Quotes from Steven Pressfield

Have you ever meditated? Then you know what it feels like to shift your consciousness to a witnessing mode and to watch thoughts arise, float across your awareness, and then drift away, to be replaced by the next thought and the thought after that. These are not thoughts. They are chatter.

In this book, when I say "Don't think," what I mean is: don't listen to the chatter. Pay no attention to those rambling, disjointed images and notions that drift across the movie screen of your mind.

The part we create from can't be touched by anything our parents did, or society did. That part is unsullied, uncorrupted; soundproof, waterproof, and bulletproof. In fact, the more troubles we've got, the better and richer that part becomes.

Chatter is your mother and father's well-intentioned expressions of caution, seeking to shield you from hurting yourself. Chatter is your teachers' equally well-meaning attempts at socialization, training you to follow the rules. Chatter is your friends' regular-Joe buddy-talk, trying to make you like them and follow the rules of the pack. Chatter is Resistance.

the ordeal had been rendered tolerable, now that I could tell myself it was my own idea.

Resistance knows that the more psychic energy we expend dredging and re-dredging the tired, boring injustices of our personal lives, the less juice we have to do our work.

Resistance never sleeps. It never slackens and it never goes away. The dragon must be slain anew every morning. However, as with anything in life, if you've succeeded in the past, at least you know that you can succeed.

Its aim is to reconcile you to "the way it is," to make you exactly like everyone else, to render you amenable to societal order and discipline.

Resistance beat him. Call it overstatement but I'll say it anyway: it was easier for Hitler to start World War II than it was for him to face a blank square of canvas.

Resistance is like an alien or like the shark in jaws, or like the terminator. It cannot be reasoned with. It understands nothing but power. It is an engine of destruction programmed with one object only : to prevent us from doing our work.

We can never eliminate Resistance. It will never go away. But we can outsmart it, and we can enlist allies that are as powerful as it is. One thing we can never, never permit ourselves to do is to take Resistance lightly, to underestimate it or to fail to take it into account.

On our single sheet of foolscap we've got the Big Beats. Now what? Fill in the gaps. David Lean famously declared that a feature film should have seven or eight major sequences. That's a pretty good guideline for our play, our album, our State of the Union address.

Fundamentalism and art are mutually exclusive. There is no such thing as fundamentalist art.

Do research early or late. Don't stop working. Never do research in prime working time. Research can be fun. It can be seductive. That's its danger. We need it, we love it. But we must never forget that research can become Resistance.

Soak up what you need to fill in the gaps. Keep working.

On realising that he is not a born warrior, as the rest of his troop are): A cherished self-conception must be given up, and one feels diminished by it. This is mistaken, however. A person discovers that he has been made stronger by the jettisoning of this sham and disadvantageous bag-gage. In fact, he has become more "himself," by aligning his self-concept more closely with fact.

Tolstoy had 13 kids and still wrote War & Peace.

Any project or enterprise can be broken down into beginning, middle, and end. Fill in the gaps; then fill in the gaps between the gaps.

The hero's journey software in our heads is demanding to be lived out. The blanks are insisting on being filled in.

I stayed nine weeks. The last four were offshore. Pay doubled on the rigs to four dollars an hour but the best part was meals were free (steak for dinner every night with unlimited milk from the machine) and every week was eighty hours with forty of that counting as time-and-a-half.

When we've got David Lean's eight sequences, we're home except for one thing: The actual work. Cover the Canvas One rule for first full working drafts: get them done ASAP.

You have never tasted freedom, friend, or you would know it is purchased not with gold, but steel.

Don't worry about quality. Act, don't reflect. Momentum is everything. Get to THE END as if the devil himself were breathing down your neck and poking you in the butt with his pitchfork. Believe me, he is. Get the serum to Nome. Get the Conestoga wagon to the Oregon Trail. Get the first version of your project done from A to Z as fast as you can.

Only men who do not mind a hard life, with scanty food, little water and lots of discomfort, men who possess stamina and initiative, need apply.