The essence of professionalism is the focus upon the work and its demands, while we are doing it, to the exclusion of all else.

Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here obedient to their laws we lie.

Someone once asked Somerset Maughham if he wrote on a schedule or only when struck by inspiration. "I write only when inspiration strikes," he replied. "Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o'clock sharp.

I am going to write my symphony; I'm just going to start tomorrow.

The problem I've always discovered in my own work when this kind of thing happens when you hit the wall is there's almost always a reason. You've almost always made a mistake in the initial conception of the project. You misapprehended something or you thought something would work and now you're three quarters on the way through and you see that it doesn't work.

On the field of The Self stand a knight and a dragon. You are the knight. Resistance is the dragon.

No matter how great a writer, artist, or entrepreneur, he is a mortal, he is fallible. He is not proof against Resistance. He will drop the ball; he will crash. That’s why they call it rewriting.