Enthusiasm is not an emotional state. It is a spiritual commitment, a loving surrender to our creative process. Enthusiasm - from the Greek, filled with God - is an ongoing energy supply tapped into the flow of life itself.

Perfectionism has nothing to do with getting it right. It has nothing to do with fixing things. It has nothing to do with standards. Perfectionism is a refusal to let yourself move forward. It is a loop-an obsessive, debilitating closed system that causes you to get stuck in the details of what you are writing or painting or making and to lose sight of the whole.

By being willing to be a bad artist, you have a chance to be an artist, and perhaps, over time, a very good one.

We must learn to let the flow manifest itself where it will.....not where we will it.

I have learned, as a rule of thumb, never to ask whether you can do something. Say, instead, that you are doing it. Then fasten your seat belt. The most remarkable things follow.

The voice of our original self is often muffled, overwhelmed, even strangled, by the voices of other people’s expectations.

The doing of something productive regardless of the outcome is an act of faith. The doing of a small something when a large something is too much for us is perhaps especially an act of faith. Faith means going forward by whatever means we can.