Is there a spiritual element to creativity? Hell, yes. Our mightiest ally (our indispensable ally) is belief in something we cannot see, hear, touch, taste, or feel.

The professional conducts his business in the real world. Adversity, injustice, bad hops and rotten calls, even good breaks and lucky bounces all comprise the ground over which the campaign must be waged. The field is level, the professional understands, only in heaven.

Stay stupid. Follow your unconventional crazy heart.

When you're a working writer, sooner or later friends and acquaintances will get you alone and confide that they, too, have a book in them.

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

For what can be more noble than to slay oneself? Not literally. Not with a blade in the guts. But to extinguish the selfish self within, that part which looks only to its own preservation, to save its own skin. That, I saw, was the victory you Spartans had gained over yourselves. That was the glue. It was what you had learned and it made me stay, to learn it too.

...she (the artist, the writer) doesn't wait for inspiration, she acts in the anticipation of its apparition.