inspiration in every book or poem or story I pick up. Other people's books are treasures when stories emerge in molten ingots that a writer can shape to fit his or her own talents. Magical theft has always played an important part of my own writer's imagination."
"In our modern age, there are writers who have heaped scorn on the very idea of the primacy of story. I'd rather warm my hands on a sunlit ice floe than try to coax fire from the books they carve from glaciers."
"It's politics . . . It makes everybody stupid. When you grow up, you'll know what I mean."
"i was delighted I had offended her upholstered sensibilities."
"Here's what I love: when a great writer turns me into a Jew from Chicago, a lesbian out of South Carolina, or a black woman moving into a subway entrance in Harlem. Turn me into something else, writers of the world. Make me Muslim, heretic, hermaphrodite. Put me into a crusader's armor, a cardinal's vestments. Let me feel the pygmy's heartbeat, the queen's breast, the torturer's pleasure, the Nile's taste, or the nomad's thirst. Tell me everything that I must know. Hold nothing back."
"I have built a city from the books I've read. A good book sings a a timeless music that is heard in the choir lofts, and balconies, and theaters that thrived within that secret city inside me."
"A man's only got so many yeses inside him before he uses them all up."
"She understood the nature of sin and knew that its most volatile form was the kind that did not recognize itself."
"One can learn anything, anything at all, I thought, if provided by a gifted and passionate teacher."
"I've never had anyone's approval, so I've learned to live without it."
"The water was pure and cold and came out of the Apennines tasting like snow melted in the hands of a pretty girl."
"Do you think that Hemingway knew he was a writer at twenty years old? No, he did not. Or Fitzgerald, or Wolfe. This is a difficult concept to grasp. Hemingway didn't know he was Ernest Hemingway when he was a young man. Faulkner didn't know he was William Faulkner. But they had to take the first step. They had to call themselves writers. That is the first revolutionary act a writer has to make. It takes courage. But it's necessary"
"I prayed hard and only gradually became aware that this fierce praying was a way of finding prologue and entrance into my own writing. This came as both astonishment and relief. When I thought God had abandoned me, I discovered that He had simply given me a different voice to praise the inexhaustible beauty of the made world."
"Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear. If the writing is good, then the result seems effortless and inevitable. But when you want to say something life-changing or ineffable in a single sentence, you face both the limitations of the sentence itself and the extent of your own talent."
"I had declared in public my desire to be a writer ... I wanted to develop a curiosity that was oceanic and insatiable as well as a desire to learn and use every word in the English language that didn't sound pretentious or ditzy."
"You're going to act like a happy man. I know, I know. It's the hardest role in the world."
"In family matters you can get over anything. That's one thing you'll learn as an adult. There's a lot you have to learn which is a lot worse than that. You'd never think of forgiving a friend for some of the things your parents did to you. But with friends it's different. Friends aren't the roll of the dice."
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