Dorothy Parker (quotes)

/in , /by
  • All men are the same age.
  • Trapped like a trap in a trap
  • And where does she find them?
  • Somebody was using the pencil.
  • Hell’s afloat in lover’s tears.
  • Scratch a king and find a fool!
  • People are more fun than anyone.
  • Brevity is the soul of lingerie.
  • Scratch a lover, and find a foe.
  • Writing well is the best revenge.
  • Women and elephants never forget.
  • Eternity is a ham and two people.
  • A hangover is the wrath of grapes.
  • A girl’s best friend is her mutter.
  • Hold your pen and spare your voice.
  • Vice is nice, but liquor is quicker.
  • At birth the Devil touched my tongue.
  • Love is like quicksilver in the hand.
  • I hate writing, I love having written.
  • But I don’t give up; I forget why not.
  • The House Beautiful is the play lousy.
  • People are more than fun than anybody.
  • Don’t look at me in that tone of voice.
  • Quick!! Act as if nothing has happened!
  • You can’t teach an old dogma new tricks.
  • Dear Mary: We all knew you had it in you. (on the birth of her child)
  • They sicken of the calm who know the storm.
  • Age before beauty, and pearls before swine.
  • She runs the gamut of emotions from A to B.
  • Scratch an actor and you’ll find an actress.
  • I wish, I wish I were a poisonous bacterium.
  • I’ve finally gotten to the bottom of things.
  • Sorrow is tranquility remembered in emotion.
  • If love is blind, why is lingerie so popular?
  • They tire of quiet, that have known the storm
  • I like to have a martini/Two at the very most.
  • Creativity is a wild mind and a disciplined eye.
  • Heterosexuality is not normal, it’s just common.
  • One more drink and I’d have been under the host.
  • It was written without fear and without research.
  • ridicule may be a shield, but it is not a weapon.
  • Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.
  • Civilization is coming to an end, you understand.
  • The best way to avoid a hangover is to stay drunk.
  • His voice was as intimate as the rustle of sheets.
  • A little bad taste is like a nice dash of paprika.
  • Writing is the art of applying the ass to the seat.
  • The definition of eternity is two people and a ham.
  • I can’t write five words but that I change seven.
  • People ought to be one of two things, young or dead.
  • It’s not the tragedies that kill us; it’s the messes.
  • Los Angeles: Seventy-two suburbs in search of a city.
  • Of Orson Welles: It’s like meeting God without dying.
  • Where’s the man could ease a heart Like a satin gown?
  • I wouldn’t touch a superlative again with an umbrella.
  • If you don’t have anything nice to say, come sit by me.
  • He is a writer for the ages, the ages of four to eight.
  • Three highballs, and I think I’m St. Francis of Assisi.
  • Time may be a great healer, but it’s a lousy beautician.
  • All I need is room enough to lay a hat and a few friends.
  • Where unwilling dies the rose; buds the new another year.
  • You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think.
  • Don’t feel bad when I die; I’ve been dead for a long time.
  • If I had any decency, I’d be dead. Most of my friends are.
  • I was the toast of two continents: Greenland and Australia.
  • Out in Hollywood, where the streets are paved with Goldwyn.
  • If you wear a short enough skirt, the party will come to you.
  • Take me or leave me; or, as is the usual order of things, both.
  • A liberal is a man who leaves the room before the fight starts.
  • She was pleased to have him come and never sorry to see him go.
  • My first love was Cinderella, but she ran off with another man.
  • [On hearing that President Coolidge was dead:] How can you tell?
  • Constant use had not worn ragged the fabric of their friendship.
  • I shudder at the thought of men…. I’m due to fall in love again
  • She will never win him, whose words had shown she feared to lose.
  • The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.
  • I hate almost all rich people, but I think I’d be darling at it.
  • This living, this living, this living Was never a project of mine.
  • Gratitude – the meanest and most snivelling attribute in the world.
  • Friends come and go but I wouldn’t have thought you’d be one of them
  • Salary is no object: I want only enough to keep body and soul apart.
  • They say of me, and so they should, It’s doubtful if I come to good.
  • The cleverest woman on earth is the biggest fool on earth with a man.
  • What writes worse than a Theodore Dreiser? … Two Theodore Dreisers.
  • Ducking for apples — change one letter and it’s the story of my life.
  • Four things I am wiser to know: Idleness, sorrow, a friend, and a foe.
  • [On the ringing of her doorbell or telephone:] What fresh hell is this?
  • And if my heart be scarred and burned, The safer, I, for all I learned.
  • London is satisfied, Paris is resigned, but New York is always hopeful.
  • There was a reason for the cost of those perfectly plain black dresses.
  • Hollywood is one place in the world where you can die of encouragement.
  • That woman speaks eighteen languages, and can’t say ‘No’ in any of them.
  • I don’t mind anything that’s written about me, as long as it’s not true.
  • Money cannot buy health, but I’d settle for a diamond-studded wheelchair.
  • Newton’s Fourth Law: Every action has an equal and opposite satisfaction.
  • Hollywood is the one place on earth where you could die of encouragement.
  • I don’t want to review books any more. It cuts in too much on my reading.
  • Her big heart did not, as is so sadly often the case, inhabit a big bosom.
  • Never throw mud: you can miss the target, but your hands will remain dirty.
  • The first thing I do in the morning is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue.
  • Said after she had been seriously ill: The doctors were very brave about it.
  • Art is a form of catharsis emotional release, purging, cleansing, purifying.
  • The sweeter the apple, the blacker the core. Scratch a lover and find a foe!
  • [On being told their loquacious, domineering host was ‘outspoken’:] By whom?
  • Guns aren’t lawful; nooses give; gas smells awful. So you might as well live.
  • I wanted to be cute. That’s the terrible thing. I should have had more sense.
  • Ah, clear they see and true they say That one shall weep, and one shall stray
  • I give her sadness and the gift of pain,a new moon madness and a love of rain.
  • I’m not a writer with a drinking problem, I’m a drinker with a writing problem.
  • I require only three things of a man. He must be handsome, ruthless and stupid.
  • There is entirely too much charm around, and something must be done to stop it.
  • I don’t know much about being a millionaire, but I’ll bet I’d be darling at it.
  • As I was saying to the landlord only this morning: ‘You can’t have everything’.
  • [When asked what was the inspiration for most of her work:] Need of money, dear.
  • He lies below, correct in cypress wood, And entertains the most exclusive worms.
  • Now, look, baby, ‘Union’ is spelled with 5 letters. It is not a four-letter word.
  • When you have to apologize, it is well, I suppose, to get the thing over quickly.
  • People Who Do Things exceed my endurance; God, for a man that solicits insurance!
  • Three be the things I shall never attain: Envy, content, and sufficient champagne.
  • Authors and actors and artists and such – Never know nothing, and never know much.
  • Bewildered is the fox who lives to find that grapes beyond reach can be really sour.
  • On being told of the death of former President Calvin Coolidge: How could they tell?
  • This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.
  • Most good women are hidden treasures who are only safe because nobody looks for them.
  • Four be the things I’d have been better without: love, curiosity, freckles and doubt.
  • Q: What’s the difference between an enzyme and a hormone? A: You can’t hear an enzyme.
  • Summer makes me drowsy. Autumn makes me sing. Winter’s pretty lousy, but I hate Spring.
  • She can sit up and beg, and she can give her paw ‚Äî I don’t say she will, but she can.
  • If you want to know what God thinks about money, just look at the people He gives it to.
  • Hollywood money isn’t money. It’s congealed snow, melts in your hand, and there you are.
  • The sun’s gone dim, and the moon’s gone black. For I loved him, and he didn’t love back.
  • I was always sweet, at first. Oh, it’s so easy to be sweet to people before you love them.
  • Anthologists are lazy fellows who like to spend a quiet evening at home raiding good books.
  • [On Dashiell Hammett:] … he is so hard-boiled you could roll him on the White House lawn.
  • Of course I talk to myself. I like a good speaker, and I appreciate an intelligent audience.
  • You do what you can, and you do it because you should. But all you can do is all you can do.
  • This must be a gift book. That is to say a book, which you wouldn’t take on any other terms.
  • [On Katharine Hepburn’s stage performance:] She ran the whole gamut of emotions, from A to B.
  • All I have to be thankful for in this world is that I was sitting down when my garter busted.
  • I like to think of my shining tombstone. It gives me, as you might say, something to live for.
  • When your bank account is so overdrawn that it is positively photographic, steps must be taken.
  • If all the girls attending [the Yale prom] were laid end to end, I wouldn’t be at all surprised.
  • Go to the Martin Beck Theatre and watch Katherine Hepburn run the gamut of emotions from A to B.
  • The Swiss are a neat and an industrious people, none of whom is under seventy-five years of age.
  • The only dependable law of life – everything is always worse than you thought it was going to be.
  • The only useful thing I ever learned in school was that if you spit on your eraser it erased ink.
  • Yet, as only New Yorkers know, if you can get through the twilight, you’ll live through the night.
  • Oh, both my shoes are shiny new, And pristine is my hat My dress is 1922‚Ķ My life is all like that.
  • His books are exciting and powerful and ‚Äî if I may filch the word from the booksy ones ‚Äî pulsing.
  • Genius can write on the back of old envelopes but mere talent requires the finest stationery available.
  • Love is like quicksilver in the hand. Leave the fingers open and it stays. Clutch it and it darts away.
  • [On hearing that Clare Boothe Luce was invariably kind to her inferiors:] And where does she find them?
  • It’s easier to write about those you hate ‚Äî just as it’s easier to criticize a bad play or a bad book.
  • Sometimes I think I’ll give up trying, and just go completely Russian and sit on a stove and moan all day.
  • I like to have a martini/Two at the very most/After three I’m under the table/After four I’m under my host.
  • If you looked for things to make you feel hurt and wretched and unnecessary, you were certain to find them.
  • Years are only garments, and you either wear them with style all your life, or else you go dowdy to the grave.
  • And there was that poor sucker Flaubert rolling around on his floor for three days looking for the right word.
  • There was nothing separate about her days. Like drops on the window-pane, they ran together and trickled away.
  • [On an actor who’d broken her leg in London:] Oh, how terrible. She must have done it sliding down a barrister.
  • The best way to keep children at home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant, and let the air out of the tires.
  • Now I know the things I know, and I do the things I do; and if you do not like me so, to hell, my love, with you!
  • [After she and Clare Boothe Luce met in a doorway and the latter said, ‘Age before beauty’:] Pearls before swine.
  • [To the British actor who annoyed her by repeated references to his busy ‘shedule’:] I think you’re full of skit.
  • Excuse me, everybody, I have to go to the bathroom. I really have to telephone, but I’m too embarrassed to say so.
  • I might repeat to myself . . . a list of quotations from minds profound – if I can remember any of the damn things.
  • [On being told party guests were ducking for apples:] There, but for a typographical error, is the story of my life.
  • Honesty means nothing until you are tested under circumstances where you are sure you could get away with dishonesty.
  • The affair between Margot Asquith and Margot Asquith will live as one of the prettiest love stories in all literature.
  • Travel, trouble, music, art, a kiss, a frock, a rhyme — I never said they feed my heart, but still they pass my time.
  • Some men break your heart in two, Some men fawn and flatter, Some men never look at you; And that cleans up the matter.
  • If all the young ladies who attended the Yale promenade dance were laid end to end, no one would be the least surprised.
  • If I had a shiny gun I could have a world of fun Speeding bullets through the brains Of the folks that cause me pains :)
  • Now that you’ve got me right down to it, the only thing I didn’t like about The Barrets of Wimplole Street was the play.
  • There must be a magnificent disregard of your reader, for if he cannot follow you, there is nothing you can do about it.
  • If I didn’t care for fun and such,I’d probably amount to much.But I shall stay the way I am,Because I do not give a damn.
  • Oh, seek, my love, your newer way; I’ll not be left in sorrow. So long as I have yesterday, Go take your damned tomorrow!
  • Her mind lives tidily, apart from cold and noise and pain. And bolts the door against her heart, out wailing in the rain.
  • Then if my friendships break and bend, There’s little need to cry The while I know that every foe Is faithful till I die.
  • If, with the literate, I am Impelled to try an epigram, I never seek to take the credit; We all assume that Oscar said it.
  • Drink and dance and laugh and lie, Love, the reeling midnight through, For tomorrow we shall die! (But, alas, we never do.)
  • Should they whisper false of you, Never trouble to deny; Should the words they say be true, Weep and storm and say they lie.
  • Why is it no one sent me yet one perfect limousine, do you suppose? Ah no, it’s always just my luck to get one perfect rose.
  • Every year, back comes Spring, with nasty little birds yapping their fool heads off and the ground all mucked up with plants.
  • Those who have mastered etiquette, who are entirely, impeccably right, would seem to arrive at a point of exquisite dullness.
  • …as for helping me in the outside world, the Convent taught me only that if you spit on a pencil eraser, it will erase ink.
  • Telegram to a friend who had just become a mother after a prolonged pregnancy: Good work, Mary. We all knew you had it in you.
  • Accursed from their birth they be Who seek to find monogamy, Pursuing it from bed to bed‚Äî I think they would be better dead.
  • There’s a hell of a distance between wisecracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.
  • Benchley and I had an office in the old Life magazine that was so tiny, if it were an inch smaller it would have been adultery.
  • Innocence is a desirable thing, a dainty thing, an appealing thing, in its place; but carried too far, it is merely ridiculous.
  • It is that word ‘hunny,’ my darlings, that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weader fwowed up.
  • [Completely bored by a country weekend, wiring to a friend:] For heaven’s sake, rush me a loaf of bread, enclosing saw and file.
  • Why, after all, should readers never be harrowed? Surely there is enough happiness in life without having to go to books for it.
  • For a few minutes, everything is so cute that the mind reels…. And then, believe it or not, things get worse. So I shot myself.
  • That would be a good thing for them to cut on my tombstone: Wherever she went, including here, it was against her better judgment.
  • This is me apologizing. I am a fool, a bird-brain, a liar and a horse-thief. I wouldn’t touch a superlative again with an umbrella.
  • All those writers who write about their own childhood! Gentle God, if I wrote about mine you wouldn’t sit in the same room with me.
  • I’m of the glamorous ladies At whose beckoning history shook. But you are a man, and see only my pan, So I stay at home with a book.
  • If wild my breast and sore my pride, I bask in dreams of suicide, If cool my heart and high my head I think ‘How lucky are the dead.
  • Said of her husband on the day their divorce became final: Oh, don’t worry about Alan. . . . Alan will always land on somebody’s feet.
  • [To woman bragging about having kept her husband for seven years:] Don’t worry, if you keep him long enough, he’ll come back in style.
  • My verses, I cannot say poems. . . . I was following in the exquisite footsteps of Miss Millay, unhappily in my own horrible sneakers.
  • What ever beauty may be it has for its basis order and for its essence unity Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone.
  • Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song, a medley of extemporanea, And love is a thing that can never go wrong, and I am Marie of Romania.
  • Misfortune, and recited misfortune especially, can be prolonged to the point where it ceases to excite pity and arouses only irritation.
  • It costs me never a stab nor squirm / To tread by chance upon a worm. / Aha, my little dear, / I say, Your clan will pay me back one day.
  • Because your eyes are slant and slow, Because your hair is sweet to touch, My heart is high again; but oh, I doubt if this will get me much.
  • Prince or commoner, tenor or bass, Painter or plumber or never-do-well, Do me a favor and shut your face – Poets alone should kiss and tell.
  • I know that there are things that never have been funny, and never will be. And I know that ridicule may be a shield, but it is not a weapon.
  • [On Edna Ferber’s Ice Palace] … the book, which is going to be a movie, has the plot and characters of a book which is going to be a movie.
  • [On being shown an apartment by a real estate agent:] Oh, dear, that’s much too big. All I need is room enough to lay a hat and a few friends.
  • The Monte Carlo casino refused to admit me until I was properly dressed so I went and found my stockings, and then came back and lost my shirt.
  • Maybe it is only I, but conditions are such these days, that if you use studiously correct grammar, people suspect you of homosexual tendencies.
  • My land is bare of chattering folk; / the clouds are low along the ridges, / and sweet’s the air with curly smoke / from all my burning bridges.
  • I never see that prettiest thing- A cherry bough gone white with Spring- But what I think, “How gay ‘twould be To hang me from a flowering tree.
  • Upton Sinclair is his own King Charles’ head. He cannot keep himself out of his writings, try though he may; or, by this time, try though he doesn’t.
  • By the time you swear you’re his, Shivering and sighing. And he vows his passion is, Infinite, undying. Lady make note of this — One of you is lying.
  • Gertrude Stein did us the most harm when she said, ‘You’re all a lost generation.’ That got around to certain people and we all said, ‘Whee! We’re lost.
  • Somewhere, there, is an analogy, in a small way, if you have the patience for it. But I guess it isn’t a very good anecdote. I’m better at animal stories.
  • I know that an author must be brave enough to chop away clinging tentacles of good taste for the sake of a great work. But this is no great work, you see.
  • The writer’s way is rough and lonely, and who would choose it while there are vacancies in more gracious professions, such as, say, cleaning out ferryboats?
  • I find her anecdotes more efficacious than sheep-counting, rain on a tin roof, or alanol tablets…. you will find me and Morpheus, off in a corner, necking.
  • I’d like to have money. And I’d like to be a good writer. These two can come together, and I hope they will, but if that’s too adorable, I’d rather have money.
  • It takes me six months to do a story. I think it out and then write it sentence by sentence – no first draft. I can’t write five words but that I change seven.
  • Ewing was a short woman who accepted the obligation borne by so many short women to make up in vivacity what they lack in number of inches from the ground.
  • If I should labor through daylight and dark, Consecrate, valorous, serious, true, Then on the world I may blazon my mark; And what if I don’t, and what if I do?
  • London is satisfied, Paris is resigned, but New York is always hopeful. Always it believes that something good is about to come off, and it must hurry to meet it.
  • Money was made, not to command our will, But all our lawful pleasures to fulfill. Shame and woe to us, if we our wealth obey; The horse doth with the horseman away.
  • It turns out that, at social gatherings, as a source of entertainment, conviviality, and good fun, I rank somewhere between a sprig of parsley and a single ice-skate.
  • [Hospitalized and pressing the nurse’s button before dictating letters to her secretary:] This should assure us of at least forty-five minutes of undisturbed privacy.
  • There’s life for you. Spend the best years of your life studying penmanship and rhetoric and syntax and Beowulf and George Eliot, and then somebody steals your pencil.
  • I know this will come as a shock to you, Mr. Goldwyn, but in all history, which has held billions and billions of human beings, not a single one ever had a happy ending.
  • Well, there are always those who cannot distinguish between glitter and glamour . . . the glamour of Isadora Duncan came from her great, torn, bewildered, foolhardy soul.
  • [From a window in the Writer’s Building at MGM, which overlooked a cemetery:] Hello down there. It might interest you to know that up here we are just as dead as you are.
  • We were all imitative. We all wandered in after Miss Edna St. Vincent Millay. We were all being dashing and gallant, declaring we weren’t virgins, whether we were or not.
  • All I say is, nobody has any business to go around looking like a horse and behaving as if it were all right. You don’t catch horses going around looking like people, do you?
  • … if this world were anything near what it should be there would be no more need of a Book Week than there would be a of a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.
  • I like best to have one book in my hand, and a stack of others on the floor beside me, so as to know the supply of poppy and mandragora will not run out before the small hours.
  • [At the reception following her remarriage to Alan Campbell:] People who haven’t talked to each other in years are on speaking terms again today – including the bride and groom.
  • Nevil Shute’s On the Beach is no Christmas carol, but it seems to me a remarkably fine novel, one which I read, in the peculiarly repulsive phrase, with my eyes glued to the page.
  • A list of authors who have made themselves most beloved and therefore, most comfortable financially, shows that it is our national joy to mistake for the first-rate, the fecund rate.
  • Men don’t like nobility in woman. Not any men. I suppose it is because the men like to have the copyrights on nobility — if there is going to be anything like that in a relationship.
  • Despite his persecutions, Mr. [Upton] Sinclair reveals himself in Money Writes! to be an enviable man. Always the thing he desires to believe is the thing he feels he knows to be true.
  • Be you wise and never sad, You will get your lovely lad. Never serious be, nor true, And your wish will come to you– And if that makes you happy, kid, You’ll be the first it ever did.
  • It may be that this autobiography [Aimee Semple McPherson’s] is set down in sincerity, frankness, and simple effort. It may be, too, that the Statue of Liberty is situated in Lake Ontario.
  • Yes, well, let me tell you that if nobody had ever learned to quote, very few people would be in love with La Rochefoucauld. I bet you I don’t know ten souls who read him without a middleman.
  • Just begin a story with such a phrase as ‘I remember Disraeli – poor old Dizz! – once saying to me, in answer to my poke in the eye,’ and you will find me and Morpheus off in a corner, necking.
  • On lady novelists: As artists they’re rot, but as providers they’re oil wells; they gush. Norris said she never wrote a story unless it was fun to do. I understand Ferber whistles at her typewriter.
  • This play John Drinkwater’s Abraham Lincoln holds the season’s record, thus far, with a run of four evening performances and one matinee. By an odd coincidence, it ran just five performances too many.
  • I misremember who first was cruel enough to nurture the cocktail party into life. But perhaps it would be not too much to say, in fact it would be not enough to say, that it was not worth the trouble.
  • Once, when I was young and true. Someone left me sad – Broke my brittle heart in two; And that is very bad. Love is for unlucky folk, Love is but a curse. Once there was a heart I broke; And that, I think, is worse.
  • [On James Gould Cozzens’ By Love Possessed:] It is a vast enterprise encompassing all sorts of love, except, naturally, those branches which extend to Jews, Negroes, and people who have lost track of their great-grandparents.
  • I can’t talk about Hollywood. It was a horror to me when I was there and it’s a horror to look back on. I can’t imagine how I did it. When I got away from it I couldn’t even refer to the place by name. ”Out there,” I called it.
  • If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second-greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first-greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.
  • Woman wants monogamy; Man delights in novelty. Love is woman’s moon and sun; Man has other forms of fun. Woman lives but in her lord; Count to ten, and man is bored. With this the gist and sum of it, What earthly good can come of it?
  • Into love and out again, Thus I went and thus I go. Spare your voice, and hold your pen: Well and bitterly I know All the songs were ever sung, All the words were ever said; Could it be, when I was young, Someone dropped me on my head?
  • The plot is so tired that even this reviewer, who in infancy was let drop by a nurse with the result that she has ever since been mystified by amateur coin tricks, was able to guess the identity of the murderer from the middle of the book.
  • The nowadays ruling that no word is unprintable has, I think, done nothing whatever for beautiful letters. … Obscenity is too valuable a commodity to chuck around all over the place; it should be taken out of the safe on special occasions only.
  • If I don’t drive around the park, I’m pretty sure to make my mark. If I’m in bed each night by ten, I may get back my looks again. If I abstain from fun and such, I’ll probably amount to much; But I shall stay the way I am, Because I do not give a damn.
  • But I give you my word, in the entire book there is nothing that cannot be said aloud in mixed company. And there is, also, nothing that makes you a bit the wiser. I wonder–oh, what will you think of me–if those two statements do not verge upon the synonymous.
  • Pictures pass me in long review,– Marching columns of dead events. I was tender, and, often, true; Ever a prey to coincidence. Always knew I the consequence; Always saw what the end would be. We’re as Nature has made us — hence I loved them until they loved me.
  • I’m never going to accomplish anything; that’s perfectly clear to me. I’m never going to be famous. My name will never be writ large on the roster of Those Who Do Things. I don’t do anything. Not one single thing. I used to bite my nails, but I don’t even do that any more.
  • How do people go to sleep? I’m afraid I’ve lost the knack. I might try busting myself smartly over the temple with the night-light. I might repeat to myself, slowly and soothingly, a list of quotations beautiful from minds profound; if I can remember any of the damn things.
  • (Scottish Terriers) have all the compactness of a small dog and all the valor of a big one. And they are so exceedingly sturdy that it is proverbial that the only thing fatal to them is being run over by an automobile – in which case the car itself knows it has been in a fight.
  • I fell into writing, I suppose, being one of those awful children who wrote verses. I went to a convent in New York-the Blessed Sacrament… I was fired from there, finally, for a lot of things, among them my insistence that the Immaculate Conception was spontaneous combustion.
  • I had been fed, in my youth, a lot of old wives’ tales about the way men would instantly forsake a beautiful woman to flock around a brilliant one. It is but fair to say that, after getting out in the world, I had never seen this happen.” [From a column dated November 17, 1928]
  • When I was young and bold and strong, The right was right, the wrong was wrong. With plume on high and flag unfurled, I rode away to right the world. But now I’m old – and good and bad, Are woven in a crazy plaid. I sit and say the world is so, And wise is s/he who lets it go.
  • Perhaps it suddenly brought to us the sense of change. Or irresponsibility. But don’t forget that, though the people in the twenties seemed like flops, they weren’t. Fitzgerald, the rest of them, reckless as they were, drinkers as they were, they worked damn hard and all the time.
  • My own dear love, he is strong and bold And he cares not what comes after. His words ring sweet as a chime of gold, And his eyes are lit with laughter. He is jubilant as a flag unfurled – Oh, a girl, she’d not forget him. My own dear love, he is all my world – And I wish I’d never met him.
  • Once I was coming down a street in Beverly Hills and I saw a Cadillac about a block long, and out of the side window was a wonderfully slinky mink, and an arm, and at the end of the arm a hand in a white suede glove wrinkled around the wrist, and in the hand was a bagel with a bite out of it.
  • There must be courage; there must be no awe. There must be criticism, for humor, to my mind, is encapsulated in criticism. There must be a disciplined eye and a wild mind…There must be a magnificent disregard of your reader, for if he cannot follow you, there is nothing you can do about it.
  • My love runs by like a day in June, And he makes no friends of sorrows. He’ll tread his galloping rigadoon In the pathway of the morrows. He’ll live his days where the sunbeams start, Nor could storm or wind uproot him. My own dear love, he is all my heart, — And I wish somebody’d shoot him.
  • Daily dawns another day; I must up, to make my way. Though I dress and drink and eat, Move my fingers and my feet, Learn a little, here and there, Weep and laugh and sweat and swear, Hear a song, or watch a stage, Leave some words upon a page, Claim a foe, or hail a friend- Bed awaits me at the end.
  • [On Kay Strozzi in The Silent Witness:] Miss Strozzi … had the temerity to wear as truly horrible a gown as ever I have seen on the American stage. … Had she not luckily been strangled by a member of the cast while disporting this garment, I should have fought my way to the stage and done her in, myself.
  • In the pathway of the sun, In the footsteps of the breeze, Where the world and sky are one, He shall ride the silver seas, He shall cut the glittering wave. I shall sit at home, and rock; Rise, to heed a neighbor’s knock; Brew my tea, and snip my thread; Bleach the linen for my bed. They will call him brave.
  • They say of me, and so they should, It’s doubtful if I come to good. I see acquaintances and friends Accumulating dividends And making enviable names In science, art and parlor games. But I, despite expert advice, Keep doing things I think are nice, And though to good I never come Inseparable my nose and thumb.
  • I regret to say that during the first act of this, I fell so soundly asleep that the gentleman who brought me piled up a barricade of overcoat, hat, stick, and gloves between us to establish a separation in the eyes of the world, and went into an impersonation of A Young Man Who Has Come to the Theater Unaccompanied.
  • Four be the things I am wiser to know: Idleness, sorrow, a friend, and a foe. Four be the things I’d been better without: Love, curiosity, freckles, and doubt. Three be the things I shall never attain: Envy, content, and sufficient champagne. Three be the things I shall have till I die: Laughter and hope and a sock in the eye.
  • The nowadays ruling that no word is unprintable has, I think, done nothing whatever for beautiful letters. The boys have gone hog-wild with liberty, yet the short flat terms used over and over, both in dialogue and narrative, add neither vigor nor clarity; the effect is not of shock but of something far more dangerous ‚Äî tedium.
  • The ladies men admire, I’ve heard, Would shudder at a wicked word. Their candle gives a single light, They’d rather stay at home at night. They do not keep awake ’till three, Nor read erotic poetry. They never sanction the impure, Nor recognize an overture. They shrink from powders and from paints… So far I’ve had no complaints.
  • I won’t telephone him. I’ll never telephone him again as long as I live. He’ll rot in hell, before I’ll call him up. You don’t have to give me strength, God; I have it myself. If he wanted me, he could get me. He knows where I am. He knows I’m waiting here. He’s so sure of me, so sure. I wonder why they hate you, as soon as they are sure of you.
  • Then she told herself to stop her nonsense. If you looked for things to make you feel hurt and wretched and unnecessary, you were certain to find them, more easily each time, so easily, soon, that you did not even realize you had gone out searching. Women alone often developed into experts at the practice. She must never join their dismal league.
  • For this my mother wrapped me warm,And called me home against the storm,And coaxed my infant nights to quiet,And gave me roughage in my diet,And tucked me in my bed at eight,And clipped my hair, and marked my weight,And watched me as I sat and stood:That I might grow to womanhoodTo hear a whistle and drop my witsAnd break my heart to clattering bits.
  • I don’t want to be classed as a humorist. It makes me feel guilty. I’ve never read a good tough quotable female humorist, and I never was one myself. I couldn’t do it. A “smartcracker” they called me, and that makes me sick and unhappy. There’s a hell of a distance between wisecracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.
  • God, the bitter misery that reading works into this world! Everybody knows that – everbody who IS everybody. All the best minds have been off reading for years. Look at the swing La Rouchefoucauld took at it. He said that if nobody had ever learned to read, very few people would be in love. Good for you, La Rouchefoucauld; nice going, boy. I wish I’d never learned to read.
  • I’ll think about something else. I’ll just sit quietly. If I could sit still. If I could sit still, maybe I could read. Oh, all the books are about people who love each other, truly and sweetly. What do they want to write about that for? Don’t they know it isn’t true? Don’t they know it’s a lie, it’s a God-damned lie? What do they have to tell about that for, when they know how it hurts?
  • There’s little in taking or giving, There’s little in water or wine: This living, this living, this living, Was never a project of mine. Oh, hard is the struggle, and sparse is The gain of the one at the top, For art is a form of catharsis, And love is a permanent flop, And work is the province of cattle, And rest’s for a clam in a shell, So I’m thinking of throwing the battle – Would you kindly direct me to hell?
  • Men They hail you as their morning star Because you are the way you are. If you return the sentiment, They’ll try to make you different; And once they have you, safe and sound, They want to change you all around. Your moods and ways they put a curse on; They’d make of you another person. They cannot let you go your gait; They influence and educate. They’d alter all that they admired. They make me sick, they make me tired.
  • Little Words When you are gone, there is nor bloom nor leaf, Nor singing sea at night, nor silver birds; And I can only stare, and shape my grief In little words. I cannot conjure loveliness, to drown The bitter woe that racks my cords apart. The weary pen that sets my sorrow down Feeds at my heart. There is no mercy in the shifting year, No beauty wraps me tenderly about. I turn to little words- so you, my dear, Can spell them out.
  • Out in Hollywood, where the streets are paved with Goldwyn, the word “sophisticate” means, very simply, “obscene.” A sophisticatedstory is a dirty story. Some of that meaning was wafted eastward and got itself mixed up into the present definition. So that a “sophisticate” means: one who dwells in a tower made of a DuPont substitute for ivory and holds a glass of flat champagne in one hand and an album of dirty post cards in the other.
  • You don’t want a general houseworker, do you? Or a traveling companion, quiet, refined, speaks fluent French entirely in the present tense? Or an assistant billiard-maker? Or a private librarian? Or a lady car-washer? Because if you do, I should appreciate your giving me a trial at the job. Any minute now, I am going to become one of the Great Unemployed. I am about to leave literature flat on its face. I don’t want to review books any more. It cuts in too much on my reading.
  • Lady, lady, never start Conversation toward your heart; Keep your pretty words serene; Never murmur what you mean. Show yourself, by word and look, Swift and shallow as a brook. Be as cool and quick to go As a drop of April snow; Be as delicate and gay As a cherry flower in May. Lady, lady, never speak Of the tears that burn your cheek- She will never win him, whose Words had shown she feared to lose. Be you wise and never sad, You will get your lovely lad. Never serious be, nor true, And your wish will come to you- And if that makes you happy, kid, You’ll be the first it ever did.

 

 

Robin Williams (quotes)

/in , /by

More serious quotes

  • Be prepared for luck.
  • Reality: What a concept!
  • It’s cheaper to keep her.
  • Comedy is acting out optimism.
  • Even mistakes can be wonderful.
  • Comedy is acting out of optimism.
  • I feel like I’m a big human snot.
  • Carpe per diem – seize the check.
  • The only weapon we have is comedy.
  • When in doubt, go for the dick joke.
  • A place where we all go can’t be bad.
  • Don’t mess with me, man, I’m a lawyer!
  • Keating: Carpe Diem! Sieze the day!
  • Cricket is basically baseball on valium.
  • Make your life spectacular, I know I did.
  • My comedy is like emotional hang-gliding.
  • Go pump some neurons. Expand your craniums
  • I love kids, but they are a tough audience.
  • There are no rules. Just follow your heart.
  • A human life is just a heartbeat in heaven.
  • You have to break in half to love somebody.
  • I only ever play Vegas one night at a time.
  • Seize the day. Make your life extraordinary.
  • Ronald Reagan is the world’s largest Muppet.
  • The idea of having a steady job is appealing.
  • Comedy pays the bills if I can’t find a film.
  • For a while you get mad, then you get over it.
  • I don’t do well with snakes, and I can’t dance.
  • Being alone onstage is like legalized insanity.
  • Dreams don’t deal in time. Time doesn’t count.
  • I know size can be daunting but don’t be afraid.
  • I’m sorry, if you were right, I’d agree with you.
  • Three wishes – no substitutes, exchanges or refunds
  • Death is nature’s way of saying, ‘Your table is ready.’
  • The world is your oyster. Never stop trying new things.
  • I was a serious method actor until I visited this site.
  • Nobody takes a picture of something they want to forget.
  • The things we fear the most have already happened to us.
  • Imagining something is better than remembering something.
  • There’s a world out there. Open a window, and it’s there.
  • There’s a world out there. Open a window, and it’s there.
  • Comedy can be a cathartic way to deal with personal trauma.
  • What’s right is what’s left if you do everything else wrong.
  • What’s right is what’s left if you do everything else wrong.
  • Anything that is not funny at a certain point will be funny.
  • We used to be hunter-gatherers, now we’re shopper-borrowers.
  • In America, they really do mythologize people when they die.
  • The truth is, if anything, I’m probably addicted to laughter.
  • Oh, no. To live… to live would be an awfully big adventure.
  • The truth is, if anything, I’m probably addicted to laughter.
  • You’re best when you’re not in charge. The ego locks the muse.
  • Do you think God gets stoned? I think so… look at the platypus.
  • With a bike you go from zero to a hundred in terms of mobility.
  • You’re going to the cemetery with your toothbrush. How Egyptian
  • Sucking the marrow out of life doesn’t mean choking on the bone.
  • I was an only child. I did have kind of like a lonely existence.
  • You’re still young. Being a true loser takes years of inaptitude
  • You’re only given a little spark of madness. You mustn’t lose it.
  • You’re only given a little spark of madness. You mustn’t lose it.
  • Good people end up in Hell because they can’t forgive themselves.
  • The meek may inherit the earth, but they don’t get in to Harvard.
  • Our job is improving the quality of life, not just delaying death.
  • There’s no question this is where I want to live. Never has been.
  • But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.
  • I used food to make myself feel better, but I felt worse when I ate.
  • No matter what people tell you, words and ideas can change the world.
  • Compassionate conservative, that’s like having a gun rack on a Volvo.
  • What’s true in our minds is true, whether some people know it or not.
  • Time is the best teacher. Unfortunately, it kills all of its students.
  • You need a touch of madness, just enough that you don’t become stupid!
  • All you have to do is think one happy thought, and you’ll fly like me.
  • I’m history! No, I’m mythology! Nah, I don’t care what I am, I’m free!
  • What some folks call impossible is just stuff they haven’t seen before.
  • If we were interested in making money, we wouldn’t have become teachers.
  • Stop being afraid of getting older. With age comes wisdom and confidence.
  • You know what music is – a harmonic connection between all living beings.
  • I think it’s great when stories are dark and strange and weirdly personal.
  • I always thought the idea of education was to learn to think for yourself.
  • I think it’s great when stories are dark and strange and weirdly personal.
  • If heaven exists, to know that there’s laughs, that would be a great thing.
  • The idea of being a character who is kind of isolated, I can relate to that.
  • If heaven exists, to know that there are laughs, that would be a great thing.
  • Some are born great. Some achieve greatness. Some get it as a graduation gift.
  • It doesn’t matter who you are, if you’ve got the legs, you can hang with them.
  • Sometimes it’s more noble to tell a small lie than to deliver a painful truth.
  • Everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about. Be kind. Always.
  • When you have a great audience, you can just keep going and finding new things.
  • Real loss is only possible when you love something more than you love yourself.
  • I learned that by being entertaining you make a connection with another person.
  • There’s no shame in failing. The only shame is not giving things your best shot.
  • The Second Amendment says we have the right to bear arms, not to bear artillery.
  • The sort of liveliness which increases with age is not far distant from madness.
  • Stand-up is the place where you can do things that you could never do in public.
  • There is no shame in failing. The only shame is not giving things your best shot.
  • As an alcoholic, you will violate your standards quicker than you can lower them.
  • You’d think all of these “atypical” somethings would add up to a typical something
  • Being in the same room with people and creating something together is a good thing.
  • People say satire is dead. It’s not dead; it’s alive and living in the White House.
  • People would say I never censor. As Billy Crystal says, ‘I don’t have that button.’
  • The world is open for play, everything and everybody is mockable in a wonderful way.
  • If women ran the world, we wouldn’t have wars… just intense negotiations every 28 days.
  • Politicians should wear sponsor jackets like Nascar drivers. Then we know who owns them.
  • Kid, if You Need Booze or Drugs to Enjoy Your Life to the Fullest, You’re Doing It Wrong.
  • Sometimes you got to specifically go out of your way to get into trouble. It’s called fun.
  • Gentlemen, haven’t we learned anything from the music of John Lennon? All we need is love.
  • The world is open for play, that everything and everybody is mockable, in a wonderful way.
  • Crying never helped anybody do anything, okay? You have a problem, you face it like a man.
  • Sometimes, you got to specifically go out of your way to get into trouble. It’s called fun.
  • But only in their dreams can men be truly free. It was always thus and always thus will be.
  • Explore an idea until you’ve exhausted it, really go to all the different parameters of it.
  • I don’t practice anything. I spend time looking over ideas and then just get out and do it.
  • Self-reliance is the key to a vigorous life. A man must look inward to find his own answers.
  • You’ve got to be crazy! It’s too late to be sane, too late. You’ve got to go full-tilt bozo.
  • A hungry stomach, an empty wallet, and a broken heart can teach you the best lessons of life.
  • Self-reliance is the key to a vigorous life. A man must look inward to find his own answers.
  • I just want to do movies, and I want to sell them. I don’t want to link up with some product.
  • I stand upon my desk to remind myself that we must constantly look at things in a different way.
  • I do believe in love. It’s wonderful, especially love third time around; it’s even more precious.
  • My favorite thing to do is ride a bicycle. I ride road bikes. And for me, it’s mobile meditation.
  • Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but when it does, it’s like open-field running.
  • What’s my credibility? Why are they looking to me for advice? Isn’t there someone more qualified?
  • If you don’t keep pushing the limits, you wake up one day and you’re the “center square to block.”
  • When I’m riding my bicycle I feel like a Buddhist who is happy just to enjoy his mundane existence
  • To be free. Such a thing would be greater than all the magic and all the treasures in all the world.
  • Comedy is there to basically show us we fart, we laugh, to make us realize we still are part animal.
  • A friend is someone who listens to your bullshit, tells you that it’s bullshit, and listens some more.
  • If we’re going to fight a disease, let’s fight one of the most terrible diseases of all, indifference.
  • Sometimes you can have a whole lifetime in a day and never notice that this is a beautiful as it gets.
  • She is not perfect. You are not perfect. The question is whether or not you are perfect for each other
  • See, the problem is that God gives men a brain and a penis, and only enough blood to run one at a time.
  • Sometimes you can have a whole lifetime in a day and never notice that this is as beautiful as it gets.
  • You will have bad times, but they will always wake you up to the stuff you weren’t paying attention to.
  • You will have bad times, but they will always wake you up to the stuff you weren’t paying attention to.
  • I love doing live action movies, but there’s a great job in doing animation, especially one with music.
  • There is still a lot to learn and there is always great stuff out there. Even mistakes can be wonderful.
  • After I quit drinking, I realized I am the same asshole I always was; I just have fewer dents in my car.
  • You can start any ‘Monty Python’ routine and people finish it for you. Everyone knows it like shorthand.
  • There’s a time for daring and there’s a time for caution, and a wise man understands which is called for.
  • Sometimes with a comedy it’s just having the instinct of how real you play it and what level you want it.
  • I want everyone out there in TV land to touch the TV. Touch the back of the TV and get a shock for Jesus.
  • Please, don’t worry so much. Because in the end, none of us have very long on this Earth. Life is fleeting.
  • Gradual school is where you go to school and you gradually find out you don’t want to go to school anymore.
  • But if there’s love, dear… those are the ties that bind, and you’ll have a family in your heart, forever.
  • On stage you’re free. You can say and do things that if you said and did any place else, you’d be arrested.
  • My children give me a great sense of wonder. Just to see them develop into these extraordinary human beings.
  • To make fun of an administration, to make fun of anything, Mark Twain said, is the last defense of democracy.
  • I’ve always improvised, and stand-up was this great release. All of a sudden, it was just me and the audience.
  • There’s this thing called freebasing. It’s not free, it costs you your home. It should be called ‘homebasing’.
  • It was kind of a decompression – from straight alcohol to mixed drinks to wine to spritzers – and then you’re out.
  • You have an internal critic, an internal drive that says, ‘OK, you can do more.’ Maybe that’s what keeps you going.
  • You treat a disease, you win, you lose. You treat a person, I guarantee you, you’ll win, no matter what the outcome.
  • It’s always great when you want scientific fact to get a really good science fiction writer to talk to you about it.
  • We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race.
  • If you’re that depressed, reach out to someone. And remember, suicide is a permanent solution, to a temporary problem.
  • If you want to die, don’t make a mistake and not quite kill yourself because the medical bills in America are hideous.
  • I have no desire to go anywhere near drugs. People say, “Aren’t you tempted?” No, because of the ridiculousness of it.
  • If there was a pill that allowed you to drink and not get drunk, an alcoholic would go “What happens if you take two?”
  • Acting is different from stand-up. It gives you this ability to enter into another character, to create another person.
  • I do believe in love; it’s wonderful – especially love third time around, it’s even more precious; it’s kind of amazing.
  • Women are wonderful. They’re amazing creatures. You can never learn enough! They’re addicting in the most amazing sense.
  • I can be trained, I can actually show you how intelligent I am, I can use a word like delicatessen and know what it means.
  • The Second Amendment! It says you have the right to bear arms, or the right to arm bears, whatever the hell you want to do!
  • On rides you see things that trigger ideas. And most the time it’s just not doing anything but riding … letting it all go.
  • Boys, you must strive to find your own voice, because the longer you wait to begin the less likely you are to find it at all.
  • In down times I do things like go for a long bike ride or run. The other thing I’m doing in that quiet time is just observing.
  • If I ever asked you about love, you’d probably quote me a sonnet. But you’ve never looked a woman and been totally vulnerable.
  • I’ve actually gone to the zoo and had monkeys shout to me from their cages, “I’m in here when you’re walking around like that?”
  • Shooting in New York is the shiznit, if I may be so bold. It was great. New York is a character. People who live here know that.
  • There are times when life’s just real quiet and simple. I sometimes get tired of people saying, “Well, what are you really like?”
  • Humor is a great defense, and an offense too. Usually the recipient isn’t too happy about it, but the people around are laughing.
  • Women are incredibly intuitive. If anybody on the planet is going to evolve to the next level, that telekinetic thing, women will.
  • I try to make sense of things. Which is why, I guess, I believe in destiny. There must be a reason that I am as I am. There must be.
  • I love to ride my bike, which is great aerobics, but also just a great time for me to think, so it’s like this terrific double bill.
  • I never performed on drugs. That’d be stupid. It’s the same thing with athletes. They can’t perform when they have cocaine problems.
  • The great thing about marriage is the idea of really getting to know someone. And really getting to know a woman is a life long task.
  • When I find out a hotel doesn’t have a DSL, it’s like “What? There’s no toilet?” Once you get used to high speed you ain’t going back
  • Friends come in all sizes, take it from me! Golly gee, size doesn’t matter, when you want some friendly patter from a pal who is true.
  • Seize the day. Because, believe it or not, each and every one of us in this room is one day going to stop breathing, turn cold, and die.
  • We have a president for whom English is a second language. He’s like ‘We have to get rid of dictators,’ but he’s pretty much one himself.
  • Women have so many levels. There’s the physical level, which is a lot of fun. There’s this emotional level, which is extremely mercurial.
  • I met Jonah Lomu. I never knew how huge he was. I felt like a peasant in a Godzilla movie. ‘Quickly! Tell the other villagers! We go now!’
  • Just now when I said, “I have a crush on you,” you didn’t say, “no way loser”. I’d rather have a lobotomy by a leper. That means something
  • The Chinese had accused the Tibetans of being terrorists, which is weird. A Tibetan terrorist is like an Amish hacker. It just doesn’t fit.
  • My preference is live performance, because you get the feedback. There’s an energy. It’s live theater. That’s why I think actors like that.
  • Don’t associate yourself with toxic people. It’s better to be alone and love yourself than surrounded by people that make you hate yourself.
  • Don’t associate yourself with toxic people. It’s better to be alone and love yourself than surrounded by people that make you hate yourself.
  • There’s three things in this world that you need: Respect for all kinds of life, a nice bowel movement on a regular basis, and a navy blazer.
  • There are three things in this world that you need: respect for all kinds of life, a nice bowel movement on a regular basis, and a navy blazer.
  • I used to think the worst thing in life was to end up alone. It’s not. The worst thing in life is to end up with people who make you feel alone.
  • Politics is so personal, vicious and immediate, how are you going to get anything done? Even the local politics where I live have gotten so ugly.
  • It’s that idea that you can have one drink – and no you can’t. Within a week I was drinking heavily. It was so quick that even I was like, ‘Wow.’
  • A lot of celebrities golf because they want to be away. For them it’s a chance to get away and be peaceful. For me it’s peaceful to ride [cycling].
  • I used to think the worst thing in life was to end up all alone. It’s not. The worst thing in life is to end up with people who make you feel all alone.
  • I don’t have a college degree, and my father didn’t have a college degree, so when my son, Zachary, graduated from college, I said, “My boy’s got learnin’!”
  • Change is not popular; we are creatures of habit as human beings. ‘I want it to be the way it was.’ But if you continue the way it was there will be no ‘is.’
  • Change is not popular; we are creatures of habits as human beings. ‘I want it to be the way it was.’ But if you continue the way it was there will be no ‘is.’
  • As intellectual as we think we are, you still trip, we still have human foibles, sexuality, all the different things to still make you aware of your humanity.
  • The human spirit is more powerful than any drug, and that is what needs to be nourished: with work, play, friendship, family. These are the things that matter.
  • The human spirit is more powerful than any drug – and that is what needs to be nourished: with work, play, friendship, family. These are the things that matter.
  • Divorce is expensive. I used to joke they were going to call it ‘all the money,’ but they changed it to ‘alimony.’ It’s ripping your heart out through your wallet.
  • Most of all, I want to thank my father, up there, the man who when I said I wanted to be an actor, he said, ‘Wonderful. Just have a backup profession like welding.’
  • Most of all, I want to thank my father, up there, the man who when I said I wanted to be an actor, he said, ‘Wonderful. Just have a back-up profession like welding.’
  • Terrible wars have been fought where millions have died for one idea – freedom. And it seems that something that means so much to so many people would be worth having.
  • Cocaine for me was a place to hide. Most people get hyper on coke. It slowed me down. Sometimes it made me paranoid and impotent, but mostly it just made me withdrawn.
  • My battles with addiction definitely shaped how I am now. They really made me deeply appreciate human contact. And the value of friends and family, how precious that is.
  • It is hard to find something where you can go off as much as I do in stand-up, but I think stand-up allows me that freedom where you can really go off and have a good time.
  • If you listen real close, you can hear them whisper their legacy to you. Go on, lean in. Listen, you hear it?  Carpe diem, seize the day boys, make your lives extraordinary.
  • Cable is not bound because people pay for it. It’s literally a choice, that’s the operative word. If you don’t like the language, if cocksucker offends you, then turn it off.
  • It’s been a tough year. . . Someone said I should send out Buddhist thank-you cards since Buddhists believe that anything that challenges you makes you pull yourself together.
  • I had one or two steady girlfriends in high school, but then in college, it was three, four… I went crazy. At one point I had three separate girlfriends, running around mad.
  • You know what music is? God’s little reminder that there’s something else besides us in this universe; harmonic connection between all living beings, every where, even the stars.
  • I’ve never had a “hankering” to direct. I can perform, but I can’t write on that level. I tend to go off on tangents. Directing also requires a kind of specificity and I don’t have it.
  • My father retired to San Francisco, and I got a chance to know him and be around him. It’s always been someplace where everything changed for the better. It’s always been a home for me.
  • Age makes you more confident. When you realize that it’s time now to just do things. When there’s not the pressure to perform on some level of expectations, there’s more to just explore.
  • I think the saddest people always try their hardest to make people happy because they know what it’s like to feel absolutely worthless  and they don’t want anyone else to feel like that.
  • All the new people you meet, it’s pretty amazing. The vampire needs new blood. And there is still a lot to learn and there is always great stuff out there. Even mistakes can be wonderful.
  • You’ve got to be crazy! It’s too late to be sane, too late. You’ve got to go full tilt bozo… ‚ÄòCause you’re only given a little spark of madness… and if you lose that, you’re nothing
  • How much more can you give? Other than, literally, open-heart surgery onstage? Not much. But the only cure you have right now is the honesty of going, this is who you are. I know who I am.
  • I think the saddest people always try their hardest to make people happy. Because they know what it feels like to feel absolutely worthless and they don’t want anybody else to feel like that.
  • Sometimes, keeping track of people. It’s always a weird combination of worrying so much about the outside world, and not… you have to be more aware of the inner circle, the folks that matter.
  • [when asked about what he was most thankful about]: Being alive. After heart surgery, you dig that part. Breath, family and friends are just amazing. Just to have a second shot is pretty great!
  • We were romantics. We didn’t just read poetry. We let it drip from our tongues like honey. Spirits soared. Women swooned, and gods were created, gentlemen. Not a bad way to spend an evening, eh?
  • Come on now! You kick out the gooks, the next thing you know, you have to kick out the chinks, the spicks, the spooks, the kikes and all that’s going to be left is a couple of brain-dead rednecks.
  • You have this idea that you’d better keep working otherwise people will forget. And that was dangerous. And then you realize, no, actually if you take a break people might be more interested in you.
  • I was once walking in an airport and a woman came up to me and said, ‘Be zany!’. That’d be like walking up to Baryshikov and going, ‘Plie! Just do a plie! Do it! Do a releve right now! Lift my wife!’
  • Stand-up is the place where you can do things that you could never do in public. Once you step on stage you’re licensed to do that. It’s an understood relationship. You walk on stage – it’s your job.
  • I couldn’t imagine living the way I used to live. Now people come up to me from the drug days and go, ‘Hi, remember me?’ And I’m going, ‘No, did I have sex with you? Did I take a dump in your tool box?’
  • [On creating] And you get that little endorphin buzz, it’s great. Why do you think Einstein looked like that? I don’t think he was going “You know this is some dynamite weed! It’s all relative you know.”
  • The dramas for me allow me to explore more behavioral, deeper psychological things. But the comedies obviously allow me to explore the idea of really working off other people. I’m having more fun doing that.
  • When you really do find a new idea or you’re in and it’s all working, that’s the gift. It’s like a musician when they hit a riff, that’s when you’re like all right, it’s mellow. You back off and just ride it.
  • I want to do a movie, but it has to be the right movie, whether it’s independent or a studio movie. I’m much more open to being a supporting actor. At the age of 60, I’ll be second fiddle. Fine. I’m happy to do it.
  • With mountain biking, it’s always that constant thing, negotiating singletrack, which I like, but for a road ride that rhythm is really Buddhist. When you get a good pedal stoke, it’s that thing of everything works.
  • My mother’s idea of natural childbirth was giving birth without makeup. She was hyper-positive – the world is a wonderful place, rainbows and unicorns. If you said anything contrary to her, you were basically exiled.
  • Everyone has these two visions when they hold their child for the first time. The first is your child as an adult saying “I want to thank the Nobel Committee for this award.” The other is “You want fries with that?”.
  • It’s a wonderful feeling when your father becomes not a God but a man to you — when he comes down from the mountain and you see he’s this man with weaknesses. And you love him as this whole being, not as a figurehead.
  • It’s a wonderful feeling when your father becomes not a god but a man to you – when he comes down from the mountain and you see he’s this man with weaknesses. And you love him as this whole being, not as a figurehead.
  • My childhood was really nice. My parents never forced me to do anything; it was always, “If you want to do that, fine.” When I told my father I was going to be an actor, he said, “Fine, but study welding just in case.”
  • Cross-country running was so beautiful with all the trails and the lake regions … very physical and also a bit spiritual, where you could come over the mountain and all of a sudden you’d see a Buddhist landscape fog.
  • When your spinal cord freezes up, you’re vulnerable to everything. But he [Chrestopher Reese] was tough as nails. And he kept a great, kind of dark sense of humor about it, but also was able to accomplish amazing things.
  • My favorite is when you go to Afghanistan and you meet the special forces guys, and they look like these heavily armed surfers. These guys are the best. You see guys dressed as full Afghans, but then wearing a Yankees hat.
  • Avoid using the word ‘very’ because it’s lazy. A man is not very tired, he is exhausted. Don’t use very sad, use morose. Language was invented for one reason boys – to woo women – and in that endeavor, laziness will not do.
  • We were totally opposite – me coming from the West Coast and a junior college, and him [ Christopher Reeve] from the hard-core Ivy League. He used to be the studly studly of all studlies, and I was the little fool ferret boy.
  • After my training wheels, my first real bike was a Schwinn, and my first time out, I rode down a hill, didn’t know how to stop, and ran right into a tree. So, that was a nice experience … like realizing, oh, there are brakes!
  • The essential truth is that sometimes you’re worried that they’ll find out it’s a fluke, that you don’t really have it. You’ve lost the muse or — the worst dread — you never had it at all. I went through all that madness early on.
  • Finding a good script is really difficult and the scariest thing of all is when they say about a script that’s not right, “we will fix it..” It’s like before you get on the Titanic and you see a big hole. In process, it’s too late.
  • Bicycles are pieces of art. You get that combination of kinetic engineering, but then, besides the welds, the paint jobs, the kind of the sculpture of it all is quite beautiful. Bikes have such great lines, and all different styles.
  • The little idiosyncrasies that only I know about: that’s what made her my wife. Oh she had the goods on me too, she knew all my little peccadilloes. People call these things imperfections, but they’re not. Ah, that’s the good stuff!
  • There was an old, crazy dude who used to live a long time ago. His name was Lord Buckley. And he said, a long time ago, he said, ‘People–they’r e kinda like flowers, and it’s been a privilege walking in your garden.’ My love goes with you.
  • I thought I was fooling people. But it’s the old thing of ‘they say vodka doesn’t smell’. No, not until you sweat. And you just lie and lie and you think ‘I can deal with this’. And then you finally go, ‘No you can’t’. And then you give up.
  • Even when I did my Broadway show, I did 15 minutes no one had seen before, because that was the night that Michael Jackson protested about Al Sharpton bailing on him. I said, “Wow, if that man bails on you, this must be really a lost cause.”
  • People say that I’m a tree hugger, but I do a lot more than hug trees. I like having my drinking water without faecal matter, that’s really nice. Or acceptable levels of strychnine. I’m an air breather, I’ve gotten used to that over the years.
  • I started doing comedy because that was the only stage that I could find. It was the pure idea of being on stage. That was the only thing that interested me, along with learning the craft and working, and just being in productions with people.
  • I stopped drinking when I had children because I wanted to be awake and aware. I did not want to be going, you know, daddy loves you and then drop my head on the table. I do not want to miss anything that they do or say. It is important to me.
  • Life is fleeting. And if you’re ever distressed, cast your eyes to the summer sky when when the stars are strung across the velvety night. And when a shooting star streaks through the blackness, turning night into day… make a wish and think of me.
  • To be acknowledged for who and what I am, no more, no less. Not for acclaim, not for approval, but, the simple truth of that recognition. This has been the elemental drive of my existence, and it must be achieved, if I am to live or die with dignity.
  • I enjoy that, and the idea of doing small things over a period of time. I think there are certain things you can do for water control in America, because that will be our most precious resource. In America, you pay more for water than you do for gas.
  • Politically, I don’t care what party you’re from, offer a point of view and let’s see what happens and really debate the issues rather than use personal attacks. Really talk about it, talk about immigration, talk about education, talk about pollution.
  • We’re dealing with fundamentalists… the Amish are fundamentalists, but they don’t try and hijack a carriage at needlepoint. And, if you’re ever in Amish country and you see a man with his hand buried in a horse’s ass, that’s a mechanic. Remember that.
  • Things that I see in the future. I see… it could be quite incredible if we can master a few problems, like the air and the water thing might be nice. I see governments dissolving these barriers are all falling down for economic reasons. They’re all so interbound.
  • If I asked you about love, you’d probably quote me a sonnet. But you’ve never looked at a woman and been totally vulnerable. Known someone that could level you with her eyes, feeling like God put an angel on earth just for you. Who could rescue you from the depths of hell.
  • I got to ninth grade and there was wrestling, and I went, ‘Wait a minute, this is fun.’ Basically, it was a chance for a small kid like me to get a chance to wail on another small kid. I went, ‘I love this.’ The discipline of it was great. Plus, I really started to be good at it.
  • I can see it now: Osama bin Laden goes up to the pearly gates where George Washington comes out, starts beating him and is then joined by 70 other members of the Continental Congress. Osama will say, Hey, wait! Where are my 71 virgins? And George will reply It’s 71 Virginians, you asshole!
  • For me, comedy starts as a spew, a kind of explosion, and then you sculpt it from there, if at all. It comes out of a deeper, darker side. Maybe it comes from anger, because I’m outraged by cruel absurdities, the hypocrisy that exists everywhere, even within yourself, where it’s hardest to see.
  • We are surrounded by a lot of failed ecosystems; the moon being one, Mars, Venus. There¬ís evidence of water on Mars and rivers and it didn¬ít take. Also, we have planets to guard us like Jupiter and Saturn that take the hits of the comets. It is miraculous that we exist on this planet, that it took.
  • I basically started performing for my mother, going, ‘Love me!’ What drives you to perform is the need for that primal connection. When I was little, my mother was funny with me, and I started to be charming and funny for her, and I learned that by being entertaining, you make a connection with another person.
  • Ever since my children were born, the moment I looked at them I was crazy about them. Once I held them I was hooked. I am addicted to my children sir. I love them with all my heart and the idea of someone telling me I can’t be with them, I can’t see them everyday. Well, it’s like someone saying I can’t have air.
  • I basically started performing for my mother, going, ‘Love me!’ What drives you to perform is the need for that primal connection. When I was little, my mother was funny with me, and I started to be charming and funny for her, and I learned that by being entertaining, you make a connection with another person.
  • In truth I never really liked any of the heavy drugs, because normally my energy is up when I’m performing, and that’s about it. Cocaine is nothing new. It’s the pressure, I think. People use it to relieve that, and for me it is about getting numb and forgetting. I have a reverse metabolic reaction to the stuff.
  • What’s wrong with death sir? What are we so mortally afraid of? Why can’t we treat death with a certain amount of humanity and dignity, and decency, and God forbid, maybe even humor. Death is not the enemy gentlemen. If we’re going to fight a disease, let’s fight one of the most terrible diseases of all, indifference.
  • Directing requires great discipline, that ability to be in and out at the same time. The great ones I’ve worked with are like generals. It’s a bit like a small war on that level. The great ones have that combination of freedom and control. I’m nowhere near that. There’s still so much to do as an actor. I have enough to explore with that.
  • My preference is live performance. Because you get the feedback. There’s an energy. It’s live theater. That’s why I think actors like that. You know, musicians need it, comedians definitely need it. It doesn’t matter what size and what club, whether it’s 30 people in the club or 2,000 in a hall or a theater. It’s live, it’s symbiotic, you need it.
  • I did an event in Washington, and it was like we lifted a sea.Immediately after [9/11], there was a stunned shock – kind of this feeling of “What do we do now?” I started performing, and there was a catharsis in the laughing. People started to be able to laugh again. Laughter can be many things – sometimes a medicine, sometimes a weapon, depending on.
  • The idea of the industrial fishing affects everyone. Those factory ships play this game of hit and run with the international fishing limits, and somebody said it’s like hunting squirrels with a bulldozer. They pull everything in and they are only looking for certain types of fish and everything else dies and they just throw it back. It’s like chumming.
  • A Pentagon official once said the people who would actually push the button probably have never seen a person die. He said the only hope -and it’s a strange thought – is if they put the button to launch the nuclear war behind a man’s heart. The President, then, with a rusty knife, would have to cut out the man’s heart, kill the man, to get to the button.
  • I’m fascinated by the new iPhone. I bought it and kept trying to use it in France. “Siri, what is a good restaurant?” (In a robotic voice.) “I’m sorry, Robin. I can’t give locations in France.” “Why, Siri?” “I don’t know.” It’s like she was upset with the French or something. “They seem to have an attitude I can’t understand. Should I look for Germans, Robin?”
  • One day [when I relapsed] I walked into a store and saw a little bottle of Jack Daniel’s. And then that voice – I call it the ‘lower power’ – goes, ‘Hey. Just a taste. Just one.’ I drank it, and there was that brief moment of ‘Oh, I’m okay!’ But it escalated so quickly. Within a week I was buying so many bottles I sounded like a wind chime walking down the street.
  • You look at the world and see how scary it can be sometimes and still try to deal with the fear. Comedy can deal with the fear and still not paralyze you or tell you that it’s going away. You say, OK, you got certain choices here, you can laugh at them and then once you’ve laughed at them and you have expunged the demon, now you can deal with them. That’s what I do when I do my act.
  • My childhood was lonely. Both my parents were away a lot, working, and the maid basically raised me. And I think that’s where a lot of my comedy comes from. Not only was the maid very funny and witty, but when my mother came home I’d use humour to try and get her attention. If I made mommy laugh, then maybe everything would be all right. I think that’s where it [my comedy] all started.
  • It’s just literally being afraid. And you think, oh, [the alcohol] will ease the fear. And it doesn’t. What was he afraid of? “Everything. It’s just a general all-round arggghhh. It’s fearfulness and anxiety.” He added, “For that first week you lie to yourself, and tell yourself you can stop, and then your body kicks back and says, no, stop later. And then it took about three years, and finally you do stop.”
  • My children give me a great sense of wonder. Just to see them develop into these extraordinary human beings. And a favorite book as a child? Growing up, it was ‘The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe’ – I would read the whole C.S. Lewis series out loud to my kids. I was once reading to Zelda, and she said ‘don’t do any voices. Just read it as yourself.’ So I did, I just read it straight, and she said ‘that’s better.’
  • It’s that idea that you can have one drink – and no you can’t. Within a week I was drinking heavily. It was so quick that even I was like, ‘Wow.’ Because you have that initial warm feeling going, ‘Oh, I remember this’. And your body does, too. And your body goes, ‘Yeah, so do I’.  Then the demon voice comes, ‘Yeah, so do I. You know what would be great? You know we bought a little bottle before? A full bottle would be wonderful’.
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On a lighter note

  • Cricket is baseball on valium.
  • When in doubt, go for the dick joke.
  • Situations Burglars Furniture Homosexuals
  • ..so many pedestrians, so little time…
  • Decaf is like masturbating with an oven mitt!
  • No man is an island; but some are peninsulas.
  • Freud: If it’s not one thing, it’s your mother
  • It’s hotter than a snake’s ass in a wagon rut.
  • Never go to Pluto, it’s a Mickey Mouse planet.
  • Why do they call it rush hour if no one moves?
  • I don’t do well with snakes, and I can’t dance.
  • I don’t do well with snakes, and I can’t dance.
  • Spring is nature’s way of saying, ‘Let’s party!’
  • Women! Can’t live with ’em, can’t live with ’em!
  • I like my wine like my women – ready to pass out.
  • I’m sorry, if you were right, I’d agree with you.
  • Why do they call it rush hour when nothing moves?
  • His golf bag does not contain a full set of irons.
  • I like my wine like my women — ready to pass out.
  • I thought lacrosse was what you find in la church.
  • If you can remember the sixties, you weren’t there.
  • Why do they call it “rush hour” when nothing moves?
  • We’re not laughing at you – we’re laughing near you.
  • Gentiles are people who eat mayonnaise for no reason.
  • I’m looking for Miss Right, or at least Miss Right Now
  • Death is nature’s way of saying, ‘Your table is ready.’
  • If we bury you ass up, I’ve got a place to park my bike.
  • In the dictionary under redundant it says see redundant.
  • Incoming is not the thing you want to hear at Christmas.
  • Mickey Mouse to a three-year-old is a six-foot-tall RAT!
  • He makes a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day float look ridiculous.
  • Canada is like a loft apartment over a really great party.
  • Death – to blink for an exceptionally long period of time.
  • My first day as a woman and I am already having hot flushes
  • Clouds are like boogers hanging on the nostrils of the moon.
  • Cocaine is God’s way of saying you’re making too much money.
  • If it’s the Psychic Network why do they need a phone number?
  • What’s right is what’s left if you do everything else wrong.
  • Never fight with an ugly person, they’ve got nothing to lose.
  • Running for senator in New York is like bobbing for piranhas.
  • Whenever a big white man picks up a banjo, my cheeks tighten.
  • You might say he was one taco short of a combination platter.
  • Along with the Oscars, the Academy is giving out a green card.
  • I went to rehab in wine country, just to keep my options open.
  • Reality is just a crutch for people who can’t cope with drugs.
  • We’ve had cloning in the South for years. It’s called cousins.
  • We’ve had cloning in the South for years. It’s called cousins.
  • Do you think God gets stoned? I think so… look at the platypus.
  • That’s the formaldehyde. That’s why Granny’s so well-preserved.
  • Sucking the marrow out of life doesn’t mean choking on the bone.
  • Cocaine is God’s way of telling you you are making too much money.
  • I love being backstage, or doing littler things like Blame Canada.
  • I’m a very tolerant man, except when it comes to holding a grudge.
  • Look at the walls of Pompeii. That’s what got the internet started.
  • Do you think God gets stoned? I think so . . . look at the platypus.
  • Never pick a fight with an ugly person, they’ve got nothing to lose.
  • Shakespeare said, “Kill all the lawyers.” There were no agents then.
  • Keith Richards is the only man who can make the Osbournes look Amish.
  • Before the Web, there was just one guy running around saying ‘I KNOW!’
  • Time is the best teacher. Unfortunately, it kills all of its students.
  • You’ll notice that Nancy Reagan never drinks water when Ronnie speaks.
  • Do you realize we’re only a heart attack away from Bush being president?
  • Do you think Adam said to Eve, ‘Back up, I don’t know how big this gets.
  • My religious background is that my mother is a Christian Dior Scientist.
  • If I could light my own farts I could fly to the moon or at least Uranus.
  • I wonder what chairs think about all day: “Oh, here comes another asshole.”
  • Is it rude to Twitter during sex? To go “omg, omg, wtf, zzz”? Is that rude?
  • You appreciate little things, like walks on the beach with a defibrillator.
  • Ballet: men wearing pants so tight that you can tell what religion they are.
  • Being a famous print journalist is like being the best-dressed woman on radio.
  • I had sex with a prostitute when I was 21, I was so bad, she gave me a refund.
  • Some are born great. Some achieve greatness. Some get it as a graduation gift.
  • You’ve got to give the guy some slack… he’s caught between Iraq and a hard-on.
  • I went to rehab [for alcoholism] in wine country, just to keep my options open.
  • Golf is a game where white men can dress up as black pimps and get away with it.
  • I feel like Adam when he said to Eve, “Back up, I don’t know how big this gets.”
  • The Second Amendment says we have the right to bear arms, not to bear artillery.
  • We had gay burglars the other night; they broke in and rearranged the furniture.
  • Politics: Poli a Latin word meaning many and tics meaning bloodsucking creatures.
  • When the media ask George W. Bush a question, he answers, ‘Can I use a lifeline?’
  • I’m an Episcopal, which is Catholic Lite. It’s like same religion, half the guilt.
  • People say satire is dead; it’s not dead; it’s alive and living in the White House.
  • Divorce, from the Latin word meaning to rip out a man’s genitals through his wallet.
  • Politics: Poli a Latin word meaning many; and “tics” meaning bloodsucking creatures.
  • It’s five o’clock in the morning. You’ve just pissed on a dumpster. It’s Miller time.
  • The Russians love Brooke Shields because her eyebrows remind them of Leonid Brezhnev.
  • If women ran the world we wouldn’t have wars, just intense negotiations every 28 days.
  • They say our mothers really know how to push our buttons – because they installed them
  • We Americans, we’re a simple people . . . but piss us off, and we’ll bomb your cities.
  • Canadian money is also called the loony. How can you take an economic crisis seriously?
  • The first time I ate organic whole-grain bread I swear it tasted like roofing material.
  • Politicians should wear sponsor jackets like Nascar drivers. Then we know who owns them.
  • Even evangelicals realize that Pinocchio’s father was a carpenter too. That’s the old joke.
  • When my friends and I played cowboys and Indians, I was always the Chinese railroad worker.
  • When the Williams sisters play tennis, it gets pretty hot. When they start grunting, I’m in.
  • When you create you get a little endorphin rush. Why do you think Einstein looked like that?
  • Golf is one of the few sports where a white man can dress like a black pimp and not look bad.
  • Compassionate conservative. I don’t know what that is, it sounds like a Volvo with a gun rack.
  • I play a lot of computer games. I love computer graphics. I’ve had Pixar in me for a long time.
  • The entire world will be in nuclear war, and only the Swiss will be going, ‘what’s that noise?’
  • Taking Viagra after open heart surgery is like a Civil War re-enactment with live ammo. Not good.
  • Ah, yes, divorce . . . from the Latin word meaning to rip out a man’s genitals through his wallet.
  • I had my back waxed once by two women… and at one point they said, Do you mind if we take a break?
  • My God, look at the size of this man! Quick! Tell the other villagers we’re going back to the boats!
  • I think Nancy does most of his talking; you’ll notice that she never drinks water when Ronnie speaks.
  • A friend is someone who listens to your bullshit, tells you that it’s bullshit, and listens some more.
  • See, the problem is that God gives men a brain and a penis, and only enough blood to run one at a time.
  • God gave men a penis and a brain, but unfortunately not enough blood supply to run both at the same time.
  • I had to stop drinking alcohol, because I used to wake up nude in front of my car with my keys in my ass.
  • You know the difference between a tornado and divorce in the south? Nothing! Someone is losing a trailer.
  • It’s great that we’ve got a compassionate conservative, but to me, that sounds like a Volvo with a gun rack.
  • You know, you get that tattoo of barbed wire when you’re 18, but by the time you’re 80, it’s a picket fence.
  • It’s great that we’ve got a compassionate conservative, but to me, that sounds like a Volvo with a gun rack.
  • The French don’t have a baseball team. And if they did, there’d only be a left field, and no one would be safe.
  • You could talk about same-sex marriage, but people who have been married (say) ‘It’s the same sex all the time.’
  • We were talking briefly about cocaine…yeah. Anything that makes you paranoid and impotent, give me more of that!
  • If women ran the world there would be no wars. However every 28 days there would be some very intense negotiations.
  • When you look at Prince Charles, don’t you think that someone in the Royal family knew someone in the Royal family?
  • And if you want a linguistic adventure, go drinking with a Scotsman. Cause you can’t fucking understand them before.
  • The human body was designed by a civil engineer. Who else would run a toxic waste pipeline through a recreational area ?
  • What is this demilitarized zone? Whatever it is, I like it! Gets you on your toes better than a strong cup of cappuccino.
  • You don’t need cocaine! There’s another way to get real high, and really mess your mind up, it’s called marathon running!
  • The Second Amendment! It says you have the right to bear arms, or the right to arm bears, whatever the hell you want to do!
  • Men may have wars, but women have their period. Men go off and kill each other, but women say nasty things, which is even better.
  • Being a functioning alcoholic is kind of like being a paraplegic lap dancer: You can do it, just not as well as the others, really.
  • I love running cross-country…You come up a hill and see two deer going, ‘What the hell is he doing?’ On a track I feel like a hamster.
  • Texting and driving at the same time is like jerking off and juggling at the same time. Too many balls in the air, if you catch my drift.
  • We have a president for whom English is a second language. He’s like ‘We have to get rid of dictators,’ but he’s pretty much one himself.
  • There are three things in this world that you need: respect for all kinds of life, a nice bowel movement on a regular basis, and a navy blazer.
  • They’re talking about partial nuclear disarmament, which is also like talking about partial circumcision – you either go all the way or forget it.
  • [Imitating a Frenchman] Fuck you Americans! Uncultured, crass Americans! We hate all of you! Fu- the Germans are here! Hello Americans! We love you!
  • A woman would never make a nuclear bomb. They would never make a weapon that kills, no, no. They’d make a weapon that makes you feel bad for a while.
  • Now you can’t even carry a nail clipper on a plane. Are they afraid you’re going to go…”All right! Give me the plane or the b*tch loses her cuticle.” ?
  • The Statue of Liberty is no longer saying, ‘Give me your poor, your tired, your huddled masses.’ She’s got a baseball bat and yelling, ‘You want a piece of me?’
  • In England, if you commit a crime, the police don’t have a gun and you don’t have a gun. If you commit a crime, the police will say ‘Stop, or I’ll say stop again.’
  • Okra is the closest thing to nylon I’ve ever eaten. It’s like they bred cotton with a green bean. Okra, tastes like snot. The more you cook it, the more it turns into string.
  • There’ll be cold fusion. We’ll actually be able to power our cars with our own feces. That’s right. The emissions problem will be a little intense, but just light a match.
  • Age makes you more confident. When you realize that it’s time now to just do things. When there’s not the pressure to perform on some level of expectations, there’s more to just explore.
  • When I was growing up they used to say, “Robin, drugs can kill you.” Now that I’m 58 my doctor’s telling me, “Robin, you need drugs to live.” I realize now that my doctor is also my dealer.
  • I was once on a German talk show, and this woman said to me, ‘Mr. Williams, why do you think there is not so much comedy in Germany?’ And I said, ‘Did you ever think you killed all the funny people?’
  • Some people say Jesus wasn’t Jewish. Of course he was Jewish. Thirty years old, single, lives with his parents, come on. He works in his father’s business, his mom thought he was God’s gift, he’s Jewish.
  • And some people say Jesus wasn’t Jewish. Of COURSE he was Jewish! 30 years old, single, lives with his parents, come on! He works in his father’s business, his mom thought he was God’s gift, he’s Jewish! Give it up!
  • Look at airport security now. What started out as definite racial profiling is now where the computer picks a name. That’s why you get a seven-month-old getting a pat down. [Imitates a security officer.] “Check the diapers. They’re full.”
  • A woman wouldn’t make a bomb that kills you. A woman would make a bomb that makes you feel bad for a while. That’s why there should be a woman President. There’d never be any wars, just every twenty-eight days there’d be very intense negotiations.
  • I walked into my son’s room the other day, and he’s got four screens going at the same time. He’s watching a movie on one screen, playing a game on another, downloading something on this one, texting on that one, people say “He’s got ADD.” Fuck that, he’s multitasking.
  • Here’s the best birth control in the whole world, if you really, if you have no pills, if you have no diaphragm, if you have no other form of contraception. Use it for ladies, if he comes at you with that little thing in his hand, just laugh at it. They can’t deal with it, OK, it’ll be gone.
  • Beer commercials usually show big men, manly men, doing manly things: “You’ve just killed a small animal. It’s time for a light beer.” Why not have a realistic beer commercial, with a realistic thing about beer, where someone goes, “It’s 5:00 in the morning. You’ve just pissed on a dumpster. It’s Miller time.”
  • And the French! The French have a bomb too! Maybe they have the Michelin Bomb- ah! Only destroys restaurants under four stars! They are the one of the only people that still test their bombs! Where do they do it? In the Sahara, in the total wasteland? No, fuck off! In Tahiti! In paradise. Why? Because we’re French. Oh, look, a Greenpeace boat coming to protest- fuck off, I sink you.
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Lines from movies

  • Make your life spectacular. I know I did. — Jack
  • To live… to live would be an awfully big adventure. — Peter Pan
  • A human life is just a heartbeat in heaven. — What Dreams May Come
  • We get to choose who we let into our weird little worlds. — Good Will Hunting
  • Our job is improving the quality of life, not just delaying death. — Patch Adams
  • Some men are born great; others have greatness thrust upon them. — Night at the Museum
  • No matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world. — Dead Poets Society
  • To be free. Such a thing would be greater than all the magic and all the treasures in all the world. — Aladdin
  • You will have bad times, but they will always wake you up to the stuff you weren’t paying attention to. — Good Will Hunting
  • You treat a disease, you win, you lose. You treat a person, I guarantee you, you’ll win, no matter what the outcome. — Patch Adams
  • You must strive to find your own voice because the longer you wait to begin, the less likely you are to find it at all. — Dead Poets Society
  • Well, good luck in the big city. If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere. And if you can’t make it here, welcome to the club. — Robots
  • I try to make sense of things. Which is why, I guess, I believe in destiny. There must be a reason that I am as I am. There must be. — Bicentennial Man
  • You know what music is? God’s little reminder that there’s something else besides us in this universe; harmonic connection between all living beings, everywhere even the stars. — August Rush
  • You’re not perfect, sport. And let me save you the suspense: This girl you met, she isn’t perfect either. But the question is whether or not you’re perfect for each other. That’s the whole deal — that’s what intimacy is all about. — Good Will Hunting
  • What’s wrong with death, sir? What are we so mortally afraid of? Why can’t we treat death with a certain amount of humanity and dignity, and decency, and God forbid, maybe even humor? Death is not the enemy, gentleman. If we’re going to fight a disease, let’s fight one of the most terrible diseases of all, indifference. — Patch Adams
  • You know, some parents, when they’re angry, they get along much better when they don’t live together. They don’t fight all the time, and they can become better people, and much better mummies and daddies for you. And sometimes they get back together. And sometimes they don’t, dear. And if they don’t, don’t blame yourself. Just because they don’t love each other anymore doesn’t mean that they don’t love you. There are all sorts of different families. — Mrs. Doubtfire
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Richard Pryor (quotes)

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  • All humor is rooted in pain.
  • I wanna grow up and be a critic.
  • I believe in divine forces and energies.
  • Everyone carries around his own monsters.
  • Bitch was so fine I’d suck her daddy’s dick.
  • No, I’m not dying, and I sure… ain’t dead.
  • Friends take up time, and I didn’t have time.
  • I ain’t no movie star, man. I’m a booty star.
  • I’m not for integration and I’m not against it.
  • If I ain’t horny, I check to see if my heart’s beatin’.
  • I’m not addicted to coke, i just love the way it smells.
  • I became a performer because it was what I enjoyed doing.
  • I love show business. I wake up every morning and kiss it.
  • I don’t want to go through life as a Wonder Wheel murderer!
  • I’m not addicted to cocaine. I just like the way it smells.
  • Booty is just a ghetto expression, and I’m just a booty star.
  • I’m slower and some days are better than others, but I’m a fighter.
  • Crosses only scare vampires away because they’re allergic to bullshit.
  • He’s just always positive. He’s always smiling and he’s always trying.
  • I was a loner and never hung out with anyone. I never had any friends.
  • If you ask me about women’s lib, I say I don’t even know what that is.
  • I see people as the nucleus of a great idea that hasn’t come to be yet.
  • I don’t see myself getting married again, but if I do, it will be forever.
  • I don’t see myself getting married again, but if I do, it will be forever.
  • It’s been a struggle for me because I had a chance to be white and refused.
  • I had to stop drinkin, cuz I got tired of waking up in my car driving ninety.
  • Most people that you talk to, they’s intelligent. Like I said, “Most people.”
  • Marriage is really tough because you have to deal with feelings… and lawyers.
  • I had to stop drinking, ‘cause I got tired of waking up in my car driving ninety.
  • I think about dying. I’ve come to realize we all die alone in one way or another.
  • I went through every phone book in Africa, and I didn’t find one god damned Pryor!
  • I never met anybody who said when they were a kid, I wanna grow up and be a critic.
  • Now they’re calling taking drugs an epidemic – that’s cos white folks are doing it.
  • I’d like to make you laugh for about ten minutes though I’m gonna be on for an hour.
  • I’d like to make you laugh for about ten minutes though I’m gonna be on for an hour.
  • My grandmother used to discipline me, I mean, beat my ass, and I deserved them, too.
  • I know that if I wasn’t scared, something’s wrong, because the thrill is what’s scary.
  • I believe in the institution of marriage, and I intend to keep trying till I get it right.
  • A lie is profanity. A lie is the worst thing in the world. Art is the ability to tell the truth.
  • I’m for human lib, the liberation of all people, not just black people or female people or gay people.
  • I urge you to ask yourself just how honorable it is to preside over the abuse and suffering of animals.
  • If you want a friend, you don’t buy a friend, Eric, you earn a friend through love and trust and respect.
  • Even when I was a little kid, I always said I would be in the movies one day, and damned if I didn’t make it.
  • Have you ever noticed how quiet you get when you go in the woods? It’s almost like you know that God’s there.
  • I had some great things and I had some bad things. The best and the worst . . . In other words, I had a life.
  • But for the use of physical punishment by, and fear of their oppressors, animals would never be a part of a circus.
  • Movies are movies, and I don’t think any of them are going to hurt the moral fiber of America and all that nonsense.
  • I don’t want them hip white people coming up to me and calling me no n – – or telling me n – – jokes. I don’t like it.
  • I expected Dracula to come jumping out any second. If he did I’d have held up a cross, cause he’s allergic to bullshit.
  • I was kicked out of school because of my attitude. I was not assimilating. So I went to work, taking any jobs I could get.
  • I can’t just say the words, do a lot of one-liners. I love each person I play; I have to be that person. I have to do him true.
  • I was given two weeks to walk again, so I hooked up with a trainer, and he… had me walking. I’ll never forget that, it was grueling.
  • I bought my parents a home before they died, and they got to see that I was going to be all right. They always thought I would go someplace.
  • I won’t talk about what it was like in prison, except to say I’m glad I’m out and that I plan never to go back and to pay my taxes every day.
  • I went to Zimbabwe. I know how white people feel in America now; relaxed! Cause when I heard the police car I knew they weren’t coming after me!
  • A sold-out house my first night back. Do you have any idea what kinda pressure that is? I could have been at home in my warm bed, playing Nintendo.
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  • I’d like to die like my father died… My father died fucking. My father was 57 when he died. The woman was 18. My father came and went at the same time.
  • If I thought about it, I could be bitter, but I don’t feel like being bitter. Being bitter makes you immobile, and there’s too much that I still want to do.
  • I think about being married again, having a home and a wife. No one can ever be married too many times, and maybe if I keep trying I’ll get it right one day.
  • I believe the ability to think is blessed. If you can think about a situation, you can deal with it. The big struggle is to keep your head clear enough to think.
  • I live in racist America and I’m uneducated, yet a lot of people love me and like what I do, and I can make a living from it. You can’t do much better than that.
  • I just don’t want to die alone, that’s all. That’s not too much to ask for, is it It would be nice to have someone care about me, for who I am, not about my wallet.
  • In March I had a minor heart attack while I was vacationing in Australia. it scared me, but it was nothing compared to what someone had in store for me down the road.
  • Hawaii is the best form of comfort for me. When I die, I want to be cremated, and I want half my ashes spread in the Pacific around the island, the rest on the property.
  • Imagine people calling you to find out if you’re dead. I’ve led a real crazy life at times, and I’ve had many strange things happen to me, but that was one of the strangest.
  • I realized this is what God has dealt me, and I should be thankful considering all that’s happened to me in my life, but MS caused the movies to stop – stop dead – and I miss it.
  • Let me tell you what really happened… Every night before I go to bed, I have milk and cookies. One night I mixed some low-fat milk and some pasteurized, then I dipped my cookie in and the shit blew up.
  • It’s so much easier for me to talk about my life in front of two thousand people than it is one-to-one. I’m a real defensive person, because if you were sensitive in my neighborhood you were something to eat.

 

Boom!: The Life and Times of a Suicide Near Death Experiencer (Chris Batts)

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  • After my NDE, I can sense the spiritual realm all around us. I automatically pay attention to it.
  • During my NDE, I learned that God likes cleanliness in the sense that we treat ourselves and our surroundings with respect. When we love ourselves and others, we naturally want to be at our best. Aunt Sara, at the bottom of it, was vicious towards others because she was unhappy with herself. She didn’t want to keep her place neat or throw anything out. In time, she became indifferent to paying bills to the point where all utilities got cut off. This was all a reflection of her troubles on the inside.
  • I asked [God], “Is there anything you want me to tell these people when I go back to Earth?” “Go and tell everyone that I love them.” ” That’s it?” “That’s it.”
  • I became more accepting and understanding of others than ever before. Many people are confused and it’s not their fault. Not everyone in life knows their purpose but that is fine. God still loves them. Everybody is here for a reason, and those reasons are huge. This is true for each and every one of us. It’s humbling when you realize this.
  • I now perceive nature differently too. Whenever I look at tree or a plant, I notice little aspects that I never saw before. I feel how alive plants are on many levels. I notice whenever plants are sick or dying. They are precious to me and I even talk to them. Animals seem different too. I notice how similar they are to humans. In the quiet pauses between the barks of dogs and meows of cats, I hear them communicating certain words and thoughts. And I pay attention to the purity of my drinking water. Whenever I go by a lake, I feel the presence of God very strongly. There are reminders of my NDE everywhere.
  • I prefer my type of music but my angels will telepathically suggest a song I know they like. I put it on. That’s a way I can spend time with them. Our music tastes overlap. I might be vibing to my music and they’ll tell me, ‘That song’s alright,’ but when I put on a song they like, I can feel them jamming. They get happy. They get excited. My angels like soulful music, music about love. The songs they don’t like as much are materialistic songs, the songs only about money.
  • Many people ask how my life is different after my NDE. I am happier and more at peace. Many things that bothered me before don’t bother me now. In situations where I might get mad at someone in the past, I now see their reason for doing what they did. I am not afraid of dying or of hell anymore. I enjoy life instead of worrying about what others think of me. My experience taught me how to treat people, not through rules or guidelines, but simply based on the love I feel within. I feel more compassion for other people and so much more empathy. Although I never liked hurting anyone’s feelings before, that feeling is now much stronger. I don’t like telling a lie and can’t tell one without feeling like a piece of shit afterwards.
  • My spiritual side is like a free-spirited hippie wearing rainbow colors and talking about peace, the type of person I didn’t consider myself before. There are many people who have spiritual tendencies and don’t even know it. A spiritual person doesn’t judge you, no matter how you look. Spiritual people don’t see appearances. We see spirits and we see the good in even the most damaged person. A spiritual person tries to get better every day. I am very open to learning about new opinions and ideas, especially spiritual ones. Anything that has you searching for God is what it’s all about. Trying to help people is the main objective of life and becomes your mission. I want to motivate people who went through the same things that I did.
  • One time, my angels gave me specific messages on humility. Being humble is being strong enough to accept imperfections in yourself and in others. The first key to humility is to appreciate what people do for you. Tell people how important they are to you. Tell them you love them. They just may need to hear it at the exact time that you are around. Don’t hold back. Next, respect people’s views, no matter what their backgrounds, races, or religions. Even if you disagree with an opinion, understand that there is always a reason why people act or think the way they do. No one is perfect. If we were perfect, we would be boring. The last key to being humble is forgiveness. Continue to do good to people even when they screw you over. The best way to kill hate is to love someone. Just because someone is a certain way does not mean you have to be the same way. You don’t have to be bigger but you have to be smarter and wiser. Show love. Hate will come back to you if you show hate. Misery is the result. That is no way for anyone to live.

 

 

I Knew Their Hearts (Jeff Olsen)

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  • We are all one.
  • There are no accidents.
  • Don’t judge anyone.
  • We are all here to learn.
  • Treasure the simple things.
  • We help create our experiences.
  • We are loved, cherished, and honored.
  • Our bodies are temples of the divine.
  • No one truly dies; no one is ever lost.
  • Everyone is on their own unique journey.
  • To what degree have you learned to love?”
  • God knows and loves everyone very personally.
  • We experience life in a way that makes us more godlike.
  • to fill the emptiness of our souls is painful and futile)
  • Our hearts know the answer to whatever questions we have.
  • In order to know another person’s heart, we must first know our own.
  • Glimpses of eternity sometimes make things more difficult in this world
  • Choose to see every experience positively; as opportunities to learn, grow,
  • In every situation we encounter, especially the challenging ones, choose joy.
  • Everything happens for a reason; there is purpose in every circumstance; there
  • True peace can only be found from the inside out (looking to people and things
  • One of the best ways to ease our pain is to reach out and be fully present for
  • I’ve learned to treasure the simple things, like holding my child’s hand, or watching my wife as she sleeps.
  • Was this how he walked the earth, in the consciousness of knowing each individual soul at this deep level of love?
  • I felt spontaneous, intense love for each and every one of them. Not a romantic love, but a perfect, compassionate love…
  • I feel the souls of others, even strangers. I no longer judge, I’m not interested in being ‘right’ – I know that love is all there is and that God loves ALL of his children deeply and equally.
  • I experienced no judgement. Only love. I learned that all my judgments were self imposed. God knew me perfectly. He wasn’t testing me or proving me, He knew me already, it was only I that did not know myself.
  • I moved about the hospital with ease, pausing to take in the beauty of the people I was encountering. I felt their true essence and marveled at the connection I had to each of them, even though I had never met them before…
  • Most of my life, I had actually avoided people. Now, everyone I saw was truly my brother or sister. In fact it went even deeper than that. THEY were, in a strange sense, ME! We were all connected pieces in a huge puzzle of oneness.
  • Words Jesus had said rushed to my recollection: ‘Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these brethren ye have done it unto me.’ Was he talking about the awareness I was experiencing? Did he feel the same thing I was feeling?
  • I felt the hustle and unrest of the hallway of a hospital. I watched the doctors and nurses as they went about their duties. I moved with ease all around them. I realized none of them were aware of me. They could not see me, but – wow – could I see them!
  • children to heal me, and in many ways, they all have, but looking outward for wholeness was a losing and painful battle… Not until I remembered the divinity within myself did I become whole. Only in that reality did I truly connect with others around me.
  • I returned with specific gifts and deeper spirituality and love. I saw symbols much differently in religious ceremonies and embraced new, deeper meaning in everything from sacred ordinances to nature. Now, even a rain storm, or a breeze, or sun on my face is a blessed gift.
  • I realized he didn’t see himself as better than the beggar or the prisoner; he knew he was one with them. He knew them perfectly, in the same way I was experiencing the strangers I saw. We are all linked and equal in God’s eyes. I was seeing it, feeling it, and experiencing it.”
  • I left my body at the scene of the accident and visited another realm of light where I was told by my own deceased wife that I must return to my oldest son who also survived the accident. As I returned to my body I had profound experiences with the living people I encountered. All judgment was lost as I saw others for who they really are through God’s eyes.
  • As smoothly as I had ascended to that place of peace, I was away again. There had been no judgment and no life review. It had only been a brief peak into something profound. And I drifted away, there was only one overwhelming question, not asked by a voice, but with energy that echoed into every cell of my being. The question was simply: ‘To what degree have you learned to love?’
  • I ‘knew’ my whole life, every event both good and bad, yet standing in the presence of divinity I saw the pure love in all of it. There was NO judgement, only the ‘knowing’ that it was all perfect. That my entire life was created in love FOR me. Even my choices, good or bad, had served my highest good in every way. For I was only here to learn and God, along with me, had provided the perfect path for my souls progression.
  • My perceptions were expanded. I knew each person I saw perfectly. I knew their joys and their sorrows. I knew their love, their hate, their pain, and their secrets. I knew everything about them, every detail, every motivation, and every outcome. I knew every emotion they were feeling, and I knew intuitively why they were feeling it. In an instant, with no contemplation, I knew them as well as I knew myself. I knew their hearts…
  • I used to embrace the belief that we are separate, when in reality we are not. I’ve learned not to judge others’ lives or compare them to mine. I have no idea what their journey is about. I know each soul is on his or her individual path. They have come here to learn. And they will learn in their own way, on their own terms. I can honor their individual progression. I learned to forgive, especially myself, which has inspired me to love at a deeper level.
  • If I have 5 senses here, there I had 50. It was super-real! Ever since, this realm has felt like the strange foggy dream. That was real, this is a dense illusion. During the experience I could truly see in a way indescribable. However it was far deeper than what I saw. It was the depth of what I felt. My hearing was beyond the senses of my ears. I felt every sound and word. I literally experienced the vibration of it all. In fact there were very few words or hearing, only intense knowing.
  • After my experience TRUTH was far more important to me then religion. I no longer judged others. I had deeper compassion and love for my fellow beings here. I lost any fear of death or God. I felt more connected to home and realized how close angels actually are, How loved we are and how perfect the plan is for each of us no matter what path we walk. I realized what a gift my body actually is. That it is my sacred temple and that deep within my heart is my own holy of holies where I already have all my own answers.
  • I grew up believing that God would judge me and that He was testing me in some way. I experienced that He loves me unconditionally and makes no judgments at all. He simply loves me enough to let me create my own experience and learn what I came here to learn from it. That what I think is bad might actually be a wonderful gift and opportunity. I learned that we are a part of God and even divine ourselves in this whole perfect process. Nothing is out of order in the universe except for us, and even that is for our own progression and growth.
  • I was fortunate to have a glimpse into that oneness, and yet my life has not been easier because of it. Some of my most trying times came over the years after the accident. Knowing that such unconditional love existed beyond the veil left me feeling empty at times in this realm. I found myself searching for the same love I had experienced in my brief visits to the hereafter. The gaping hole in my heart yearned to be filled. Too often I looked to external influences to fill the void inside me. I expected my new wife to fill me up and make me whole. I expected my
  • I was a part of ALL OF IT. I was as eternal as the divine Creator I stood with. I had actually taken part in creating my own life experience to learn what I wanted to come to earth to get. Truth, knowledge, light and love flowed through me in a way that I was literally a part of it. I was in God and He was in me. We were ONE. And I was at one with every soul. We were knit together as beautiful parts of the perfect whole. We definitely live on – eternally. There is NO death. Simply a passing or a return to home. We are all ONE and we are in actuality One with God. Everything is in perfect order.
  • I saw purpose in every event of my entire life. I saw how every circumstance had been divinely provided for my learning and development. I had the realization that I had actually taken part in creating every experience of my life. I knew I had come to this earth for only one reason, which was to learn, and that everything that had ever happened to me had been a loving step in that process of my progression. Every person, every circumstance, and every incident was custom created for me. It was as if the entire universe existed for my higher good and development. I felt so loved, so cherished, and so honored. I realized that not only was I embraced by deity, but also that I myself was divine, and that we all are. I knew that there are no accidents in this life. That everything happens for a Yet we always get to choose how we will experience what happens to us here… Everything suddenly made sense. Everything had divine order.  Jeff Olsen
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  • I realized that no one ever really dies. We always live on. I had experienced a God as real and tangible as we are. He knows our every heartache, yet allows us to experience and endure them for our growth. His is the highest form of love; He allows us to become what we will. He watches as we create who we are. He allows us to experience life in a way that makes us more like Him, divine creators of our own destiny.
  • That everything that had ever happened to me had been a loving step in that process of my progression. Every person, every circumstance, and every incident was custom created for me. It was as if the entire universe existed for my higher good and development. I felt so loved, so cherished, and so honored. I realized that not only was I being embraced by deity, but also that I myself was divine, and that we all are. I knew that there are no accidents in this life. That everything happens for a reason. Yet we always get to choose how we will experience what happens to us here. I could exercise my will in everything, even in how I felt about the wreck and the death of my family members. God didn’t want me to hurt and feel put upon as if my son and wife had been taken from me. He was simply there assisting me to decide how I was going to experience it. He was providing me with the opportunity, in perfect love, to exercise my personal agency in this entire situation. I knew my wife and son were gone. They had died months earlier, but time didn’t exist where I was at that moment. Rather than having them ripped away from me, I was being given the opportunity to actually hand them over to god. To let them go in peace, love, and gratitude. Everything suddenly made sense. Everything had divine order. I could give my son to god and not have him taken away from me. I felt my power as a creator and cocreator with god to literally let go of all that had happened to me. I held my baby son as god himself held me. I experienced the oneness of all of it. Time did not matter. Only love and order existed. Tamara and griffin had come into my life as perfect teachers. And in leaving me in such a way, they continued as perfect teachers to bring me to that point of remembering who I was. Remembering that I was created in god’s image and actually came from him. I was aware now that I could actually walk with god, empowered by what I was learning in my life. I felt the divine energy of the being behind me inviting me to let it all go and give griffin to him. In all that peace and knowledge, I hugged my little boy tightly one last time, kissed him on the cheek, and gently laid him back down in the crib. I willingly gave him up. No one would ever take him away from me again. He was mine. We were one, and I was one with god. As soon as I breathed in all that peace, I awoke, back into the pain and darkness of my hospital bed, but with greater perspective. I marveled at what I had just experienced. It was not just a dream. It felt too real. It was real to me, far more real than the pain, the grief, and my hospital bed. Griffin was alive in a place more real than anything here. And tamara was there with him. I knew it. As the years have passed, I’ve often wondered how I could have put my son back in the crib the way I did. Maybe I should have held on and never let go. But in that place, it all made sense. I realized that no one ever really dies. We always live on. I had experienced a god as real and tangible as we are. He knows our every heartache, yet allows us to experience and endure them for our growth. His is the highest form of love; he allows us to become what we will. He watches as we create who we are. He allows us to experience life in a way that makes us more like him, divine creators of our own destiny. My experience showed me purpose and order. I knew there was a master plan far greater than my limited earthly vision. I also learned that my choices were mine alone to make. I got to decide how I felt, and that made all the difference in the universe. Even in this tragedy, I got to determine the outcome. I could choose to be a victim of what had happened or create something far greater.

 

 

Dying to Be Me: My Journey from Cancer, to Near Death, to True Healing (Anita Moorjani)

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  • All that materializes dematerializes.
  • Life is to be lived with joy and abandon.
  • There’s no separation except in our own minds.
  • Inpirational Hedy Lamarr Quotes to Keep You Positive
  • The games we have the ability to play in our minds amaze me.
  • My outer life is actually only a reflection of my inner state.
  • I wanted to shut out reality in an attempt to shut out the truth.
  • Any positivity you bring to yourself, you’re bringing to the Whole.
  • The universe only gives me what I’m ready for, and only when I’m ready.
  • It was as though their emotions were mine. It was as though I became them.
  • Beliefs only allow what we deem credible while keeping out everything else.
  • I’m loved unconditionally, for no other reason than simply because I exist.
  • Religion is not truth. It is just a path. And different people follow different paths.
  • Unconditional self-love increases my energy tremendously, and the universe acts in kind.
  • We’re all co-creating this world and our lives within it through our emotions, thoughts, and actions.
  • What’s also very clear is that the universe only gives me what I’m ready for, and only when I’m ready.
  • I could feel my attachment recede as I began to know that everything was perfect and going according to plan.
  • I knew that was really the only purpose of life: to be our self, live our truth, and be the love that we are.
  • Only by being my unique self can I allow others to interact with me on the level of their own infinite selves.
  • I perceived that I wouldn’t have to go out and search for what I was supposed to do- it would unfold before me.
  • All things that we perceive as positive, negative, good, or bad are simply parts of the perfect, balanced Whole.
  • But I now understand that the key is to always honor who you truly are and allow yourself to be in your own truth.
  • I just had to be myself and enjoy life, and to allow myself to be an instrument for something much greater to take place.
  • As Elizabeth Barrett Browning once observed poetically: “Earth’s crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God.”
  • Soon, I found myself locked in my own cage of fear and desperation, where my experience of life was getting smaller and smaller.
  • Religion is just a path for finding truth: Religion is not truth. It is just a path. And different people follow different paths.
  • When we’re each aware of our own Magnificence, we don’t feel the need to control others, and we won’t allow ourselves to be controlled.
  • Each time my emotions took over the situation, I discovered myself starting to expand again, and I felt a release from all attachment.
  • When I was willing to let go of what I wanted, I received what was truly mine. I’ve realized that the latter is always the greater gift.
  • We are not these bodies; we’re neither our accomplishments nor our possessions—we are all one with the Source of all being, which is God.
  • The dichotomy is that for true healing to occur, I must let go of the need to be healed and just enjoy and trust in the ride that is life.
  • Everything that seemingly happens externally is occurring in order to trigger something within us, to expand us and take us back to who we truly are.
  • Unconditional Love is our birthright, not judgment or condemnation, and there’s nothing we need to do to earn it. This is simply who and what we are.
  • Because of my experience, I absolutely do strongly believe that we all have the capacity to heal ourselves as well as facilitate the healing of others.
  • I could feel my attachment to the scene receding as I began to realize that everything was perfect and going according to plan in the greater tapestry.
  • I can’t say this strongly enough, but our feelings about ourselves are actually the most important barometer for determining the condition of our lives!
  • We’ve allowed our fears and ego to edge God out of our lives, which has much to do with all of the disease not only in our bodies, but in our world as well.
  • Our life is our prayer. It’s our gift to this universe, and the memories we leave behind when we someday exit this world will be our legacy to our loved ones.
  • In the tapestry of life, we’re all connected. Each one of us is a gift to those around us helping each other be who we are, weaving a perfect picture together.
  • Letting go of attachment to any way of believing or thinking has made me feel more expanded and almost transparent so that universal energy can just flow through me.
  • When my inner dialogue is telling me that I’m safe, unconditionally loved, and accepted, I then radiate this energy outward and change my external world accordingly.
  • …letting go of attachment to any way of believing or thinking has made me feel more expanded and almost transparent so that universal energy can just flow through me.
  • When we realize our magnificence and live in our true nature of love, we’ll synchronistically attract the right teacher, book, or spiritual philosophy at the right time!
  • We all are God. We’ve allowed our fears and ego to edge God out of our lives, which has much to do with all of the disease not only in our bodies, but in our world as well.
  • Pursuing what I desire only reinforces separation, whereas allowing means realizing that since we’re all One and everything is connected, that which I desire is already mine.
  • In my pain and fear, I could no longer see the purpose in continuing, and I felt myself getting tired. I was beginning to give up. I was getting ready to admit that I was beaten.
  • Every aspect of you is perfect. There’s nothing to let go, nothing to forgive, nothing to attain. You already are everything you need to be. It can seem so complicated, but it’s not.
  • Every single encounter was woven together to create the fabric that was the sum of my life up to this point. I may have been only one thread, yet I was integral to the overall finished picture.
  • And then I was overwhelmed by the realization that God isn’t a being, but a state of being…and I was now that state of being! And then I was overwhelmed by the realization that God isn’t a being.
  • If we can go through life armed with humor and the realization that we are love, we’ll already be ahead of the game. Add a box of good chocolates into the mix, and we’ve really got a winning formula!
  • The process of allowing happens by first trusting, and then by always being true to who I am. In this way, I will only attract that which is truly mine, and it all happens at the rate I’m comfortable with.
  • I sense that we choose to incarnate into a physical body in order to express love, passion, and the full range of other human emotions not available to us separately in the state of pure awareness and Oneness.
  • Cancer is just a word that creates fear. Forget about that word, and let’s just focus on balancing your body. All illnesses are just symptoms of imbalance. No illness can remain when your entire system is in balance.
  • When you can completely love your ego unconditionally and accept it as part of how you express in this life, you’ll no longer have a problem with it. It won’t impede your growth – on the contrary, it will be an asset.
  • I just had to be myself, fearlessly! In that way, I’d be allowing myself to be an instrument of love. I understood that this was the best thing that any of us could possibly do or be, for both the planet and ourselves.
  • What I mean by being centered is experiencing being at the center of my cosmic web, being aware of my position. This is really the only place any of us ever are, and it’s important to feel our centrality at the core of it.
  • I’m at my strongest when I’m able to let go, when I suspend my beliefs as well as disbeliefs, and leave myself open to all possibilities. That also seems to be when I’m able to experience the most internal clarity and synchronicities.
  • I believe that the greatest truths of the universe don’t lie outside, in the study of the stars and the planets. They lie deep within us, in the magnificence of our heart, mind, and soul. Until we understand what is within, we can’t understand what is without.
  • We’re all—every single one of us—unique, indispensable facets of the infinite universe. Each of us is an integral part of the greater unfolding tapestry that’s continually working toward healing the planet. Our only obligation is to always be true to ourselves and to allow.
  • So no, it wasn’t my beliefs that caused me to heal. My NDE was a state of pure awareness, which is a state of complete suspension of all previously held doctrine and dogma. This allowed my body to reset itself. In other words, an absence of belief was required for my healing.
  • We always attract the perfect results, and like calls to like. So the kinder I am to myself, the more outward events will reflect that. The harder and more judgmental I am toward myself, the more my situation will match it. The universe always proves me right in my opinion of myself!
  • I also used to believe that I wasn’t spiritual enough and needed to work harder in that area. Then I discovered that we’re all spiritual, regardless of what we do or believe. We can’t be anything else, because that’s who we are—spiritual beings. We just don’t always realize it, that’s all.
  • Words taken literally or held as ultimate truth can keep us stagnant and stuck, holding on to old ideologies. I now know that everything I need is already contained within me and is completely aceessible if I allow myself to open up to what I sense is true for me…and the same is true for you.
  • When I’m being love, I don’t get drained, and I don’t need people to behave a certain way in order to feel cared for or to share my magnificence with them. They’re automatically getting my love as a result of me being my true self. And when I am nonjudgmental of myself, I feel that way toward others.
  • When we’re true to ourselves, we become instruments of truth for the planet. Because we’re all connected, we touch the lives of everyone around us, who then affect others. Our only obligation is to be the love we are and allow our answers to come from within in the way that’s most appropriate for us.
  • I believe that at the core, no one is truly bad—that evil is only a product of our fears, the same way my cancer was. From the magnificent perspective, even criminals are victims of their own limitations, fear, and pain. If they’d had true self-awareness to begin with, they never would have caused any harm.
  • I understood that at the core, our essence is made of pure love. We are pure love-every single one of us. How can we not be, if we come from the Whole and return to it? I knew that realizing this meant never being afraid of who we are. Therefore, being love and being our true self is one and the same thing!
  • I understood that at the core, our essence is made of pure love. We are pure love—every single one of us. How can we not be, if we come from the Whole and return to it? I knew that realizing this meant never being afraid of who we are. Therefore, being love and being our true self is one and the same thing!
  • I have discovered that to determine whether my actions stem from doing or being, I only need to look at the emotion behind my everyday decisions. Is it fear, or is it passion? If everything I do each day is driven by passion and a zest for living, then I’m being, but if my actions are a result of fear, then I’m in doing mode.
  • Why do I believe this? I asked myself. Is it purely cultural and social conditioning? It might have applied to me at some point, but does it still hold true? Does it serve me to continue to believe a lot of what I was brought up and taught to think? In some situations, maybe, but in a lot of cases, the answer was a definite no.
  • It’s also not the case that attracting positive things is simply about keeping upbeat. I can’t say this strongly enough, but our feelings about ourselves are actually the most important barometer for determining the condition of our lives! In other words, being true to ourselves is more important than just trying to stay positive!
  • Previously, I used to pursue, feeling as though I had to do, get, and achieve. However, the very act of going after something stems from fear—we’re afraid of not having what we truly want. It keeps us stuck in duality, because the focus is on the inherent separation between the hunter and the quarry. Now, however, I no longer chase anything. Instead, I allow.
  • We’re all born with an ego – it’s a natural part of who we are here. We’re only completely without it in death. Fighting against this during life only creates more self-judgement. Plus, only when we love our ego unconditionally are we able to accept everyone else’s. This is when it stops being an issue, and your humility and magnificence really shine through.
  • Before, without even realizing it, everything I did was to avoid pain or to please other people. I was caught up in doing, pursuing, searching, and achieving; and I was the last person I ever took into consideration. My life was driven by fear—of displeasing others, of failing, of being selfish, and of not being good enough. In my own head, I always fell short.
  • In my NDE state, I realized that the entire universe is composed of unconditional love, and I’m an expression of this. Every atom, molecule, quark, and tetraquark, is made of love. I can be nothing else, because this is my essence and the nature of the entire universe. Even things that seem negative are all part of the infinite, unconditional spectrum of love.
  • I realized that time doesn’t move in a linear fashion unless we’re using the filter of our physical bodies and minds. Once we’re no longer limited by our earthly senses, every moment exists simultaneously. I’ve come to think that the concept of reincarnation is really just an interpretation, a way for our intellect to make sense of all existence happening at once.
  • I understood that merely by being the love I truly am, I would heal both myself and others. I’d never understood this before, yet it seemed so obvious. If we’re all One, all facets of the same Whole, which is unconditional love, then of course who we are is love! I knew that was really the only purpose of life: to be our self, live our truth, and be the love that we are.
  • Selfishness comes from too little self-love, not too much, as we compensate for our lack. There’s no such thing as caring for the self too much, just as there’s no such thing as too much genuine affection for others. Our world suffers from too little self-love and too much judgment, insecurity, fear, and mistrust. If we all cared about ourselves more, most of these ills would disappear.
  • I realized that every moment in all our lives – past, present, future, known, unknown, and unknowable – exist simultaneously, as though outside of what we know as time. I became aware that I already was everything I was trying to attain, and I believe that’s true for everyone. All things that we perceive as positive, negative, good, or bad, are simply parts of the perfect, balanced Whole.
  • The reason why humans are so vulnerable and fearful around this subject is because we create our ideas of the afterlife and our gods in human terms. We assign to these concepts the same physical properties and fallible values that we posses and are vulnerable to—values such as fear, retribution, judgment, and punishment. And then we project all our strength and power onto our own creations.
  • Since the tapestry of all time has already been woven, everything I could ever want to happen in my life already exists in that infinite, nonphysical plane. My only task is to expand my earthly self enough to let it into this realm. So if there’s something I desire, the idea isn’t to go out and get it, but to expand my own consciousness to allow universal energy to bring it into my reality here.
  • Being love also means being aware of the importance of nurturing my own soul, taking care of my own needs, and not putting myself last all the time. This allows me to be true to myself at all times and to treat myself with total respect and kindness. It also lets me view what may be interpreted as imperfections and mistakes with no judgment, seeing only opportunities to experience and to learn with unconditional love.
  • I felt as though I didn’t fit in with the people of this planet and their values. My priorities had changed, and I found that I was no longer interested in working in an office, reporting to anyone, or earning money for its own sake. I didn’t care to network, go out with friends after work to unwind, deal with morning or evening rush hours, or commute to work in the city. And so for the first time since my NDE, I felt lost…and lonely.
  • I detach myself from preconceived outcomes and trust that all is well. Being myself allows the wholeness of my unique magnificence to draw me in those directions most beneficial to me and to all others. This is really the only thing I have to do. And within that framework, everything that’s truly mine comes into my life effortlessly, in the most magical and unexpected ways imaginable, demonstrating every day the power and love of who I truly am.
  • If things seemed challenging, instead of trying to change them physically (which is what I did pre-NDE), I began checking in with my internal world. If I’m stressed, anxious, unhappy, or something similar, I go inward and tend to that first. I sit with myself, walk in nature, or listen to music until I get to a centered place where I feel calm and collected. I noticed that when I do so, my external world also changes, and many of the obstacles just fall away without my actually doing anything.
  • I’ve learned that strongly held ideologies actually work against me. Needing to operate out of concrete beliefs limits my experiences because it keeps me within the realm of only what I know—and my knowledge is limited. And if I restrict myself to only what I’m able to conceive, I’m holding back my potential and what I allow into my life. However, if I can accept that my understanding is incomplete, and if I’m able to be comfortable with uncertainty, this opens me up to the realm of infinite possibilities.
  • To access this state of allowing, the only thing I had to do was be myself! I realized that all those years, all I ever had to do was be myself, without judgment or feeling that I was flawed. At the same time, I understood that at the core, our essence is made of pure love. We are pure love—every single one of us. How can we not be, if we come from the Whole and return to it? I knew that realizing this meant never being afraid of who we are. Therefore, being love and being our true self is one and the same thing!
  • Q: Most people on a spiritual path believe that the ego impedes spiritual growth and that we’re supposed to shed the ego. Why aren’t you advocating this? A: Because if you deny the ego, it will push back against you harder. The more you reject something, the more it fights back for its own survival. But when you can completely love your ego unconditionally and accept it as part of how you express in this life, you’ll no longer have a problem with it. It won’t impede your growth—on the contrary, it will be an asset.
  • Living more in harmony with who we truly are isn’t just forcing ourselves to repeat positive thoughts. It really means being and doing things that make us happy, things that arouse our passion and bring out the best in us, things that make us feel good—and it also means loving ourselves unconditionally. When we’re flowing in this way and feeling upbeat and energized about life, we’re in touch with our magnificence. When we can find that within us, things really start to get exciting, and we find synchronicities happening all around us.
  • Why, oh why, have I always been so harsh with myself? Why was I always beating myself up? Why was I always forsaking myself? Why did I never stand up for myself and show the world the beauty of my own soul? Why was I always suppressing my own intelligence and creativity to please others? I betrayed myself every time I said yes when I meant no! Why have I violated myself by always needing to seek approval from others just to be myself? Why haven’t I followed my own beautiful heart and spoken my own truth? Why don’t we realize this when we’re in our physical bodies?
  • I became aware that we’re all connected. This was not only every person and living creature, but the interwoven unification felt as though it were expanding outward to include everything in the universe—every human, animal, plant, insect, mountain, sea, inanimate object, and the cosmos. I realized that the entire universe is alive and infused with consciousness, encompassing all of life and nature. Everything belongs to an infinite Whole. I was intricately, inseparably enmeshed with all of life. We’re all facets of that unity—we’re all One, and each of us has an effect on the collective Whole. I
  • I’m at my strongest when I’m able to let go, when I suspend my beliefs as well as disbeliefs, and leave myself open to all possibilities. That also seems to be when I’m able to experience the most internal clarity and synchronicities. My sense is that the very act of needing certainty is a hindrance to experiencing greater levels of awareness. In contrast, the process of letting go and releasing all attachment to any belief or outcome is cathartic and healing. The dichotomy is that for true healing to occur, I must let go of the need to be healed and just enjoy and trust in the ride that is life.
  • In that expansive state, I realized how harshly I’d treated myself and judged myself throughout my life. There was nobody punishing me. I finally understood that it was me I hadn’t forgiven, not other people. I was the one who was judging me, whom I’d forsaken, and whom I didn’t love enough. It had nothing to do with anyone else. I saw myself as a beautiful child of the universe. Just the fact that I existed made me deserving of unconditional love. I realized that I didn’t need to do anything to deserve this—not pray, nor beg, nor anything else. I saw that I’d never loved myself, valued myself, or seen the beauty of my own soul.
  • When we live completely from the mind over a period of time, we lose touch with the infinite self, and then we begin to feel lost. This happens when we’are in doingmode all the time, rather than being . The latter means letting ourselves be who and what we are without judgment. Being doesn’t mean that we don’t do anything. It’s just that our actions stem from following our emotions and feelings while staying present in the moment. Doing, on the other hand, is future focused, with the mind creating a series of tasks that take us from here to there in order to achieve a particular outcome, regardless of our current emotional state.
  • I believe this is the most powerful idea for each of us: realizing that we’re here to discover and honor our own individual path. It doesn’t matter whether we renounce the material world and meditate on a mountaintop for 20 years or create a billion-dollar multinational company that employs thousands of people, giving them each a livelihood. We can attend a temple or church, sit on the beach, drink a margarita, take in a glorious sunset with a loved one, or walk through the park enjoying an ice cream. Ultimately, whichever path we choose is the right one for us, and none of these options are any more or less spiritual than the others.
  • Although I strongly believe that the best thing I can do for myself and others is to consciously keep myself uplifted and do what makes me feel happy, you may be surprised to learn that I don’t advocate positive thinking as a blanket prescription. It’s true that since all of life is connected, keeping myself in high spirits has a larger impact, as it is also what I’m putting out to the Whole. However, if and when I notice negative thoughts creeping in, it seems best to allow them to pass through with acceptance and without judgment. When I try to suppress or force myself to change my feelings, the more I push them away, the more they push back. I just allow it all to flow through me, without judgment, and I find that the thoughts and emotions will pass. As a result, the right path for me unfolds in a totally natural way, letting me be who I truly am.
  • A lot of people don’t like to hear that there’s no judgment after we die. It’s comforting to think that people will be held accountable for their wrongdoings. But punishment, rewards, judgment, condemnation, and the like are a here thing, not a there thing. That’s why we have laws, rules, and systems. On the other side, there’s total clarity about why we are the way we are and why we did anything we did, no matter how unethical it felt in life. I believe that those who hurt others only do so out of their own pain and their feelings of limitation and separation. Perpetrators of acts such as rape and murder are far removed from even having an inkling of their own magnificence. I imagine they have to be extremely unhappy within themselves to cause so much pain to others, so in fact, they need the most compassion—not judgment and further suffering in the afterlife.
  • If we’re energetic beings inseparable from the Universal life force, we don’t need any outside system to make decisions for us or tell us how our energy can be raised or lowered. We’re all unique, so no one can really make blanket rules about what’s right for us. However, this is what many organized spiritual systems and religions seem to do. Once a structure is established, everyone is expected to follow the same tenets. Those who choose not to are judged negatively, and that’s how and why organized religions create divisiveness and strife instead of the unity that they’re trying to establish with those very rules. Following a religious path doesn’t necessarily exempt us from living a life of fear or even victimizing others. Following a personal spiritual path, however, means to follow the promptings of our own inner being and taps into the infinite self we all are at our core.
  • As I looked at the great tapestry that was the accumulation of my life up to that point, I was able to identify exactly what had brought me to where I was today. Just look at my life path! Why, oh why, have I always been so harsh with myself? Why was I always beating myself up? Why was I always forsaking myself? Why did I never stand up for myself and show the world the beauty of my own soul? Why was I always suppressing my own intelligence and creativity to please others? I betrayed myself every time I said yes when I meant no! Why have I violated myself by always needing to seek approval from others just to be myself? Why haven’t I followed my own beautiful heart and spoken my own truth? Why don’t we realize this when we’re in our physical bodies? How come I never knew that we’re not supposed to be so tough on ourselves? I still felt myself completely enveloped in a sea of unconditional love and acceptance. I was able to look at myself with fresh eyes, and I saw that I was a beautiful being of the Universe. I understood that just the fact that I existed made me worthy of this tender regard.
  • When I feel an incredible desire for where I want my life to go, I know that if I were to pursue it aggressively, this would only cause me to fight against universal energy. The more effort I have to put into trying to attain it, the more I know that I am doing something wrong. Allowing, on the other hand, doesn’t require effort. It feels more like a release, because it means realizing that since everything is One, that which I intend to get is already mine. The process of allowing happens by first trusting, and then by always being true to who I am. In this way, I will only attract that which is truly mine, and it all happens at the rate I’m comfortable with. I can keep focusing on what worries me or what I think I need or find lacking, and my life won’t move toward what I’d like to experience. It will just stay the way it is now, because I’m paying attention to my fears and what upsets me or leaves me feeling unfulfilled, instead of expanding my awareness by trusting and allowing new experiences. So I can let the picture materialize slower or faster, depending on how quickly I want to let go of my worries and relax into the process.
  • So I found myself with nothing but compassion for all the criminals and terrorists in the world, as well as their victims. I understood in a way I never had before that for people to commit such acts, they must really be full of confusion, frustration, pain, and self-hatred. A self-actualized and happy individual would never carry out such deeds! People who cherish themselves are a joy to be around, and they only share their love unconditionally. In order to be capable of such crimes, someone had to be (emotionally) diseased—in fact, much like having cancer. However, I saw that those who have this particular type of mental cancer are treated with contempt in our society, with little chance of receiving any practical help for their condition, which only reinforces their condition. By treating them in this way, we only allow the cancer in our society to grow. I could see that we haven’t created a society that promotes both mental and physical healing. This all meant that I was no longer able to view the world in terms of us and them—that is, victims and perpetrators. There’s no them; it’s all us. We’re all One, products of our own creation, of all our thoughts, actions, and beliefs. Even perpetrators are victims of their own self-hatred and pain.
  • The way I see it, if we were encouraged to express who we truly are, we’d all be very loving beings, each bringing our uniqueness to the world. Problems and strife come as a result of our not knowing who we are and not being able to show our inner beauty. We’ve created so much judgment about what’s perfect, which leads to doubt and competitiveness. Since we feel as though we’re not good enough, we go around acting out. However, if each of us became aware of our magnificence and felt good about ourselves, it seems to me the only thing we’d have to share is our unique nature, expressed outwardly in a loving manner that reflects our self-care. It follows that the problems we see in the world aren’t from the judgment or hatred we have for others but for ourselves. Just as the key to my healing was unconditional self-love that eliminated fear, the key to a better world is for everyone to care for themselves the same way, realizing their true worth. If we stopped judging ourselves, we’d automatically find less and less need to condemn others. We’d begin to notice their true perfection. The universe is contained within us, and what we experience externally is only a reflection. I believe that at the core, no one is truly bad—that evil is only a product of our fears, the same way my cancer was.

 

 

Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All (Tom Kelley & David Kelley)

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  • Failure sucks, but instructs.
  • The history of discovery is full of creative serendipity.
  • The first step toward a great answer is to reframe the question.
  • Belief in your creative capacity lies at the heart of innovation.
  • you are not limited to only what you have been able to do before.
  • A growth mindset, on the other hand, is a passport to new adventures.
  • So design your space for flexibility instead of inertia and the status quo.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche said, “All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.”
  • Like a muscle, your creative abilities will grow and strengthen with practice.
  • To keep your thinking fresh, constantly seek out new sources of information.
  • A creative mindset can be a powerful force for looking beyond the status quo.
  • It’s hard to be best right away, so commit to rapid and continuous improvements.
  • But to gain this creative, empowered mindset, sometimes you have to touch the snake.
  • Striving for perfection can get in the way during the early stages of the creative process.
  • The three circles represented three questions you should ask yourself: What are you good at?
  • The key is to be quick and dirty—exploring a range of ideas without becoming too invested in only one.
  • Noticing that something is broken is an essential prerequisite for coming up with a creative solution to fix
  • At its core, creative confidence is about believing in your ability to create change in the world around you.
  • Relentless practice creates a database of experience that you can draw upon to make more enlightened choices.
  • But to act, most of us must first overcome the fears that have blocked our creativity in the past. Tom Kelley
  • If you want a team of smart, creative people to do extraordinary things, don’t put them in a drab, ordinary space.
  • A creativity scar, a specific incident when they were told they weren’t talented as artists, musicians, writers, singers.
  • Everything in modern society is the result of a collection of decisions made by someone. Why shouldn’t that someone be you?
  • Their ultimate strokes of genius don’t come about because they succeed more often than other people—they just do more, period.
  • happen in a corporation or in the army, you had to be at the higher ranks, to be a general. But you just need to start a movement.
  • Mark Twain said a century ago, It’s not what you don’t know that gets you into trouble, it’s what you know for sure that ain’t so.
  • That combination of thought and action defines creative confidence: the ability to come up with new ideas and the courage to try them out.
  • New opportunities for innovation open up when you start the creative problem-solving process with empathy toward your target audience—whether
  • Empathy means challenging your preconceived ideas and setting aside your sense of what your think is true in order to learn what actually is true
  • Great groups believe they are on a mission from God. Beyond mere financial success, they genuinely believe they will make the world a better place.
  • Jim Collins began by drawing a Venn diagram of three overlapping circles in the air, challenging the audience to follow along using Theater of the mind.
  • Erik smiles wryly as he remembers what he asked: Isn’t it wonderful now that you have made it as professional musician that you don’t have to practice anymore?
  • It’s not about just coming up with the one genius idea that solves the problem, but trying and failing at a hundred other solutions before arriving at the best one.
  • The looks good, feel bad trap is all about avoiding a career that makes you feel unhappy – and finding the right fit in terms of your interests, skills, and values.
  • I used to think that to make something happen in a corporation or in the army, you had to be at the higher ranks, to be a general. But you just need to start a movement.
  • Think about how you approach clients or customers. Do you ask deep, probing questions, or are you hearing what you expect? Are you making a connection or just making contact?
  • In fact, early failure can be crucial to success in innovation. Because the faster you find weaknesses during an innovation cycle, the faster you can improve what needs fixing.
  • To learn from failure, however, you have to own it. You have to figure out what went wrong and what to do better next time. If you don’t, you’re liable to rpat your errors in the future.
  • Design thinking relies on the natural – and coachable – human ability to be intuitive, to recognize patterns, and to construct ideas that are emotionally meaningful as well as functional.
  • When you influence the dialogue around new ideas, you will influence broader patterns of behaviour. Negative or defeatist attitudes spawn negative or defeatists words. The opposite is also true.
  • Great groups are more optimistic than realistic. They believe they can do what no one else has done before. And the optimists, even when their good cheer is unwarranted, accomplish more, says Warren.
  • As Brown writes: When our self-worth isn’t on the line, we are far more willing to be courageous and risk sharing our raw talents and gifts. One way to embrace creativity, Brown says, is to let go of comparison.
  • Great groups ship. They are places of action, not think tanks or retreat centers devoted solely to the generation of ideas. Warren characterized the successful collaborations he studied as dreams with deadlines.
  • Whether you live in Silicon Valley or Shanghai, Munich or Mumbai, you’ve already felt the effects of seismic market shifts. Most businesses today realize that the key to growth, and even survival, is innovation.
  • As IDEO design director Tom Hulme puts it, Release your idea into the wild before it’s ready. Real-world market testing (even when you know you have more development to do) can be an invaluable source of insight.
  • And that’s the point. Work doesn’t have to feel like Work with a capital W. You should be able to feel passion, purpose, and meaning in whatever you do. And that shift in perspective can open up a world of possibilities.
  • Since then, Bandura’s research has shown that when people have this belief, they undertake tougher challenges, persevere longer, and are more resilient in the face of obstacles and failure. Bandura calls this belief self-efficacy.
  • When you unleash your creative confidence, you start to see new ways to improve on the status quo – from how you throw a dinner party to how you run a meeting. And once you become aware of those opportunities, you have to start seizing them.
  • No company that falls behind the competition is guilty of standing completely still. But sometimes our efforts fail because of the level of commitment to change. I’ll try can become a halfhearted promise of follow-through rather than decisive action.
  • Try to engage a beginner’s mind. For kids, everything is novel, so they ask lots of questions and look at the world wide-eyed, soaking it all in. Everywhere they turn, they tend to think, Isn’t that interesting? rather than I already know about that.
  • By adapting the best attributes of gaming culture, we can shift people’s view of failure and ratchet up their willingness and determination to persevere. We just need to hold out a Reasonable hope for success, as well as the possibility of a truly epic win.
  • No matter how high you rise in your career, no matter how much expertise you gain, you still need to keep your knowledge and your insights refreshed. Otherwise, you may develop a false confidence in what you already know that might lead you to the wrong decision.
  • Try recasting your changes as experiments to boost reception and increase creative confidence. Some will fail (that’s why it’s called trial and error). But many, protected under the non threatening umbrella of experimentation, may raise your chances of success.
  • At IDEO’s Munich office, we call the reframed challenge Question Zero, since it is a new starting point for seeking creative solutions. Reframing the problem not only gives you more successful solutions but also allows you to address brigger, more important problems.
  • The newfound courage, exhibited by the same people who once had to wear hockey masks to get near a snake, led Bandura to pivot toward a new line of research: how people come to believe that they can change a situation and accomplish what they set out to do in the world.
  • We didn’t know as children that we were creative. We just knew that it was okay for us to try experiments that sometimes succeeded and sometimes falied. That we could keep creating, keep tinkering, and trust that something interesting would result if we just stuck with it
  • Whether you consider yourself a born innovator or are new to creative confidence, you can get better faster at coming up with new ideas if you give yourself and those around you the leeway to make mistakes from time to time. Permission to fail comes more easily in some settings than others.
  • It turns out that creativity isn’t some rare gift to be enjoyed by the lucky few—it’s a natural part of human thinking and behavior. In too many of us it gets blocked. But it can be unblocked. And unblocking that creative spark can have far-reaching implications for yourself, yo . . . Read more
  • Mihay Csikszentmihalyi, an expert in the field of positive psychology, calls flow – that creative state in which time seems to slip away and you are completely immersed in an activity for its own sake. When you are in a state of flow, the world around you drops away and you are fully engaged.
  • But innovation – whether driven by an individual or a team – can happen anywhere. It’s fueled by a restless intellectual curiosity, deep optimism, the ability to accept repeated failure as the price of ultimate success, a relentless work ethic, and a mindset that encourages not just ideas, but action.
  • The notion of empathy and human-centeredness is still not widely practiced in many corporations. Business people rarely navigate their own websites or watch how people use their products in a real-world setting. And if you do a word association with business person, the word empathy doesn’t come up much.
  • How can you discover what you’re born to do, or even what you’re good at? One approach is to use your free time to pursue interests or hobbies. A new weekend project can make you feel more energized throughout the week, whether you’re learning how to play the piano or designing Lego robots with your kids. 
  • In our experience, one of the scariest snakes in the room is the fear of failure, which manifests itself in such ways as fear of being judged, fear of getting started, fear of the unknown. And while much has been said about fear of failure, it still is the single biggest obstacle people face to creative success.
  • People who have creative confidence make better choices, set off more easily in new directions, and are better able to find solutions to seemingly intractable problems. They see new possibilities and collaborate with others to improve the situations around them. And they approach challenges with newfound courage.
  • Rediscovering the familiar is a powerful example of how looking at something closely can affect what you see. So apply a beginner’s mind to something you do or see every day: commuting to work, eating dinner, or preparing for a meeting. Look for new insights about familiar things. Think of it as a treasure hunt.
  • As the American writer Mark Twain said a century ago, It’s not what you don’t know that gets you into trouble, it’s what you know for sure that ain’t so. Don’t be fooled by what you know for sure about your customer, yourself, your business, or the world. Seek out opportunities to observe and update your worldview.
  • To overcome inertia, good ideas are not enough. Careful planning is not enough. The organizations, communities, and nations that thrive are the ones that initiate action, that launch rapid innovation cycles, that learn by doing as soon as they can. They are sprinting forward, while others are still waiting at the starting line.
  • Ask yourself, what can you do to increase your deal flow of new ideas? When was the last time you took a class? Read some unusual magazines or blogs? Listened to new kinds of music? Traveled a different route to work? Had coffee with a friend or colleague who can teach you something new? Connected to big ideas people via social media?
  • By adopting the eyes of a traveler and a beginner’s mindset, you will notice a lot of details that you normally might have overlooked. You put aside assumptions and are fully immersed in the world around you. In this receptive mode, you’re ready to start actively searching out inspiration. And when it comes to inspiration, quantity matters.
  • …those under the influence of a fixed mindset were willing to sabotage their long-term chances for success rather than expose a potential weakness. If they let the same logic guide their choices throughout life, it’s easy to understand how their perception of their own abilities as permanently limited can become a self-fulfilling hypothesis.
  • The more fresh new ideas cross your field of vision each day, the greater your insights will be. As Nobel laureate Linus Pauling famously said, If you want a good idea, start with a lot of ideas. At IDEO, we try to keep a fast-running stream of conversations going about provocative new technologies, inspiring case studies, and emerging trends.
  • If you have a problem that you can’t analyze easily, or that doesn’t have a metric or enough data to draw upon, design thinking may be able to help you move forward using empathy and prototyping. When you need to achieve a breakthrough innovation or make a creative leap, this methodology can help you dive into the problem and find new insights.
  • Relaxed attention lies between meditation, where you completely clear your mind, and the laserlike focus you apply when tackling a tough math problem. Our brains can make cognitive leaps when we are not completely obsessed with a challenge, which is why good ideas sometimes come to us while we are in the shower, or taking a walk or a long drive.
  • In reality, we all have a little of both mindsets. Sometimes the fixed mindset whispers in one ear: We’ve never been good at anything creative, so why embarrass ourselves now? And the growth mindset whispers in the other ear: Effort is the path to mastery, so let’s at least give this a try. The question is, which voice are you going to listen to?
  • Author and educator Tina Seelig asks her students to write a failure resume that highlights their biggest defeats and screw-ups. She says that smart people accustomed to promoting their successes find it very challenging. In the process of compiling their failure resume, however, they come to own their setbacks, both emotionally and intellectually.
  • Like too many of us, Jeremy found himself trapped by the curse of competence. Yes, he could successfully perform all the requirements of his job, but he gained no real fulfillment from what he did. Raised with a tireless work ethic, Jeremy showed up at the office everyday, resigned to the fact that I would hate whatever I did for the next twenty years.
  • Creativity is much broader and more universal than what people typically consider the artistic fields. We think of creativity as using your imagination to create something new in the world. Creativity comes into play wherever you have the opportunity to generate new ideas, solutions, or approaches. And we believe everyone should have access to that resource.
  • You don’t have to switch careers or move to Silicon Valley to change your mindset. You don’t have to become a design consultant or quit your job. The world needs more creative policy makers, office managers, and real estate agents. Whatever your profession, when you approach it with creativity, you’ll come up with new and better solutions and more successes.
  • Steve Jobs was famous for his exhortation to make a dent in the universe, which he expressed this way in a interview: “The minute that you understand that you can poke life and actually something will…pop out the other side, that you can change it, you can mold it, that’s maybe the most important thing…Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.”
  • Bandura’s work scientifically validated something we’ve been seeing for years: Doubts in one’s creative ability can be cured by guiding people through a series of small successes. And the experience can have a powerful effect on the rest of their lives. The state of mind Bandura calls self-efficacy is closed related to what we think of as creative confidence.
  • Ever travel to a foreign city? We’ve all heard that travel broadens the mind. But beneath this cliche lies a deep truth. Things stand out because they’re different, so we notice every detail, from street signs to mailboxes to how you pay at a restaurant. We learn a lot when we travel not because we are any smarter on the road, but because we pay such close attention.
  • When our self-worth isn’t on the line, we are far more willing to be courageous and risk sharing our raw talents and gifts. One way to embrace creativity, Brene Brown says, is to let go of comparison. If you are concerned about conforming or about how you measure up to others’ successes, you won’ perform the risk taking and trailblazing inherent in creative endeavors.
  • The doctors and nurses translated the pit crew’s techniques into new behaviours. For example, they now map out tasks and timing for every role in order to minimize the need for conversation. And they step through a checklist to relay key patient information. As reported in the Wall street Journal, the Ferrari- inspired changes reduced technical errors by % and information errors by %.
  • When people transcend the fears that block their creativity, all sorts of new possibilities emerge. Instead of being paralyzed by the prospect of failure, they see every experience as an opportunity they can learn from. The need for control keeps some people stuck at the planning stage of a project. With creative confidence, they become comfortable with uncertainty and are able to leap into action.
  • The question hung in the air for a moment before Yo-Yo Ma delivered the bad news to Erik. Long after ascending to the top of his field, Yo-Yo Ma continues to practice as much as six hours a day. Erik was crushed. But Yo-Yo Ma’s lesson is a reminder to us all – passion doesn’t preclude effort. In fact, passion demands effort. But in the end, you are more likely to feel that all that effort was worthwhile.
  • What we’ve found is that we don’t have to generate creativity from scratch. We just need to help people rediscover what they already have: the capacity to imagine – or build upon – new-to-the-world ideas. But the real value of creativity doesn’t emerge until you are brave enough to act on those ideas. That combination of thought and action defines creative confidence: the ability to come up with new ideas and the courage to try them out.
  • Pressfield’s sleight of hand, substituting the word resistance for procrastination, is more than just semantics. In giving the phenomenon a different name, Pressfield redefines that enemy. Procrastination seems like a form of personal weakness. But Resistance is a force we can do battle with. Mentioning procrastination is a reminder of our failings. But invoking Resistance is a call to arms. It’s an obstacle we are challenged to overcome.
  • To fully appreciate the growth mindset, it helps to contrast it with its all-too-familiar evil twin, the fixed mindset have the deep-seated belief that everyone is born with only a certain amount of intelligence and a certain amount of talent. If invited on a journey to creative confidence, people with a fixed mindset will prefer to stay behind in their comfort zone, afraid that the limits of their capabilities will be revealed to others.
  • While the path of least resistance is usually to coast along in neutral, people with creative confidence have a do something mindset. They believe their actions can make a positive difference, so they act. They recognize that waiting for a perfect plan or forecast might take forever, so they move forward, knowing they will not always be right but optimistic about their ability to experiment and conduct midcourse corrections further down the road.
  • Diego Rodriguez in his blog Metacool says that innovation thinkers often use informed intuition to identify a great insight, a key need, or a core feature. In other words, relentless practice creates a database of experience that you can draw upon to make more enlightened choices. When it comes to bringing new stuff into the world, Diego argues that the number of product cycles you’ve gone through (what he calls mileage) trumps the number of years of experience. –
  • One prerequisite for achieving creative confidence is the belief that your innovation skills and capabilities are not set in stone. If you currently feel that you are not a creative person – if you think, I’m not good at that kind of thing – you have to let go of that belief before you can move on. You have to believe that learning and growth are possible. In other words, you need to start with what Stanford psychology professor Carol Dweck calls a growth mindset.
  • The tendency to label ourselves as noncreative comes from more than just our fear of being judged. As schools cut funding for the arts and high-stakes testing becomes more pervasive, creativity itself is devalued, compared to traditional core subjects like math and science. Those subjects emphasize ways of thinking and problem solving that have a clear-cut single right answer, while many real-world twenty-first-century challenges require more open-minded approaches.
  • One day, David and Brian were in art class, sitting at a table with half a dozen classmates. Brian was working on a sculpture, making a horse out of the clay that the teacher kept under the sink. Suddenly one of the girls saw what he was making, leaned over, and said to him, That’s terrible. That doesn’t look anything like a horse. Brian’s shoulders sank. Dejected, he wadded up the clay horse and throw it back in the bin. David never saw Brian attempt a creative project again.
  • The result was a way forward that the company called Design for Delight – referred to internally as DD. For the employees at Intuit, design for delight means evoking positive emotion by going beyond customer expectations in delivering ease and benefit so people buy more and tell others about the experience. Among the principles are: ) deep customer empathy; ) going broad to go narrow (ie. seeking many ideas before converging on a solution); and ) rapid experiments with customers.
  • Resilient people, in addition to being resourceful problem solvers, are more likely to seek help, have strong social support, and be better connected with colleagues, family, and friends. Resilience is often thought of as a solo effort – the lone hero who falls and rises up again to do battle. In reality, however, reaching out to others is usually a strategy for success. It doesn’t have to be an admission of weakness. We need others to help us bounce back from adversity and hardship.
  • How often does something like that happen in childhood? Whenever we mention lost-confidence stories like Brian’s to business audiences, someone always comes up to us afterward to share a similar experience when a teacher or parent or peer shut them down. Let’s face it, kids can be cruel to one another. Sometimes, people remember a specific moment when they decided, as children, that they weren’t creative. Rather than be judged, they simply withdrew. They stopped thinking of themselves as creative at all.
  • Coe Leta Stafford, a veteran IDEO design researcher with a PhD in cognitive development, has lots of experience asking questions of potential end users. One way she brings questions to life is by making them playful. Instead of asking “Why do you like this book so much?” she’ll turn it into a game: Pretend you wanted to convince a friend that they should read this book, what would you tell them? She reframes the question in a way that sidesteps some of the business as usual responses and elicits more meaningful answers.
  • A wandering mind can be a good thing. Researcher Jonathan Schooler of the University of California believes that our brains are often working on task-unrelated ideas and solutions when we daydream. That could explain studies showing that prolific mind wanderers score higher on tests of creativity. And new research on the network of the brain similarly found that our minds make unlikely connections between ideas, memories, and experiences when we are at rest and not focused on a specific task or project.
  • Successful scientists must have been extremely susceptible to such happy accidents because there are dozens of such stories in the history of science and invention. From penicillin to pacemakers, and from saccharin to safety glass, a lot of discoveries have come into this world because scientists noticed that one of their mishaps or mistakes had turned into a breakthrough. Their success-from-failure stories indicate not only that they were keen observers, but also that they were conducting a lot of experiments to begin with.
  • If you want to make something great, you need to start making. Striving for perfection can get in the way during the early stages of the creative process. So don’t get stuck at the planning stage. Don’t let your inner perfectionist slow you down. All the over-planning, all the procrastinating, and all the talking are signs that we are afraid, that we just don’t feel ready. You want everything to be just right before you commit further or share something with others. That tendency leads us to wait rather than act, to perfect rather than launch.
  • Karaoke confidence, like creative confidence, depends on an absence of fear of failure and judgement. But it does not necessarily require native singing ability or immediate success…Karaoke confidence seems to rely on a few key ingredients. And we’ve noticed that those same ingredients are essential for encouraging cultures of innovation everywhere. Here are five guidelines that can improve your next karaoke experience – and your innovation culture: – keep your sense of humor – Build on the energy of others  – Minimize hierarchy  – Value tam camaraderie and trust   – Defer judgement – at least temporarily
  • In his book Juggling for the Complete Klutz, Cass didn’t start us out juggling two balls, or even one. He began with something more basic: The Drop. Step one is simply to throw all three balls in the air and let them drop. Then repeat. In learning to juggle, the angst comes from failure – from having the ball fall to the floor. So with step one, Cass aims to numb aspiring jugglers to that. Having the ball fall to the floor becomes more normal than the ball not falling to the floor. After we address our fear of failure, juggling becomes a lot easier. The two of us were skeptical at first, but with the help of his simple approach, we really did learn to juggle.
  • A widely held myth suggests that creative geniuses rarely fail. Yet according to Professor Dean Keith Simonton of the University of California, Davis, the opposite is actually true: creative geniuses, from artists like Mozart to scientists like Darwin, are quite prolific when it comes to failure – they just don’t let that step them. His research has found that creative people simply do more experiments. Their ultimate strokes of genius don’t come about because they succeed more often than other people – they just do more, period. They take more shots at the goal. That is the surprising, compelling mathematics of innovation: if you want more success, you have to be prepared to shrug off more failure.
  • How do you make it safe to participate and engage in creative action? How do you gather the courage to try something new, knowing that you may be terrible at it initially? As toddlers, we were all bad at walking, but no one told us we should abandon the effort. As children, most of us had trouble mastering a bicycle, but we were encouraged to keep at it. As young adults, we discovered that driving a car wasn’t as easy as we thought it would be – but we had a lot of motivation to improve our driving skills so that we could get a driver’s license. So why is developing our creative confidence at work so fraught with peril? Why are we so prone to abandon a creative endeavor just because it’s difficult early on?
  • What will people pay you to do? and What were you born to do? If you focus on just what you’re good at, you can end up in a job you are competent at but that doesn’t fulfill you. As for the second circle, while people say, Do what you love and the money will follow, that’s not literally true. One of David’s favourite activities is tinerking in the studio above his workshop; one of Tom’s dreams is to travel the world, collecting stories and experiences from different cultures. So far no one has offered to pay us to do those things. The Third circle – what you were born to do – is about finding work that is intrinsically rewarding. The goal is to find a vocation that you’re good at, that you enjoy, and that someone will pay you to pursue. And of course it’s important to work with people you like and respect.
  • In the realm of video games, the level of challenge and reward rises proportionately with a gamer’s skills; moving forward always requires concentrated effort, but the next goal is never completely out of reach. This contributes to what Jane McGonigal calls urgent optimism: the desire to act immediately to tackle an obstacle, motivated by the belief that you have a reasonable hope of success. Gamers always believe that an epic win is possible – that it is worth trying, and trying now, over and over again. In the euphoria of an epic win, gamers are shocked to discover the extent of their capabilities. As you move from level to level, success can flip your mindset to a state of creative confidence. We’ve all seen this kind of persistence and gradual mastery of skills in children – from toddlers learning to walk to kids learning how to shoot a basketball.
  • Our version of the alternative to negative speech patterns is the phrase How might we…, introduced to us several years ago by Charles Warren, now salesforce.com’s senior vice president of product design. How might we…? is an optimistic way of seeking out new possibilities in the world. In a matter of weeks, the phrase went viral at IDEO and has stuck ever since. In three disarmingly simple words, it captures much of our perspective on creative groups. The how suggests that improvement is always possible – that the only question remaining is how we will find success. The word might temporarily lowers the bar a little. It allows us to consider wild or improbable ideas instead of self-editing from the very beginning, giving us more chance of a breakthrough. And the we establishes ownership of the challenge, making it clear that not only will it be a group effort, but it will be our group. –
  • Amy Wrzesniewski has found that people have one of three distinct attitudes toward the work they do: they think of it as either a job, a career, or a calling. And the difference is crucial. When work is strictly a job, it may effectively pay the bills, but you’re living mostly for the weekend and your hobbies. Those who see work as a career focus on a promotions and getting ahead, putting in long hours to achieve a more impressive title, a larger office, or a higher salary. In other words, you are focused on checking off achievements rather than pursuing deeper meaning. In contrast, for those who pursue a calling, their work is intrinsically rewarding in its own right – no just a means to an end. So, what you do professionally fulfills you personally as well. And often that work is meaningful because you are contributing to a larger purpose or feel part of a larger community. As Wrzesniewski points out, the origins of the word calling: are religious, but it maintains its meaning in the secular context of work: the sense that you are contributing to a higher value or to something bigger than yourself.

 

 

Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered (Austin Kleon)

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  • First, be useful. Then necessary.
  • Become a documentarian of what you do.
  • The worst troll is the one that lives in your head.
  • Don’t show your lunch or your latte, show your work.
  • The real gap is between doing nothing and doing something.
  • it’s not enough to be good. In order to be found, you have to be findable.
  • Walt Disney: We don’t make movies to make money, we make money to make more movies.
  • Go back to your documentation and find one little piece of process that you can share.
  • You can’t be content with mastery; you have to push yourself to become a student again.
  • If you want people to know about what you do and the things you care about, you have to share.
  • Steve Albini says, being good at things is the only thing that earns you clout or connections.
  • George Orwell wrote: Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful.
  • It sounds a little extreme, but in this day and age, if your work isn’t online, it doesn’t exist.
  • The people who get what they’re after are very often the ones who just stick around long enough.
  • This story shows what happens when a musician interacts with his fans on the level of a fan himself.
  • Don’t talk to people you don’t want to talk to, and don’t talk about stuff you don’t want to talk about.
  • Be open, share imperfect and unfinished work that you want feedback on, but don’t share absolutely everything.
  • Alain de Botton wrote, Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn’t learning enough.
  • Being open and honest honest about what you like is the best way to connect with people who like those things, too
  • Cartoonist Natalie Dee says: There’s never a space under paintings in a gallery where someone writes their opinion.
  • ask yourself ‘is it helpful? is it entertaining? is it something i’d be comfortable with my boss or my mother seeing?’
  • Show your work, and when the right people show up, pay close attention to them, because they’ll have a lot to show you.
  • Make stuff you love and talk about stuff you love and you’ll attract people who love that kind of stuff. It’s that simple.
  • Part of the art of creating is in discovering your own kind. They are everywhere. But don’t look for them in the wrong places”
  • Colin Marshall says: If you spend your life avoiding vulnerability, you and your work will never truly connect with other people.
  • Don’t try to be hip or cool. Being open and honest about what you like is the best way to connect with people who like those things, too.
  • Your influences are all worth sharing because they clue people in to who you are and what you do – sometimes even more than your own work
  • Once a day, after you’ve done your day’s work, go back to your documentation and find one little piece of your process that you can share.
  • Online, everyone – the artist and the curator, the master and the apprentice, the expert and the amateur – has the ability to contribute something.
  • The stories you tell about the work you do have a huge effect on how people feel and what they understand about your work, (…) affects how they value it.
  • Want to pick up a great book or two this season? Check out our recommendations of hot books selected by your fellow readers, bestselling authors, and more!
  • But now I realize that the only way to find your voice is to use it. It’s hardwired, built into you. Talk about the things you love. Your voice will follow.
  • The trouble with imaginative people is that we’re good at picturing the worst that could happen to us. Fear is often just the imagination taking a wrong turn.
  • iI sounds a little extreme, but in this day and age, if your work isn’t online, it doesn’t exist. (…) if you want people to know about you, you have to share.
  • Isak Dinesen wrote, You can’t count on success; you can only leave open the possibility for it, and be ready to jump on and take the ride when it comes for you.
  • You have to remember that your work is something you do, not who you are. This is especially hard for artists to accept, as so much of what they do is personal.
  • You should be able to explain your work to a kindergartner, a senior citizen, and everybody in between. of course, you always need to keep your audience in mind.
  • Once a good knuckleball is thrown, it’s equally unpredictable to the batter, the catcher, and the pitcher who threw it. (Sounds a lot like the creative process, huh?)
  • A successful or failed project is no guarantee of another success or failure. Whether you’ve just won big or lost big, you still have to face the question What’s next?
  • To all viewers but yourself, what matters is the product: the finished artwork. To you, and you alone, what matters is the process: the experience of shaping the artwork.
  • But whatever the nature of your work, there is an art to what you do, and there are people who would be interested in that art, if only you presented it to them in the right way.
  • When you find things you genuinely enjoy, don’t let anyone else make you feel bad about it. Don’t feel guilty about the pleasure you take in the things you enjoy. Celebrate them.
  • Artist Ben Shan says: An amateur is an artist who supports himself with outside jobs which enable him to paint. A professional is someone whose wife works to enable him to paint.
  • Social media sites are the perfect place to share daily updates. Don’t worry about being on every platform; pick and choose based on what you do and the people you’re trying to reach.
  • to be interest-ing is to be curious and attentive, and to practice the continual projection of interest. To put it more simply: If you want to be interesting, you have to be interested.
  • Colin Marshall says: Compulsive avoidance of embarrassment is a form of suicide. If you spend your life avoiding vulnerability, you and your work will never truly connect with other people.
  • Above all, recognize that if you have had success, you have also had luck — and with luck comes obligation. You owe a debt, and not just to your gods. You owe a debt to the unlucky. Michael Lewis
  • The world is changing at such a rapid rate that it’s turning us all into amateurs. Even for professionals, the best way to flourish is to retain an amateur’s spirit and embrace uncertainty and the unknown.
  • The impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes. —Annie Dillard
  • Don’t think of your website as a self-promotion machine, think of it as a self-invention machine. online, you can become the person you really want to be. fill your website with your work and your ideas and the stuff you care about.
  • Try new things. If an opportunity comes along that will allow you to do more of the kind of work you want to do, say Yes. If an opportunity comes along that would mean more money, but less of the kind of work you want o do, say No.
  • The best way to get started on the path to sharing your work is to think about what you want to learn, and make a commitment to learning it in front of others. (…) share what you love, and people who love the same things will find you.
  • Everybody loves a good story, but good storytelling doesn’t come easy to everybody. It’s a skill that takes a lifetime to master. So study the great stories and then go find some of your own. Your stories will get better the more you tell them.
  • Teaching people doesn’t subtract value from what you do, it actually adds to it. When you teach someone how to do your work, you are, in effect, generating more interest in your work. People feel closer to your work because you’re letting them in on what you know.
  • By taking advantage of the internet and social media, an artist can share whatever she wants, whenever she wants, at almost no cost. (…) she can share her sketches and work-in-progress, post pictures of her studio, or blog about her influences, inspiration, and tools.
  • We all love things that other people think are garbage. You have to have the courage to keep loving your garbage, because what makes us unique is the diversity and breadth of our influences, the unique ways in which we mix up the parts of culture others have deemed high and the low.
  • Stock and flow is an economic concept that writer Robin Sloan has adapted into a metaphor for media: Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that remind people you exist. Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today.
  • In their book, Rework, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson encourage businesses to emulate chefs by outteaching their competition. What do you do? What are your ‘recipes’? What’s your ‘cookbook’? What can you tell the world about how you operate that’s informative, educational, and promotional? They encourage businesses to figure out the equivalent of their own cooking show.
  • Think about what you want to learn, and make a commitment to learning it in front of others. Find a scenius, pay attention to what others are sharing, and then start taking note of what they’re not sharing. Be on the lookout for voids that you can fill with your own efforts, no matter how bad they are at first. . . . Share what you love, and the people who love the same things will find you.
  • Artists love to trot out the tired line, My work speaks for itself, but the truth is, our work doesn’t speak for itself. Human beings want to know where things came from, how they were made, and who made them. The stories you tell about the work you do have a huge effect on how people feel and what they understand about your work, and how people feel and what they understand about your work effects how they value it.
  • Writer David Foster Wallace said that he thought good nonfiction was a chance to watch somebody reasonably bright but also reasonably average pay far closer attention and think at far more length about all sorts of different stuff than most of us have a chance to in our daily lives. Amateurs fit the same bill: They’re just regular people who get obsessed by something and spend a ton of time thinking out loud about it.
  • Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. —Steve Jobs
  • As you put yourself and your work out there, you will run into your fellow knuckleballers. These are your real peers-the people who share your obsessions, the people who share a similar mission to your own, the people with whom you share a mutual respect. There will only be a handful or so of them, but they’re so, so important. Do what you can to nurture your relationships with these people. Show them work before you show anybody else. Keep them as close as you can.
  • Author John Gardner said the basic plot of nearly all stories is this: A character wants something, goes after it despite opposition (perhaps including his own doubts), and so arrives at a win, lose, or draw. I like Gardner’s plot formula because it’s also the shape of most creative work: You get a great idea, you go through the hard work of executing the idea, and then you release the idea out into the world, coming to a win, lose, or draw. Sometimes the idea succeeds, sometimes it fails, and more often than not, it does nothing at all.
  • Every client presentation, every personal essay, every cover letter, every fund-raising request – they’re all pitches. They’re stories with the endings chopped off. A good pitch is set up in three acts: The first act is the past, the second act is the present, and the third is the future. The first act is where you’ve been – what you want, how you came to want it, and what you’ve done so far to get it. The second act is where you are now in your work and how you’ve worked hard and used up most of your resources. The third act is where you’re going, and how exactly the person you’re pitching can help you get there. Like a Choose Your Own Adventure book, this story shape effectively turns your listener into the hero who gets to decide how it ends.
  • If you believe in the lone genius myth, creativity is an antisocial act, performed by only a few great figures — mostly dead men with names like Mozart, Einstein, or Picasso. The rest of us are left to stand around and gawk in awe at their achievements. Under the “scenius” model, great ideas are often birthed by a group of creative individuals — artists, curators, thinkers, theorists, and other tastemakers — who make up an ecology of talent. Being a valuable part of a scenius is not necessarily about how smart or talented you are, but about what you have to contribute—the ideas you share, the quality of the connections you make, and the conversations you start. If we forget about genius and think more about how we can nurture and contribute to a scenius, we can adjust our own expectations and the expectations of the worlds we want to accept us. We can stop asking what others can do for us, and start asking what we can do for others.

 

 

The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life (Twyla Tharp)

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  • Personality is a skill.
  • Perfect practice makes perfect.
  • In creative endeavors luck is a skill.
  • You are never lonely when the mind is engaged.
  • The more you know, the better you can imagine.
  • Challenge the assumptions. Act on the challenge.
  • The great ones never take fundamentals for granted.
  • You do your best work after your biggest disasters.
  • You filter the world through your particular prism.
  • An artist’s ultimate goal is the achievement of mastery.
  • If I stopped reading, I’d stop thinking. It’s that simple.
  • In theory, the only perfectly clean room is an empty room.
  • Never save for two meetings what you can accomplish in one.
  • Questioning what’s gone unquestioned gets the brain humming.
  • You won’t get very far relying on your audience’s ignorance.
  • Whom the gods wish to destroy, they give unlimited resources.
  • You can’t overthink when you don’t have time to think at all.
  • You can never spend enough time on the basics.
  • Art is competitive with yourself, with the past, with the future.
  • Before you can think out of the box, you have to start with a box
  • Better an imperfect dome in Florence than cathedrals in the clouds.
  • By acknowledging failure, you take the first step to conquering it.
  • Knowing when to stop is almost as critical as knowing how to start.
  • Learn to do for yourself. It’s the only way to broaden your skills.
  • You don’t have a really good idea until you combine two little ideas.
  • To force change, you have to attack the work with outrage and violence.
  • The willingness to take directions is a skill noticed mostly when absent.
  • As Freud said, “When inspiration does not come to me, I go halfway to meet it.”
  • It’s vital to know the difference between good planning and too much planning.
  • The goal is to connect with something old so it becomes new. Look and imagine.
  • In the words of T.S. Eliot, you’re distracted from distractions by distractions.
  • Japanese sword fighter Miyamoto Musashi counseled, “Never have a favorite weapon.”
  • Solitude is an unavoidable part of creativity. Self-reliance is a happy by-product.
  • There’s nothing wrong with fear; the only mistake is to let it stop you in your tracks.
  • The short answer is: everywhere. It’s like asking Where do you find the air you breathe?
  • It’s vital to be able to forget the pain of failure while retaining the lessons from it.
  • Mark Twain said, the man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.
  • My heroes are those who’ve prevailed over far greater losses than I’ve ever had to face.
  • Our ability to grow is directly proportional to an ability to entertain the uncomfortable.
  • We get into ruts when we run with the first idea that pops into our head, not the last one.
  • When you’re in a rut, you have to question everything except your ability to get out of it.
  • Alone is a fact, a condition where no one else is around. Lonely is how you feel about that.
  • Doing is better than not doing, and if you do something badly you’ll learn to do it better.
  • Ideas will come to you more quickly if you’ve been putting in the time at your chosen craft.
  • Sometimes you can’t identify a good idea until you’ve considered and discarded the bad ones.
  • Being blocked is most often a failure of nerve, with only one solution: Do something-anything.
  • The routine is as much a part of the creative process as the lightning bolt of inspiration, maybe more.
  • Scratching can look like borrowing or appropriating, but it’s an essential part of creativity.
  • The great ones shelve the perfected skills for a while and concentrate on their imperfections.
  • We’ve always done it this way is not a good enough reason to keep doing it if it isn’t working.
  • How to be lucky: Be generous. Generosity is luck going in the opposite direction, away from you.
  • That’s the true value of the box: It contains your inspirations without confining your creativity.
  • Giving yourself a handicap to overcome will force you to think in a new and slightly different way.
  • It’s not only how we express what we remember, it’s how we interpret it – for ourselves and others.
  • By making the start of the sequence automatic, they replace doubt and fear with comfort and routine.
  • New collaborators bring new vectors of energy into your static world – and they can be combustible.
  • Remember this when you’re struggling for a big idea. You’re much better off scratching for a small one.
  • Creativity is a habit, and the best creativity is a result of good work habits. That’s it in a nutshell.
  • I have learned over the years that you should never save for two meetings what you can accomplish in one.
  • Switching genres was Beethoven’s way of maintaining his inexperience, and as a result, enlarging his art.
  • Traveling the paths of greatness, even in someone else’s footprints, is a vital means to acquiring skill.
  • When you stimulate your body, your brain comes alive in ways you can’t simulate in a sedentary position.
  • Give me a writer who thinks he has all the time in the world and I’ll show you a writer who never delivers.
  • Inexperience erases fear. You do not know what is and is not possible and therefore everything is possible.
  • I became a choreographer because I longed to dance, and nobody was making the kinds of dances I felt inside me.
  • If you don’t have a broad base of skills, you’re limiting the number of problems you can solve when trouble hits.
  • That’s what the great ones do: They shelve the perfected skills for a while and concentrate on their imperfections.
  • There comes a point where you have to let your creation out into the world or it isn’t worth a tinkerer’s damn.
  • If you’re at a dead end, take a deep breath, stamp your foot, and shout “Begin!” You never know where it will take you.
  • One of her skills, and a great deal of her charm, was this built-in sense of humility. The greatest dancers have that.
  • If art is the bridge between what you see in your mind and what the world sees, then skill is how you build that bridge.
  • The only bad thing about having a good creative day is that it ends, and there’s no guarantee we can repeat it tomorrow.
  • What you are today and what you will be in five years depends on two things: the people you meet and the books you read.
  • Once you realize the power of memory, you begin to see how much is at your disposal in previously under-appreciated places.
  • Every act of creation is also an act of destruction or abandonment. Something has to be cast aside to make way for the new.
  • …get busy copying. Traveling the paths of greatness, even in someone else’s footprints, is a vital means to acquiring skill.
  • No one starts a creative endeavor without a certain amount of fear; the key is to learn how to keep free-floating fears from paralyzing you before you’ve begun.
  • Obligation is not the same as commitment, and it’s certainly not an acceptable reason to stick with something that isn’t working.
  • Analyze your own skill set. See where you’re strong and where you need dramatic improvement, and tackle those lagging skills first.
  • Obligation is a flimsy base for creativity, way down the list behind passion, courage, instinct, and the desire to do something great.
  • I am magnetically drawn to images, whether they’re paintings, photographs, film, or video. They are all lodestones of inspiration to me.
  • …there’s a fine line between good planning and overplanning. You never want the planning to inhibit the natural evolution of your work.”
  • Remember this the next time you moan about the hand you’re dealt: No matter how limited your resources, they’re enough to get you started.
  • The more you are in the room working, experimenting, banging away at your objective, the more luck has a chance of biting you on the nose.
  • You may wonder which came first: the skill or the hard work. But that’s a moot point. The Zen master cleans his own studio. So should you.
  • I want my dancers to grab my ideas and abandon common sense. I want them to give something of their own and to push everything to the edge.
  • You don’t get lucky without preparation, and there’s no sense in being prepared if you’re not open to the possibility of a glorious accident.
  • The golfer Ben Hogan said, “Every day you don’t practice you’re one day further from being good. If it’s something you want to do, make the time.”
  • Make it your priority. Work around it. Once your basic needs are taken care of, money is there to be used. What better investment than in yourself?
  • We need this breadth and passion if we’re going to keep perfecting our craft, whether or not there is approval, validation, or money coming from it.
  • But obligation, I eventually saw, is not the same as commitment, and it’s certainly not an acceptable reason to stick with something that isn’t working
  • Whether or not God has kissed your brow, you still have to work. Without learning and preparation, you won’t know how to harness the power of that kiss.
  • Confidence is a trait that has to be earned honestly and refreshed constantly; you have to work as hard to protect your skills as you did to develop them.
  • …the creative act is editing. You’re editing out all the lame ideas that won’t resonate with the public. It’s not pandering. It’s exercising your judgment.
  • Want to pick up a great book or two this season? Check out our recommendations of hot books selected by your fellow readers, bestselling authors, and more!
  • Someone has done it before? Honey, it’s all been done before. Nothing’s really original. Not Homer or Shakespeare and certainly not you. Get over yourself.”
  • You can’t be stoic and strong about everything. Some things in life are just meant to be enjoyed simply because you enjoy them. They are their own rationale.
  • I know it’s important to be prepared, but at the start of the process this type of perfectionism is more like procrastination. You’ve got to get in there and do.
  • I read for growth, firmly believing that what you are today and what you will be in five years depends on two things: the people you meet and the books you read.
  • I became my own rebellion. Going with your head makes it arbitrary. Going with your gut means you have no choice. It’s inevitable, which is why I have no regrets.
  • Practice without purpose, however, is nothing more than exercise. Too many people practice what they’re already good at and neglect the skills that need more work.
  • Knowing when to stop is almost as critical as knowing how to start. How do you know when something is not only the best that you can do but the best that it can be?
  • I start every dance with a box. I write the project name on the box, and as the piece progresses, I fill it up with every item that went into the making of the dance.
  • Metaphor is the lifeblood of all art, if it is not art itself. Metaphor is our vocabulary for connecting what we’re experiencing to what we have experienced before.”
  • My perfect world does not exist, but it’s there as a goal. What are the conditions of your perfect world? Which of them are essential, and which can you work around?
  • Another thing about knowing who you are is that you know what you should not be doing, which can save you a lot of heartaches and false starts if you catch it early on.
  • Venturing out of your comfort zone may be dangerous, yet do it anyways because our ability to grow is directly proportional to an ability to entertain the uncomfortable.
  • You only need one good reason to commit to an idea, not four hundred. But if you have four hundred reasons to say yes and one reason to say no, the answer is probably no.
  • When you fail in public, you are forcing yourself to learn a whole new set of skills, skills that you have nothing to do with creating and everything to do with surviving.
  • One of the horrors of growing older is the certainty that you will lose memory and that the loss of vocabulary or incident or imagery is going to diminish your imagination.
  • I Guess that’s the real secret to creative preparation. If you’re at a dead end, take a deep breath, stamp your foot, and shout Begin! You never know where it will take you.
  • You may not think that doing a verb is practical or productive for anyone but a dancer. I disagree. The chemistry of the body is inseparable from the chemistry of the brain.
  • Reading, conversation, environment, culture, heroes, mentors, nature – all are lottery tickets for creativity. Scratch away at them and you’ll find out how big a prize you’ve won.
  • Scratching is where creativity begins. It is the moment where your ideas first take flight and begin to defy gravity. If you try to rein it in, you’ll never know how high you can go.
  • You can’t just dance or paint or write or sculpt. Those are just verbs. You need a tangible idea to get you going. The idea, however minuscule, is what turns the verb into a noun…
  • Creativity is an act of defiance. You’re challenging the status quo. You’re questioning accepted truths and principles. You’re asking three universal questions that mock conventional wisdom:
  • Nobody worked harder than Mozart. By the time he was twenty-eight years old, his hands were deformed because of all the hours he had spent practicing, performing, and gripping a quill pen to compose.
  • Every time you set out to create something new, you have to prove to yourself you can still do it at least as well as, if not better than, you did it before. You can not rest on your creative laurels.
  • You’re only kidding yourself if you put creativity before craft. Craft is where our best efforts begin. You should never worry that rote exercises aimed at developing skills will suffocate creativity.”
  • Never worry that rote exercises aimed at developing skills will suffocate creativity. At the same time, it’s important to recognize that demonstrating great technique is not the same as being creative.
  • Leon Battista Alberti, a fifteenth-centure architectural theorist, said, “Errors accumulate in the sketch and compound in the model. But better an imperfect dome in Florence than cathedrals in the clouds.”
  • Too much planning implies you’ve got it all under control. That’s boring, unrealistic, and dangerous. It lulls you into a complacency that removes one of the artist’s most valuable conditions: being pissed.
  • Without passion, all the skill in the world won’t lift you above craft. Without skill, all the passion in the world will leave you eager but floundering. Combining the two is the essence of the creative life.
  • To generate ideas, I had to move. It’s the same if you’re a painter: You can’t imagine the work, you can only generate ideas when you put pencil to paper, brush to canvas-when you actually do something physical.
  • Everything that happens in my day is a transaction between the external world and my internal world. Everything is raw material. Everything is relevant. Everything is usable. Everything feeds into my creativity.”
  • A plan is like the scaffolding around a building. When you’re putting up the exterior shell, the scaffolding is vital. But once the shell is in place and you start work on the interior, the scaffolding disappears.
  • Every creative person has to learn to deal with failure, because failure, like death and taxes, is inescapable. If Leonardo and Beethoven and Goethe failed on occasion, what makes you think you’ll be the exception?
  • Without passion, all the skill in the world won’t lift you above your craft. Without skill, all the passion in the world will leave you eager but floundering. combining the two is the essence of the creative life.”
  • In Hollywood, an adventure movie with two guys doesn’t quite qualify as an idea. Two guys and a bear does. It adheres to the unshakable rule that you don’t have a really good idea until you combine two little ideas.
  • Creativity is not just for artists. It’s for businesspeople looking for a new way to close a sale; it’s for engineers trying to solve a problem; it’s for parents who want their children to see the world in more than one way.
  • Every work of art needs a spine – an underlying theme, a motive for coming into existence. It doesn’t have to be apparent to the audience. But you need it at the start of the creative process to guide you and keep you going.
  • Every young person grows up with an overwhelming sense of possibility, and how life, in some ways, is just a series of incidents in which that possibility is either enlarged or smacked out of you. How you adapt is your choice.
  • If you’re in a creative rut, the easiest way to challenge assumptions is to switch things around them and make the switch work. The process goes like this: Identify the concept that isn’t working. Write down your assumptions about it.
  • As Tracy Kidder wrote in The Soul of a New Machine, Good engineers ship. In other words, while perfection is a wonderful goal, there comes a point where you have to let your creation out into the world or it isn’t worth a tinkerer’s damn.
  • I believe that every work of art needs a spine – an underlying theme, a motive for coming into existence. It doesn’t have to be apparent to the audience. But you need it at the start of the creative process to guide you and keep you going.
  • There’s an emotional lie to overplanning; it creates a security blanket that lets you assume you have things under control, that you are further along than you really are, that you’re home free when you haven’t even walked out the door yet.
  • It doesn’t matter if it’s a book, magazine, newspaper, billboard, instruction manual, or cereal box — reading generates ideas, because you’re literally filling your head with ideas and letting your imagination filter them for something useful.
  • It’s tempting to believe that the quantity and quality of our creative productivity would increase exponentially if only we could afford everything we’ve imagined, but I’ve seen too many artists dry up the moment they had enough money in the bank.
  • My daily routines are transactional. Everything that happens in my day is a transaction between the external world and my internal world. Everything is raw material. Everything is relevant. Everything is usable. Everything feeds into my creativity.
  • …there’s a lesson here about finding your groove. Yes, you can find it via a breakthrough in your craft. But you can also find it in other means — in congenial material, in a perfect partner, in a favorite character or comfortable subject matter.”
  • There’s no point in analyzing it. If you could figure out how you get into a groove you could figure out how to maintain it. That’s not going to happen. The best you can hope for is the wisdom and good fortune to occasionally fall into a groove. (196)
  • When people who have demonstrated talent fizzle out or disappear after early creative success, it’s not because their gifts, that famous one percent inspiration, abandoned them; more likely they abandoned their gift through a failure of perspiration.
  • No matter how limited your resources, they’re enough to get you started. Time, for example, is our most limited resource, but it is not the enemy of creativity that we think it is. The ticking clock is our friend if it gets us moving with urgency and passion.
  • Habitually creative people are, in E.B. white’s phrase, ‘prepared to be lucky.’ You don’t get lucky without preparation, and there’s no sense in being prepared if you’re not open to the possibility of a glorious accident. In creative endeavors luck is a skill.
  • I’m often asked, Where do you get your ideas? This happens to anyone who is willing to stand in front of an audience and talk about his or her work. The short answer is: everywhere. It’s like asking Where do you find the air you breathe? Ideas are all around you.
  • You can’t just dance or paint or write or sculpt. Those are just verbs. You need a tangible idea to get you going. The idea, however minuscule, is what turns the verb into a noun—paint into a painting, sculpt into sculpture, write into writing, dance into a dance.
  • As Mozart himself wrote to a friend, People err who think my art comes easily to me. I assure you, dear friend, nobody has devoted so much time and thought to composition as I. There is not a famous master whose music I have not industriously studied through many times.
  • In those long and sleepless nights when I’m unable to shake my fears sufficiently, I borrow a biblical epigraph from Dostoyevsky’s The Demons: I see my fears being cast into the bodies of wild boars and hogs, and I watch them rush to a cliff where they fall to their deaths.
  • Art is not about minimizing risk and delivering work that is guaranteed to please. Artists have bigger goals. If being an artist means pushing the envelope, you don’t want to stuff your material in someone else’s envelope. You don’t want to know the envelope has been invented.
  • Creativity is an act of defiance. You’re challenging the status quo. You’re questioning accepted truths and principles. You’re asking three universal questions that mock conventional wisdom: Why do I have to obey the rules? Why can’t I be different?  Why can’t I do it my way?
  • In the end, there is no one ideal condition for creativity. What works for one person is useless for another. The only criterion is this: Make it easy on yourself. Find a working environment where the prospect of wrestling with your muse doesn’t scare you, doesn’t shut you down.
  • This, to me, is the most interesting paradox of creativity: In order to be habitually creative, you have to know how to prepare to be creative, but good planning alone won’t make your efforts successful; it’s only after you let go of your plans that you can breathe life into your efforts.
  • Get busy copying. That’s not a popular notion today, not when we are all instructed to find our own way, admonished to be original and find our own voice at all costs! But it’s sound advice. Traveling the paths of greatness, even in someone else’s footprints, is a vital means to acquiring skill.
  • When you’re in scratching mode, the tiniest microcell of an idea will get you going. Musicians know this because compositions rarely come to them whole and complete. They call their morsels of inspiration lines or riffs or hooks or licks. That’s what they look for when they scratch for an idea.”
  • Jerry Robbins made a point of going to see everything because he could find something useful in even the worst productions. He’d sit there, viewing the catastrophe onstage, and imagine how he would have done it differently. A bad evening at the theater for everyone else was a creative workout for him.
  • Part of the excitement of creativity is the headlong rush into action when we latch onto a new idea. Yet, in the excitement, we often forget to apply pressure to the idea, poke it, challenge it, push it around, see if it stands up. Without that challenge, you never know how far astray your assumptions may have taken you.”
  • All I have is the certainty of experience that looking foolish is good for you. It nourishes the spirit. You appreciate this more and more over the years as the need to not look foolish fades with youth. (Remember the centenarian who when asked about the best part of living such a long life replied, No more peer pressure.)
  • Creativity is more about taking the facts, fictions, and feelings we store away and finding new ways to connect them. What we’re talking about here is metaphor. Metaphor is the lifeblood of all art, if it is not art itself. Metaphor is our vocabulary for connecting what we’re experiencing now with what we have experienced before.
  • Immerse yourself in the details of the work. Commit yourself to mastering every aspect. At the same time, step back to see if the work scans, if it’s intelligible to an unwashed audience. Don’t get so involved that you lose what you’re trying to say. This was the yin and yang of my work life: Dive in. Step back. Dive in. Step back.
  • No matter what system you use, I recommend having a goal and putting it in writing. I read once that people who write down their New Year’s resolutions have a greater change of achieving them than people who don’t. This is the sort of factoid tat is probably apocryphal but, like many urban legends, sounds as though it should be true.
  • Your creative endeavors can never be thoroughly mapped out ahead of time. You have to allow for the suddenly altered landscape, the change in plan, the accidental spark- and you have to see it as a stroke of luck rather than a disturbance of your perfect scheme. Habitually creative people are, in E. B. White’s phrase, prepared to be lucky.
  • A Manhattan writer I know never leaves his apartment without reminding himself to come back with a face. Whether he’s walking down the street or sitting on a park bench or riding the subway or standing on a checkout line, he looks for a compelling face and works up a rich description of it in his mind. When he has a moment, he writes it all down in his notebook.
  • Beethoven, despite his unruly reputation and wild romantic image, was well organized. He saved everything in a series of notebooks that were organized according to the level of development of the idea. He had notebooks for rough ideas, notebooks for improvements on those ideas, and notebooks for finished ideas, almost as if he was pre-aware of an idea’s early, middle, and late stages.
  • Skill gives you the wherewithal to execute whatever occurs to you. Without it, you are just a font of unfulfilled ideas. Skill is how you close the gap between what you can see in your mind’s eye and what you can produce; the more skill you have, the more sophisticated and accomplished your ideas can be. With absolute skill comes absolute confidence, allowing you to dare to be simple.
  • Destiny, quite often, is a determined parent. Mozart was hardly some naive prodigy who sat down at the keyboard and, with God whispering in his ears, let music flow from his fingertips. It’s a nice image for selling tickets to movies, but whether or not God has kissed your brow, you still have to work. Without learning and preparation, you won’t know how to harness the power of that kiss.
  • When Homer composed the Iliad and Odyssey, he was drawing on centuries of history and folklore handed down by oral tradition. When Nicolas Poussin painted The Rape of the Sabine Women, he was re-creating Roman history. When Marcel Proust dipped his petites madeleines into his tea, the taste and aroma set off a flood of memories and emotions from which modern literature has still not recovered.
  • A math professor at Williams College bases ten percent of his students’ grades on failure. Mathematics is all about trying out new ideas — new formulas, theorems, approaches — and knowing that the vast majority of them will be dead ends. To encourage his students not to be afraid of testing their quirkiest ideas in public, he rewards rather than punishes them for coming up with wrong answers.”
  • More than anything, I associate mastery with optimism. It’s the feeling at the start of a project when I believe that my whole career has been preparation for this moment and I am saying, Okay, let’s begin. Now I am ready. Of course, you’re never one hundred percent ready, but that’s a part of mastery, too: It masks the insecurities and the gaps in technique and lets you believe you are capable of anything.
  • The golfer Davis Love III was taught by his father to think of practice as a huge circle, like a clock. You work on a skill until you master it, and then you move on to the next one. When you’ve mastered that, you move on to the next, and the next, and the next, and eventually you’ll come full circle to the task that you began with, which will now need remedial work because of all the time you’ve spent on other things.
  • Jerome Robbins liked to say that you do your best work after your biggest disasters. For one thing, it’s so painful it almost guarantees that you won’t make those mistakes again. Also, you have nothing to lose; you’ve hit bottom, and the only place to go is up. A fiasco compels you to change dramatically. The golfer Bobby Jones said, I never learned anything from a match I won. He respected defeat and he profited from it.
  • Ideas take on many forms. There are good ideas and bad ideas. Big ideas and little ideas. A good idea is one that turns you on rather than shuts you off. It keeps generating more ideas and they improve on one another. A bad idea closes doors instead of opening them. It’s confining and restrictive. The line between good and bad ideas is very thin. A bad idea in the hands of the right person can easily be tweaked into a good idea.
  • When I look back on my best work, it was inevitably created in what I call The Bubble. I eliminated every distraction, sacrificed almost everything that gave me pleasure, placed myself in a single-minded isolation chamber, and structured my life so that everything was not only feeding the work but subordinated to it. It is not a particularly sociable way to operate. It’s actively anti-social. On the other hand, it is pro-creative.
  • Sadly, some people never get beyond the box stage in their creative life. We all know people who have announced that they’ve started work on a project– say, a book– but some time passes, and when you politely ask how it’s going, they tell you that they’re still researching. Weeks, months, years pass and they produce nothing. They have tons of research but it’s never enough to nudge them toward the actual process of writing the book.
  • Repetition is a problem if it forces us to cling to our past successes. Constant reminders of the things that worked inhibit us from trying something bold and new. We lose sight of the fact that we weren’t searching for a formula when we first did something great; we were in unexplored territory, following our instincts and passions wherever they might lead us. It’s only when we look back that we see a path, and it’s only there because we blazed it.
  • You’ve got two minutes to come up with sixty uses for the stool. A lot of interesting things happen when you set an aggressive quota, even with ideas. People’s competitive juices are stirred. Instead of panicking they focus, and with that comes an increased fluency and agility of mind. People are forced to suspend critical thinking. To meet the quota, they put their internal critic on hold and let everything out. They’re no longer choking off good impulses.
  • When I’ve learned all I can at the core of a piece, I pull back and become the Queen of Detachment. I move so far back that I become a surrogate for the audience. I see the work the way they will see it. New, fresh, objectively. In the theater, I frequently go to the back and watch the dancers rehearse. If I could watch from farther away, from outside the theater in the street, I would. That’s how much detachment I need from my work in order to understand it.
  • I cannot overstate how much a generous spirit contributes to good luck. Look at the luckiest people around you, the ones you envy, the ones who seem to have destiny falling habitually into their laps. What are they doing that singles them out? It isn’t dumb luck if it happens repeatedly. If they’re anything like the fortunate people I know, they’re prepared, they’re always working at their craft, they’re alert, they involve their friends in their work, and they tend to make others feel lucky to be around them.
  • There are mighty demons, but they’re hardly unique to me. You probably share some. If I let them, they’ll shut down my impulses (‘No, you can’t do that’) and perhaps turn off the spigots of creativity altogether. So I combat my fears with a staring-down ritual, like a boxer looking his opponent right in the eye before a bout. 1. People will laugh at me? Not the people I respect; they haven’t yet, and they’re not going to start now…. 2. Someone has done it before? Honey, it’s all been done before. Nothing’s original. Not Homer or Shakespeare and certainly not you. Get over yourself. 3. I have nothing to say? An irrelevant fear. We all have something to say. I will upset someone I love? A serious worry that is not easily exorcised or stared down because you never know how loved ones will respond to your creation. The best you can do is remind yourself that you’re a good person with good intentions. You’re trying to create unity, not discord.  5. Once executed, the idea will never be as good as it is in my mind? Toughen up. Leon Battista Alberti, the 15th century architectural theorist, said, ‘Errors accumulate in the sketch and compound in the model.’ But better an imperfect dome in Florence than cathedrals in the clouds.
  • A lot of habitually creative people have preparation rituals linked to the setting in which they choose to start their day. By putting themselves into that environment, they start their creative day. The composer Igor Stravinsky did the same thing every morning when he entered his studio to work: He sat at the piano and played a Bach fugue. Perhaps he needed the ritual to feel like a musician, or the playing somehow connected him to musical notes, his vocabulary. Perhaps he was honoring his hero, Bach, and seeking his blessing for the day. Perhaps it was nothing more than a simple method to get his fingers moving, his motor running, his mind thinking music. But repeating the routine each day in the studio induced some click that got him started. In the end, there is no ideal condition for creativity. What works for one person is useless for another. The only criterion is this: Make it easy on yourself. Find a working environment where the prospect of wrestling with your muse doesn’t scare you, doesn’t shut you down. It should make you want to be there, and once you find it, stick with it. To get the creative habit, you need a working environment that’s habit-forming. All preferred working states, no matter how eccentric, have one thing in common: When you enter into them, they compel you to get started.
  • Your Creative Autobiography 1. What is the first creative moment you remember? 2. Was anyone there to witness or appreciate it? 3. What is the best idea you’ve ever had? 4. What made it great in your mind? 5. What is the dumbest idea? 6. What made it stupid? 7. Can you connect the dots that led you to this idea? 8. What is your creative ambition? 9. What are the obstacles to this ambition? 10. What are the vital steps to achieving this ambition? 11. How do you begin your day? 12. What are your habits? What patterns do you repeat? 13. Describe your first successful creative act. 14. Describe your second successful creative act. 15. Compare them. 16. What are your attitudes toward: money, power, praise, rivals, work, play? 17. Which artists do you admire most? 18. Why are they your role models? 19. What do you and your role models have in common? 20. Does anyone in your life regularly inspire you? 21. Who is your muse? 22. Define muse. 23. When confronted with superior intelligence or talent, how do you respond? 24. When faced with stupidity, hostility, intransigence, laziness, or indifference in others, how do you respond? 25. When faced with impending success or the threat of failure, how do you respond? 26. When you work, do you love the process or the result? 27. At what moments do you feel your reach exceeds your grasp? 28. What is your ideal creative activity? 29. What is your greatest fear? 30. What is the likelihood of either of the answers to the previous two questions happening? 31. Which of your answers would you most like to change? 32. What is your idea of mastery? 33. What is your greatest dream?

 

 

Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative (Austin Kleon)

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  • Validation is for parking.
  • You’re ready. Start making stuff.
  • Be nice. The world is a small town.
  • Keep all your passions in your life.
  • Practice productive procrastination.
  • Copying is about reverse-engineering.
  • All fiction, in fact, is fan fiction.
  • Side projects and hobbies are important
  • Read deeply. Stay open. Continue to wonder.
  • What is originality? Undetected plagiarism.
  • Enjoy your obscurity while it lasts. Use it.
  • Show just a little bit of what you’re working on.
  • Creative people need time to just sit around and do nothing.
  • The only mofos in my circle are people that I can learn from.
  • Pretend to be making something until you actually make something.
  • So go on, get angry. But keep your mouth shut and go do your work.
  • Complain about the way other people make software by making software.
  • Step 1: Wonder at something. Step 2: Invite others to wonder with you.
  • Eat breakfast. Do some push-ups. Go for long walks. Get plenty of sleep.
  • Every new idea is just a mashup or a remix of one or more previous ideas.
  • You don’t want to look like your heroes, you want to see like your heroes.
  • Don’t worry about unity – what unifies your work is the fact that you made it. –
  • As Salvador Dalí said, Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.
  • It’s in the act of making things and doing our work that we figure out who we are.
  • when people give you advice, they’re really just talking to themselves in the past.
  • Whether you’re in school or not, it’s always your job to get yourself an education.
  • Find the most talented person in the room, and if it’s not you, go stand next to him.
  • Establishing and keeping a routine can be even more important than having a lot of time.
  • If you find that you’re the most talented person in the room, you need to find another room.
  • If you ever find that you’re the most talented person in the room, you need to find another room.
  • My grandpa used to tell my dad, Son, it’s not the money you make, it’s the money you hold on to.
  • If you’re worried about giving your secrets away, you can share your dots without connecting them.
  • Look things up. Chase down every reference. Go deeper than anybody else – that’s how you’ll get ahead.
  • In the end, creativity isn’t just the things we choose to put in, it’s the things we choose to leave out.
  • You are, in fact, a mashup of what you choose to let into your life. You are the sum of your influences.
  • Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work. —Gustave Flaubert
  • Dress for the job you want, not the job you have, and you have to start doing the work you want to be doing.
  • If all your favorite makers got together and collaborated, what would they make with you leading the crew?
  • Whenever I’ve become lost over the year, I just look at my website and ask myself, What can I fill this with?
  • Personally, I think bad weather leads to better art. You don’t want to go outside, so you stay inside and work.
  • It’s one of my theories that when people give you advice, they’re really just talking to themselves in the past.
  • Start copying what you love. Copy copy copy copy. At the end of the copy, you will find yourself. Yohji Yamamoto
  • The thing is: It takes a lot of energy to be creative. You don’t have that energy if you waste it on other stuff.
  • Gustave Flaubert said, be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.
  • Your job is to collect good ideas. The more good ideas you collect, the more you can choose from to be influenced by.
  • Amassing a body of work or building a career is a lot about the slow accumulation of little bits of effort over time.
  • Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But, since no one was listening, everything must be said again.
  • Get comfortable with being misunderstood, disparaged, or ignored – the trick is to be too busy doing your work to care.
  • In Conan O’Brien’s words, “It is our failure to become our perceived ideal that ultimately defines us and makes us unique.”
  • Scratch your own itch – Draw the art you want to see, start the business you want to run, build the products you want to use.
  • If you love different things, you just keep spending time with them. Let them talk to each other. Something will begin to happen.
  • Pretend to be something you’re not until you are—fake it until you’re successful, until everybody sees you the way you want them.
  • Step 1: Wonder at something. Step 2: Invite others to wonder with you. You should wonder at the things nobody else is wondering about.
  • Write the kind of story you like best – write the story you want to read. The same principle applies to your life and your career.
  • You’ll never get that freedom back again once people start paying you attention, and especially not once they start paying you money.
  • Don’t just steal the style, steal the thinking behind the style. You don’t want to look like your heroes, you want to see like your heroes.
  • If you feel like you have two or three real passions, don’t pick and choose between them. Don’t discard. Keep all your passions in your life.
  • What a good artist understands is that nothing comes from nowhere. All creative work builds on what came before. Nothing is completely original.
  • The artist is a collector… Your job is to collect good ideas. The more good ideas you collect, the more you can choose from to be influenced by.
  • Be curious about the world in which you live. Look things up. Chase down every reference. Go deeper than anybody else–that’s how you’ll get ahead.
  • Collect books, even if you don’t plan on reading them right away. Filmmaker John Waters has said, “Nothing is more important than an unread library.”
  • The most important thing is that you show your appreciation without expecting anything in return, and that you get new work out of the appreciation.
  • Step one, do good work, is incredibly hard. There are no shortcuts. Make stuff every day. Know you’re going to suck for a while. Fail. Get better.
  • French writer Andre Gide put it, Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But, since no one was listening, everything must be said again.
  • Copy your heroes. Examine where you fall short . What’s in there that makes you different? That’s what you should amplify and transform into your own work.
  • School is one thing. Education is another. The two don’t always overlap. Whether you’re in school or not, it’s always your job to get yourself an education.
  • Telling yourself you have all the time in the world, all the money in the world, all the colors in the palette, anything you want—that just kills creativity.
  • When you get sick of one project, move over to another, and when you’re sick of that one, move back to the project you left. Practice productive procrastination. –
  • Nobody is born with a style or a voice. We don’t out of the womb knowing who we are. In the beginning, we learn by pretending to be our heroes. We learn by copying.
  • Try it: Instead of keeping a rejection file, keep a praise file. Use it sparingly — don’t get lost in the past glory — but keep it around for when you need the lift.
  • Ironically, really good work often appears to be effortless. People will say, Why didn’t I think of that? They won’t see the years of toil and sweat that went into it.
  • Harold Ramis once laid out his rule for success: Find the most talented person in the room, and if it’s not you, go stand next to him. Hang out with him. Try to be helpful.
  • The latest post is the first post that visitors see, so you’re only as good as your last post. This keeps you on your toes, keeps you thinking about what you can post next.
  • Distance and difference are the secret tonic of creativity. When we get home, home is still the same. But something on our mind has been changed and that changes everything.
  • If we’re free from the burden of trying to be completely original, we can stop trying to make something out of nothing, and we can embrace influence instead of running from it.
  • The great thing about remote or dead masters is that they can’t refuse you as an apprentice. You can learn whatever you want from them. They left their lesson plans in their work.
  • In this age of information abundance and overload, those who get ahead will be the folks who figure out what to leave out, so they can concentrate on what’s really important to them.
  • The artist is a collector. Not a hoarder, mind you, there’s a difference: Hoarders collect indiscriminately, artists collect selectively. They only collect things that they really love.
  • A wonderful flaw about human beings is that we’re incapable of making perfect copies. Our failure to copy our heroes is where we discover where our own thing lives. That is how we evolve.
  • If you’re not into the world you live in, you can build your own world around you. Surround yourself with books and objects that you love. Tape things up on the wall. Create your own world.
  • Cartoonist Gary Panter said, If you have one person you’re influenced by, everyone will say you’re the next whoever. But if you rip off a hundred people, everyone will say you’re so original.
  • The manifesto is this: Draw the art you want to see, start the business you want to run, write the books you want to read, build the products you want to use – do the work you want to see done.
  • Google everything. I mean everything. Google your dreams, Google your problems. Don’t ask a question before you Google it. You’ll either find the answer or you’ll come up with a better question.
  • At some point, you’ll have to move from imitating your heroes to emulating them. Imitation is about copying. Emulation is when imitation goes one step further, breaking through into your own thing.
  • Draw the art you want to see, start the business you want to run, play the music you want to hear, write the books you want to read, build the products you want to use – do the work you want to see done.
  • It’s the side projects that really take off. By side projects I mean the stuff that you thought was just messing around. Stuff that’s just play. That’s actually the good stuff. That’s when the magic happens.
  • The trouble with creative work: Sometimes by the time people catch on to what’s valuable about what you do, you’re either a) bored to death with it, or b) dead. You can’t go looking for validation from external sources.
  • Not everybody will get it. People will misinterpret you and what you do. They might even call you names. So get comfortable with being misunderstood, disparaged, or ignored — the trick is to be too busy doing your work to care.
  • The computer is really good for editing your ideas, and it’s really good for getting your ideas ready for publishing out into the world, but it’s not really good for generating ideas. There are too many opportunities to hit the delete key.
  • Nicholson Baker says, if you ask yourself ‘what’s the best thing that happened today?’ it actually forces a certain kind of cheerful retrospection that pull up from the recent past things to write about that you wouldn’t otherwise think about.
  • I think it’s good to have a lot of projects going at once so you can bounce between them. When you get sick of one project, move over to another, and when you’re sick of that one, move back to the project you left. Practice productive procrastination.
  • Your brain gets too comfortable in your everyday surroundings. You need to make it uncomfortable. You need to spend some time in another land, among people that do things differently than you. Travel makes the world look new, and when the world looks new, our brains work harder.
  • The best advice is not to write what you know, it’s to write what you like. Write the kind of story you like best – write the story you want to read. The same principle applies to your life and career: Whenever you’re at a loss for what move to make next, just ask yourself, What would make a better story?
  • Chew on one thinker-writer, activist, role model- you really love. Study everything there is to know about that thinker. Then find three people the thinker loved and find out everything about them. Repeat this as many times as you can. Climb up the tree as far as you can go. Once you built your tree, it’s time to start your own branch.
  • The reason to copy your heroes and their style is so that you might somehow get a glimpse into their minds. That’s what you really want – to internalize their way of looking at the wold. If you just mimic the surface of somebody’s work without understanding where they are coming from, your work will never be anything more that a knockoff.
  • Don’t wait until you know who you are to get started. If I’d waited to know who I was or what I was about before I started “being creative,” well, I’d be sitting around trying to figure myself out instead of making things. In my experience, it’s in the act of making things and doing our work that we figure out who we are. You’re ready. Start making stuff.
  • You don’t get to pick your family, but you can pick your teachers and you can pick your friends and you can pick the music you listen to and you can pick the books you read and you can pick the movies you see. You are, in fact, a mashup of what you choose to let into your life. You are the sum of your influences. The German writer Goethe said, “We are shaped and fashioned by what we love.
  • Always be reading. Go to the library. There’s magic in being surrounded by books. Get lost in the stacks. Read bibliographies. It’s not the book you start with, it’s the book that book leads you to. Collect books, even if you don’t plan on reading them right away. Filmmaker John Waters has said, Nothing is more important than an unread library. Don’t worry about doing research. Just search.
  • Creative people need time to just sit around and do nothing. I get some of my best ideas when I’m bored, which is why I never take my shirts to the cleaners. I love ironing my shirts-it’s so boring, I almost always get good ideas. If you’re out of ideas, wash the dishes. Take really long walk. Stare at a spot on the wall for as long as you can. As the artist Maira Kalman says, “Avoiding work is the way to focus my mind.”