“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.”

Anne Lamott

more info

“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.”

James Baldwin

more info

“To get up at a regular hour, to devote a regular amount of time during the day to activities such as meditating, reading, listening to music, walking; not to indulge, at least not beyond a certain minimum, in escapist activities like mystery stories and movies, not to overeat or overdrink are some obvious and rudimentary rules. It is essential, however, that discipline should not be practiced like a rule imposed on oneself from the outside, but that it becomes an expression of one’s own will; that it is felt as pleasant, and that one slowly accustoms oneself to a kind of behavior which one would eventually miss, if one stopped practicing it.”

Erich Fromm

more info