What rival male has dared to ...

What rival male has dared to bugle a mating call on my turf? - P188

The cynical interpretation would be "This is unequivocal evidence that the world is a place of deep unfairness." - P192

Mind you, hard work guarantee...

Mind you, hard work guarantees nothing in realms of creativity. (Nothing guarantees anything in realms of creativity.) - P183

Do what you love to do, and do it with both seriousness and lightness. - P183

But creative living can be an amazing vocation, if you have the love and courage and persistence to see it that way. - P185

I would not trade a minute of...

I would not trade a minute of that encounter for anything. - P181

That is the Song of the Disciplined Half-Ass. - P181

˝We all spend our twenties an...

"We all spend our twenties and thirties trying so hard to be perfect, because we’re so worried about what people will think of us. Then we get into our forties and fifties, and we finally start to be free, because we decide that we don’t give a damn what anyone thinks of us. But you won’t be completely free until you reach your sixties and seventies, when you finally realize this liberating truth—nobody was ever thinking about you, anyhow." - P174

Create whatever you want to create—and let it be stupendously imperfect, because it’s exceedingly likely that nobody will even notice. And that’s awesome. - P175

"Done is better than good." - P176

General George Patton’s: "A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week." - P176

Or, to paraphrase: A good-enough novel violently written now is better than a perfect novel meticulously written never. - P176

You may want your work to be perfect, in other words; I just want mine to be finished. - P177

What you want is to cultivate...

What you want is to cultivate quite the opposite: You must learn how to become a deeply disciplined half-ass. - P166

The writer Rebecca Solnit puts it well: "So many of us believe in perfection, which ruins everything else, because the perfect is not only the enemy of the good; it’s also the enemy of the realistic, the possible, and the fun." - P166

You can hear him working through all the same questions that we all must work through in our lives: Why am I here? What have I been called to do? How am I getting in my own way? How can I best live out my destiny? - P170

Possessing a creative mind, after all, is something like having a border collie for a pet: It needs to work, or else it will cause you an outrageous amount of trouble. Give your mind a job to do, or else it will find a job to do, and you might not like the job it invents (eating the couch, digging a hole through the living room floor, biting the mailman, etc.). It has taken me years to learn this, but it does seem to be the case that if I am not actively creating something, then I am probably actively destroying something (myself, a relationship, or my own peace of mind). - P171

("If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you don’t bring forth what is within you, what you don’t bring forth will destroy you."—Gospel of Thomas.) - P172