Quotes About Balance

It's impossible to make a living in the arts unless you make a fortune. There's almost no in-between. Writers are either broke or rolling in it. Oddly, you can't tell them apart.

What is difficult is the promotion, balancing the public side of a writer's life with the writing. I think that's something a lot of writers are having to face. Writers have become much more public now.

I think writers need windows on a view to remind them that a whole world is out there, not the minutiae with which they might be dealing on a close scale.

I'm not a writer who teaches. I'm a teacher who writes.

For me, the day job comes first. That's why I call myself a diplomat who writes, not a writer who masquerades as a diplomat. If the day job demands it, I won't write at all. I write in what I call 'the crevices of my day job', and that comes only on weekends.

In America, we divide federal power between the legislative, executive and judicial branches so that no one holds too much power. This is sixth-grade civics: Congress writes the laws; the president executes the laws; and the courts apply those laws fairly and dispassionately to cases.

I don't know if I'm a writer who plays poker or a poker player who writes.

I think of myself as a serious professor who, during the weekend, writes novels.

Arranging a bowl of flowers in the morning can give a sense of quiet in a crowded day - like writing a poem or saying a prayer.

I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.

In an average week I'll be testing recipes, doing a voice-over, filming and writing. I cram everything in Monday to Friday because I refuse to give up the weekend.

I can't recommend technical writing as a day job for fiction writers because it's going to be hard to write all day and then come home and write fiction.

In writing, I try to find the right balance between momentum and infinity, truth and beauty.

I have so much going on inside my head in terms of writing, there's such a large space in my life taken up by that. I can't imagine it being taken up by a husband and children and writing, and everything getting its due. I don't believe there is room for all of it. I really don't.

I do listen to a lot of music, but I don't listen when I'm writing.

When I'm fishing, I feel guilty that I'm not writing, and when I'm writing, I feel guilty that I'm not fishing. But when push comes to shove, I'll always take the writing.

Every choice brings wisdom in its wake. If you got to have the wisdom first, it wouldn't be a choice--just policy

Elena had always felt like the center of her own world - who doesn't? The world arranged itself around her like petals around the stem of a flower. This way the meadows, that way the woodland. Over here, the baryn's estate, out there, the hills that hug the known world close and imply a world at beyond. She could never come up with the edge of a world, because it always kept going on beyond. She moved the center of the world as she walked. The world was balanced on her head.

Not old enough to feel like an adult , really, but old enough to look like one, and to know the distinction between being carefree and careless.

The eye is always drawn to light, but shadows have more to say.

There was much to hate in this world, and too much to love.

Yet how much really could you owe other people? Was it endless?

It seems to me the nature of the world is all one thing or all the other. Either there is nothing but coincidence or there is nothing but established fare.

Use your talent at sorcery, don't be used by it.