discipline
Keep your butt on the chair. You do it at the same time every day. You never wait for inspiration. It’s ridiculous. It will never come. It’s another way to keep you from writing…and you have to do it badly…Everything I’ve written that anyone might think is helpful was four pages longer and very purple and overwrought.
Studio 360 (radio show), April 29, 2011.
Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.
The Paris Review Interviews, vol. II (New York: Picador, 2007), 266.