Quote

Artists are modest. They know they're not doing the work they're just taking dictation.

Steven Pressfield

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Steven Pressfield
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: September 1
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Port-of-Spain
Modest
Artists
Taking
Artist
Work
Dictation

More quotes by Steven Pressfield

Image
Our job in this lifetime is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it.
Steven Pressfield
Image
In other words, any act that rejects immediate gratification in favor of long-term grown, health, or integrity. Or, expressed another way, any act that derives from our high nature instead of our lower. Any of these will elicit Resistance.
Steven Pressfield
Image
Traditional publishers will be dominant, and they should be because they really do assure quality. But eBooks, which are huge already, are going to eclipse everything. They will save traditional publishing the way DVDs saved movie studios (for a while) and they'll greatly expand the number of readers.
Steven Pressfield
Image
As resistance works to keep us from becoming who we were born to be, equal and opposite powers are counterpoised against it. These are our allies and angels.
Steven Pressfield
Image
The athlete knows the day will never come when he wakes up pain-free. He has to play hurt.
Steven Pressfield
Image
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.
Steven Pressfield
Image
The artist committing himself to his calling has volunteered for hell, whether he knows it or not. He will be dining for the duration on a diet of isolation, rejection, self-doubt, despair, ridicule, contempt, and humiliation.
Steven Pressfield
Image
There's a secret that real writers know that wannabe writers don't, and the secret is this: It's not the writing part that's hard. What's hard is sitting down to write. What keeps us from sitting down is Resistance.
Steven Pressfield
Image
A work-in-progress generates its own energy field. You, the artist or entrepreneur, are pouring love into the work you are suffusing it with passion and intention and hope.
Steven Pressfield
Image
If you were meant to cure cancer or write a symphony or crack cold fusion and you don't do it, you not only hurt yourself, even destroy yourself. You hurt your children. You hurt me. You hurt the planet.
Steven Pressfield
Image
Don't prepare. Begin. Our enemy is not lack of preparation. The enemy is resistance, our chattering brain producing excuses. Start before you are ready.
Steven Pressfield
Image
The professional does not permit himself to become hidebound within one incarnation, however comfortable or successful. Like a transmigrating soul, he shucks his outworn body and dons a new one. He continues his journey.
Steven Pressfield
Image
When we sit down day after day and keep grinding, something mysterious starts to happen... Unseen forces enlist in our cause serendipity reinforces our purpose.
Steven Pressfield
Image
The last element in drama is high stakes. War, of course, is life and death - survival, not only for the story's characters, but often for the society itself. That's why I'm drawn to stories that are built around wars, even if they're not technically war stories.
Steven Pressfield
Image
The artist and the fundamentalist both confront the same issue, the mystery of their existence as individuals.
Steven Pressfield
Image
The Kabbalah describes angels as bundles of light, meaning intelligence, consciousness. Kabbalists believe that above every blade of grass is an angel crying Grow! Grow! ... I believe that above the entire human race is one super-angel, crying Evolve! Evolve!
Steven Pressfield
Image
Start before you’re ready.
Steven Pressfield
Image
We show up. We do our best. Good things happen.
Steven Pressfield
Image
Socrates demonstrated long ago, that the truly free individual is free only to the extent of his own self-mastery.
Steven Pressfield
Image
Anything that draws attention to ourselves through pain-free or artificial means is a manifestation of Resistance.
Steven Pressfield