Notable Quotes

There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

The trouble is, you think you have time.

We’re like licorice. Not everyone likes licorice, but the people who like licorice really like licorice.

One of the illusions is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day of the year.

Beware by whom you are called sane.

How you do anything is how you do everything.

No good job can be done in haste.

That you have bipolar disorder … does not begin to encompass the whole of you — it is a what, while you are a you.

The grass is greener where you water it.

You have the right to work, but for the work’s sake only. You have no right to the fruits of work.

Desire for the fruits of work must never be your motive in working. Never give way to laziness, either. Perform every action with your heart fixed on the Supreme Lord. Renounce attachment to the fruits.

Be even-tempered in success and failure; for it is this evenness of temper which is meant by yoga.

Work done with anxiety about results is far inferior to work done without such anxiety, in the calm of self-surrender. Seek refuge in the knowledge of Brahman. They who work selfishly for results are miserable.

If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.

To be silent the whole day, see no newspaper, hear no radio, listen to no gossip, be thoroughly and completely lazy, thoroughly and completely indifferent to the fate of the world is the finest medicine a man can give himself.

Everyone is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.

The crowd is the gathering place of the weakest; true creation is a solitary act.

If others would think as hard as I did, then they would get similar results.

Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the assessment that something else is more important than fear.

The work of criticism is superfluous unless it is itself a work of art as independent of the work it criticizes as that is independent of the materials that went into it.

Sometimes we expect more from others because we would be willing to do that much for them.

Interviewer: There’s a certain aesthetic to the way you live. You once talked about using good silver every day.

Didion: Well, every day is all there is.

May your problems be solvable.

How to write a good thank you note

1. Do not start with the thank you.
2. Start with any other sentence. If you first say, "Thank you for the nice sweater," you can't imagine what to write next. Say, "It was so wonderful to come home from school to find this nice sweater. Thank you for thinking of me on Arbor Day."
3. Then you're done.

I recommend learning how to write a very good thank-you note. A child who can write a nice thank-you note can turn into a cocaine dealer five years later and be remembered as the child who wrote nice thank-you notes.

If you will it, it is no dream.

The men of the world were equal to the thinkers in every other respect and were often superior to them, just as animals in their tenacious undeviating actions in cases of necessity may often seem superior to human beings.

If you pass a bookstore and don’t go in, it’s a crime!

The most dangerous thought that you can have as a creative person is to think that you know what you're doing, because once you think you know what you're doing you stop looking around for other ways of doing things and you stop being able to see other ways of doing things.

You have to like what you do enough that the concept of 'spare time' seems mistaken.

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

Get rich, young man, for money is power and power ought to be in the hands of good people. I say you have no right to be poor.

I think it's far more important to write well than most people realize. Writing doesn't just communicate ideas; it generates them. If you're bad at writing and don't like to do it, you'll miss out on most of the ideas writing would have generated.

As for how to write well, here's the short version: Write a bad version 1 as fast as you can; rewrite it over and over; cut out everything unnecessary; write in a conversational tone; develop a nose for bad writing, so you can see and fix it in yours; imitate writers you like; if you can't get started, tell someone what you plan to write about, then write down what you said; expect 80% of the ideas in an essay to happen after you start writing it, and 50% of those you start with to be wrong; be confident enough to cut; have friends you trust read your stuff and tell you which bits are confusing or drag; don't (always) make detailed outlines; mull ideas over for a few days before writing; carry a small notebook or scrap paper with you; start writing when you think of the first sentence; if a deadline forces you to start before that, just say the most important sentence first; write about stuff you like; don't try to sound impressive; don't hesitate to change the topic on the fly; use footnotes to contain digressions; use anaphora to knit sentences together; read your essays out loud to see (a) where you stumble over awkward phrases and (b) which bits are boring (the paragraphs you dread reading); try to tell the reader something new and useful; work in fairly big quanta of time; when you restart, begin by rereading what you have so far; when you finish, leave yourself something easy to start with; accumulate notes for topics you plan to cover at the bottom of the file; don't feel obliged to cover any of them; write for a reader who won't read the essay as carefully as you do, just as pop songs are designed to sound ok on crappy car radios; if you say anything mistaken, fix it immediately; ask friends which sentence you'll regret most; go back and tone down harsh remarks; publish stuff online, because an audience makes you write more, and thus generate more ideas; print out drafts instead of just looking at them on the screen; use simple, germanic words; learn to distinguish surprises from digressions; learn to recognize the approach of an ending, and when one appears, grab it.

You can do it like it’s a great weight on you, or you can do it like a dance.