If you dedicate your attention to discipline in your life you become smarter.

For almost anyone who chooses to be a writer, since so very few writers are able to learn a living from their work that is equivalent to the living earned by the average dentist or accountant.

What you believe matters, however. It’s all anyone has to act on. And since what you do is who you are, your actions define you. If you don’t believe anything is true simply because you can’t logically prove what’s true, you won’t do anything. You won’t be anything. You’ll end up spending your life in a rocking chair looking out at the horizon waiting for an answer that never comes. You might as well be dead. It’s an old philosophical problem.

I am not a ventriloquist.

It's hard to spend years at a time working in total solitude with no reality-check.

Lists of books we reread and books we can't finish tell more about us than about the relative worth of the books themselves.

Nobody does anything for one reason.