Worry is a state of mind based upon fear. It works slowly, but persistently. It is insidious and subtle. Step by step it “digs itself in” until it paralyzes ones reasoning faculty, destroys self-confidence and initiative. Worry is a form of sustained fear caused by indecision therefore it is a state of mind which can be controlled.
You'll never rise any higher than the way you see yourself.
You might occasionally feel that some people are standing in the way and slowing your progress, but in reality the biggest person standing in your way is you. Others can stop you temporarily -- you are the only one who can do it permanently.
Every moment wasted looking back prevents us from moving forward.
Because we cling to the past we become unavailable to the present.
Frustration is a very positive sign. It means that the solution to your problem is within range, but what you're currently doing isn't working, and you need to change your approach in order to achieve your goal.
I believe that there's no improvement if you have an inferiority complex and victim mentality.
Fears, indecision, and frustration feed on words. Without words they usually stop. . . . Words are at times good for looking back, but they are confining when I need to act in the present.
An empty head is not really empty; it is stuffed with rubbish. Hence the difficulty of forcing anything into an empty head.
I need eight hours to get maybe 20 minutes of work done. I had one of those yesterday: seven hours of self-loathing.
People who say, "I don't know what to do," usually aren't inspired enough to make it happen.
What can one possibly introduce into a mind that is already full, and full of itself?
If you don't believe in yourself, somewhere or another, you sabotage yourself.
You might think that shifting your thoughts is as easy as setting your mind to it. But stressful thoughts aren't held in place through choice or will power. They're held in place through perceived truth value.
There is always a point in the writing of a piece when I sit in a room literally papered with false starts and cannot put one word after another and imagine that I have suffered a small stroke, leaving me apparently undamaged but actually aphasic.
I'm not sure why writing for others became harder. Probably a reluctance to give away anything you might conceivably use yourself caused a block. I did it, but it remained hard when it had once been easy.
I had writer's block for almost a year.
If you say "can't" you're restricting what you can do or ever will do.
I wonder, when a writer's blocked and doesn't have any resources to pull himself out of it, why doesn't he jump in his car and drive around the U.S.A.? I went last winter for seven thousand miles and it was lovely. Inexpensive, too.
There's the hardest thing - when you cannot be as athletic or perform at a level you really want to. Your mind is telling you, but your body is not allowing you.
Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it's always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.
A working brain is probably a lot like a map, where anybody can get from one place to another on the freeways. It's the nonworking brains that get blocked, that have dead ends, that are under construction like mine.
I think we go through our lives limiting our potential, and when times are tough, it's easy to convince ourselves that something isn't possible, but if you start there, then you limit yourself and the possibilities of what you can create.
Writing is simply one thought after another dying upon the one before.
No man is hindered by another; he is only hindered by himself. No man suffers because of another; he suffers only because of himself.
