Category: Comedy Books

I recently finished reading Bossypants by Tina Fey. Here’s the quotes I found most interesting.

“When choosing sexual partners, remember: Talent is not sexually transmittable.” (Kindle Location 13).

“In most cases being a good boss means hiring talented people and then getting out of their way.” (Kindle Location 32).

“My whole life, people who ask about my scar within one week of knowing me have invariably turned out to be egomaniacs of average intelligence or less. And egomaniacs of average intelligence or less often end up in the field of TV journalism.” (Kindle Locations 64-66).

“So I spent four years attempting to charm the uninterested. (It was probably good practice for my future career on a low-rated TV show.)” (Kindle Location 521).

“A wise friend once told me, “Don’t wear what fashion designers tell you to wear. Wear what they wear.”” (Kindle Location 1080).

“It seemed promising because I’d heard the show was looking to diversify. Only in comedy, by the way, does an obedient white girl from the suburbs count as diversity.” (Kindle Locations 1154-1155).

“The only advice anyone had given me about meeting with Lorne was “Whatever you do, don’t finish his sentences.”” (Kindle Location 1163).

“Things I Learned from Lorne Michaels

1) Producing is about discouraging creativity.

…sometimes Actors have what they call “ideas.” Usually it involves them talking more, or, in the case of more experienced actors, sitting more. When Actors have ideas it’s very important to get to the core reason behind their idea. Is there something you’re asking them to do that’s making them uncomfortable? Are they being asked to bare their midriff or make out with a Dick Cheney look-alike? (For the record, I have asked actors to do both, and they were completely game.) Rather than say, “I’m uncomfortable breast-feeding a grown man who I just met today,” the actor may speak in code and say something like “I don’t think my character would do that.” Or “I’ve hurt my back and I’m not coming out of my dressing room.” You have to remember that actors are human beings. Which is hard sometimes because they look so much better than human beings. Is there someone in the room the actor is trying to impress? This is a big one and should not be overlooked. If a male actor is giving you a hard time about something, you must immediately scan the area for pretty interns…

2) The show doesn’t go on because it’s ready; it goes on because it’s 11:30.

…You have to try your hardest to be at the top of your game and improve every joke you can until the last possible second, and then you have to let it go.

What I learned about bombing as a writer at Saturday Night is that you can’t be too worried about your “permanent record.” Yes, you’re going to write some sketches that you love and are proud of forever—your golden nuggets. But you’re also going to write some real shit nuggets. And unfortunately, sometimes the shit nuggets will make it onto the air. You can’t worry about it. As long as you know the difference, you can go back to panning for gold on Monday.

3) When hiring, mix Harvard Nerds with Chicago Improvisers and stir.

Harvard Is Classical Military Theory, Improv Is Vietnam.

4) Television is a visual medium.

You may want to be diligent and stay up with the writers all night, but if you’re going to be on the show, you can’t.

5) Don’t make any big decisions right after the season ends.

The interesting thing about this piece of advice is that no one ever takes it.

6) Never cut to a closed door.

7) Don’t hire anyone you wouldn’t want to run into in the hallway at three in the morning.

#8 Never tell a crazy person he’s crazy.

Lorne knows that the most exhausting people occasionally turn out the best stuff. How do I explain the presence of crazy people on the staff if we’re following Rule #7? Easily: These crazy people are charming and brilliant and great fun to see at three in the morning. Also, some people arrive at the show sane and the show turns them crazy.” (Kindle Locations 1180-1264).

“Real movie stars do look different from regular people. They are often a little smaller and usually have nicer teeth, shoes, and watches than anyone else in the room.” (Kindle Locations 1291-1292).

“Writers are often assigned to help produce sketches that the performers write.” (Kindle Locations 1297-1298).

“Saturday Night Live runs on a combustion engine of ambition and disappointment.” (Kindle Location 1315).

“If your boss is a jerk, try to find someone above or around your boss who is not a jerk.” (Kindle Location 1407).

“Technology doesn’t move backward. No society has ever de-industrialized.” (Kindle Locations 1560-1561).

“What I learned about Film Acting is that it’s mostly about not standing in other people’s light, and remembering what hand you had your papers in. When you do your “off-camera” lines for someone, you try to put your head real close to the camera. That’s about it. You’re a trained film actor now.” (Kindle Locations 1811-1813).

“Though we are grateful for the affection 30 Rock has received from critics and hipsters, we were actually trying to make a hit show. We weren’t trying to make a low-rated critical darling that snarled in the face of conventionality. We were trying to make Home Improvement and we did it wrong.” (Kindle Locations 1837-1839).

“Even if I sucked, it might be a good rating. A good rating is a good rating, even if people tune in just to be mad about how much it sucked.” (Kindle Locations 1971-1972).

“By the second week, I realized what made this experience so fun and different. For the first time ever, I was performing in front of an audience that wanted to see me. I had spent so many years handing out fliers, begging people to check out my improv team. I was so used to trying to win the audience over or just get permission to be there that a willing audience was an incredible luxury. It was like having a weight lifted off you. I thought, “This must be what it’s like for Darrell when he plays Bill Clinton.” Or for Tracy Morgan when he does anything. People are just happy to see them.” (Kindle Locations 2067-2071).

“Politics and prostitution have to be the only jobs where inexperience is considered a virtue. In what other profession would you brag about not knowing stuff? “I’m not one of those fancy Harvard heart surgeons. I’m just an unlicensed plumber with a dream and I’d like to cut your chest open.” The crowd cheers.” (Kindle Locations 2079-2081).

“Some weeks you got to produce a pure little comedy piece that was dear to your heart and had a great host like Alec Baldwin or Julia Louis-Dreyfus in it. Some weeks you had to sit and take notes from the smallest Hanson brother about what jokes he didn’t care for.” (Kindle Locations 2152-2153).

“When people say, “You really, really must ” do something, it means you don’t really have to. No one ever says, “You really, really must deliver the baby during labor.” When it’s true, it doesn’t need to be said.” (Kindle Locations 2298-2299).

If you liked the quotes, please buy the book here.

I recently finished “Enter Talking” by Joan Rivers. Here’s the quotes I found interesting.

“I felt timing inside me, knew instinctively the exact moment to pause, the instant to hit a line like punching a button to detonate laughter – and it was laughter with me, not at me, laughter intoxicating beyond anything. I had never knowing how to deal with adults, ahd always felt there was nothing inside my head which could be of any interest to them, but those men wanted this pathetic, fantasy-ridden kid at the table, wanted me to perform and be funny, wanted to be entertained and I was doing it. I had found out how to get my way, how to get them to say, “Sure, you can stay up another twenty minutes.” By making them laugh I was in charge. It was the first time I ever had the heady feeling, the first time I found this way to be in control – and I have lived by that knowledge to this day.” (54)

“A comic onstage must be in command, an authoritarian figure. Ladylike ways do not work for my audiences. I have to be the toughest one in the room or they will talk right through me. They have to know I am like a lion tamer who says, “if you come near me, I’ll kill you.” (55)

“If you love the wrong person, there is a point where you must walk away, not matter what it does to you.” (66)

“Nobody else will ever have your ambition, will ever hand your success to you, so you had better go out and achieve it yourself.” (70)

“Everybody in the business knows that resumes are mostly lies and no legitimate producer looks at them – or, if they do, they know instantly which are the lies. Nobody ever says, “Oh, I’m going to hire you because I see you were in so-and-so.” If you have a big credit, they already know it.” (77)

“I would think, Please, God, if you’re going to make me a failure, fine. Bud don’t make me a failure at something I don’t want to do.” (84)

“Whenever nobody laughed, Lou Alexander pressed on with energy. If his ego was on the line, he had learned to hide that.” (116)

“He told me that other people’s material only worked well for them, and when I knew who I was, I would know what would work for me.” (119)

“I was experiencing a show business truth – familiarity does not breed contempt, it breeds hope.” (130)

“Even sobbing in the filthy shower in Boston, telling myself, “I’m not going to do this anymore; I’m not going to do it anymore,” I had known I would keep on going, no matter what. My parents were not going to defeat me.” (147)

“All of us in comedy have had our Show Bars, our hideous low points that almost destroy us – except that we come back to have more of them – walking out on stages hundreds and hundreds of times when lights are broken, when microphones do not work, when audiences are hostile, when our material stinks. That is what makes you tough. That is what changes you from a happy amateur to a professional, tans your hide, turns you, eventually, leathery.” (149)

“I could not endure the reality that I might end up Joan Molinsky, an unattractive, nondescript little Jewish girl, run-of-the-mill, who might just as well have stayed in Brooklyn and married the druggist and had a normal life. I had come from normal life, from real life, and nobody there had been happy. I knew I had to be special, had to have a life different from anything I had ever known, and if I ended up ordinary Joan Molinsky, I would always be unhappy and make my husband and children unhappy.” (207)

“How could he be loving when from childhood he had never been taught what it is to love – when his wife did not love him and his children did not love him?” (216)

“The act evolves out of yourself – but not intellectually. It gathers emotionally inside you, in a strange way a by-product of struggle, of a willingness to do anything, try anything, expose yourself to anything – staying in motion because sooner or later those ripples will cause change. This is paying your dues, appearing again and again and again on every sort of stage in front of every kind of audience, until you gradually, gradually acquire technique and a stage identity, which is not you, but has your passion, your hurts, your angers, your particular humor.” (217)

“When you begin losing an audience, do not get loud; get quiet, make them find you and come back to you.” (223)

“The only way you can go into show business is to expect no reward at all – which, of course, is impossible. Everybody goes into this business for profit and recognition. The paradox is: If you are not in it for the rewards, they are more likely to come to you. If you are willing to do anything just to work – if you are obsessed – you will make your luck.” (241)

“Talent rises to the surface like the best of cream because there is so little of it. All the neurotics go into this business, the unhappy people, the misfits, and they say, “I’m going to be an actor; I’m going to be a comic.” The ones with talent always make it, unless their neurosis is so great it stops them. Talent shines through.” (241)

“But to maintain success, stamina is more important than talent. You have to learn to be a marathon runner.” (242)

“It was wrong to let a man I would never marry devote his life to me.” (244)

“I discovered the performer’s paradox: the greater the high of a success, the deeper the pit of frustration afterward.” (246)

“Just supporting myself by performing has always been to me major success in show business.” (247)

“I was absorbing a sorry truth of show business – rejection is the norm and acceptance the oddity.” (252)

“You must make crucial choices in comedy, must constantly say, “This is funny, but it is not for me.” (253)

“I was doing hunks that sort of worked, but had no consistent image of myself onstage – and never even thought about it. There was no core to me, nothing that made it all the same girl. I was only trying to be a funny girl – anything for a laugh, whether it fir the character or not. The minute there was no laugh, there was no me – and the audience knew it instantly.” (259)

“I had no concept till then of the incredible dedication of somebody like Tennessee Williams. I had always thought he sat down in his room and wrote A Streetcar Named Desire and brought it to somebody who said, “This is very good, I’ll produce it.” But here was this Pulitzer Prize winner, who had already given us Blanche DuBois, working like a beginner with his first play. After all the pretty parties, all the nice manners, all the big limousines that he pulled up in, there he was day after day in the theater cutting and fixing and pruning and changing and switching and worrying, sitting, hunched forward, making notes in the low box stage at right, where Lincoln would have gotten it.” (276)

“Experience counts for a great deal and very little. Every night onstage I feel I am starting from scratch, still not quite sure what I am doing and where I am going, thrown by the simplest thing that goes wrong.” (276)

“Jack Benny once said, “No matter how big you are, you have to get to the stage through the kitchen.” (276)

“The anger and bitterness in him were so great, you could see he would not last long as a comic. He could not keep himself from making a statement – and you cannot make statements through comedy. Your anger can be forty-nine percent and your comedy fifty-one percent, and you are okay. If the anger is fifty-one percent, the comedy is gone. Comedy is anger, but anger is not comedy.” (282)

“I knew that they wanted to laugh and that I was going to fail them. So I had no confidence, and when you walk onstage without confidence, never meeting the audience’s eyes, they smell the fear. Everything is affected – your delivery, your look, your stance.” (301)

“Never trust an audience. Never think they are truly your friends. Get their attention and their respect immediately. You are like a lion tamer on that stage, either master or victim, and there is no in between.” (301)

“I have learned that certain kinds of success can ruin you. If I had been a hit in the Catskills that summer, I would probably not be where I am today. The struggle to make it in the mountains, the browbeating you suffer, defeats many comics. They wake up at age forty and find they are Catskills comics, locked into that groove of humor, sapped of the talent and drive they need to reach the next rung. Once a cruise comic did so well on a cruise ship that he went to his agent and said, “I’m ready for Caesars palace.” The agent answered, “As soon as it floats.” (302)

“It started my lifelong technique of taping every show, replaying the act, making notes, and using the new lines that worked.” (304)

“Lenny Bruce was hysterically funny with total control of his audience. The children were lined up to be fed. I was seeing Jesus.” (307)

“That night I realized the importance of getting down to basics: What are we really talking about? Why are we embarrassed about this? If that is all it is, so what? We need to know what we are really bothered about, need to get in touch with our true feelings and attitudes so we can deal with them.” (308)

“Personal truth means to me talking about your pain, which means stripping everything away, showing all of yourself, not some corner of your life okay for audiences to see. But the risk is awesome. When you open yourself up, talking about things that deeply pain you, perhaps the audience will not be your friend, perhaps when you bare your soul and say, “Here are my thighs,” they may go, “Yeah? So? Waiter, another drink please,” instead of “My god, my God, you’ve been living with this?” That is a tremendous fear to overcome.” (309)

“My pain had found a channel and was spilling through, flooding me with a happy hysteria, goading me to speak fast and make everything funny because at any second I might begin to cry.” (310)

“At last I had become hurt enough, upset enough, angry enough to expose her onstage – and in my act from that night on, the pain kept spilling and spilling and spilling.” (311)

“When you work solely for money, the spark and excitement go and the audience knows it.” (314)

“I wondered to myself why I constantly chose impossible men. Maybe I was picking men who would not stop my career, men I would not have to marry.” (321)

“Freddie used to ask people what they thought of a new performer. “Liked” was the kiss of death. “Loved” or “hated” interested him. At least the performer had aroused emotion. It was the first time being loathed by some people was my big asset.” (330)

“There was within me a primal understanding that I could only be happy alone onstage, talking one-on-one to the audience.” (333)

“They all kept saying, “She goes too far…” and kept coming back, and night after night I was feeling those shock waves of laughter, luxuriating in the appreciation, getting that soaring sensation of liftoff.” (342)

“I learned that if I made even one friend in the audience, then I did not care if the entire rest of the audience turned against me.” (343)

“William Randolph Heart said, “If you write for the masses, you eat with the classes. If you write for the classes, you eat with the masses.” (344)

“I thought a hook was low-class, so it took me years to find mine and it just came naturally. Much later, when my act had really become gossiping over the back fence with audiences, I slipped into “Can we talk?” I said it so much, so automatically, it became my identifying line. People began to know who I was oh – “Oh, yeah, she’s the one who says ‘Can we talk?’” I hate saying it – I do not like anything that’s consciously done. It is too manipulative. But that hook lifted me off a plateau in my career, and what really took me through the roof was talking about personalities.” (347)

“You cannot rely on anything, even while it is happening. You cannot say, “Okay, I’ve reached this level.” You have reached no level. You get up the next morning and you are at the bottom all over again. You have your talent on this day, but you never know whether tomorrow you will be able to look at something and make a joke of it – whether you will still have that gift that came from nowhere and may disappear into nowhere.” (358)

“In a curious way, failure was setting me free. Since show business considered me too old, too shopworn, too shocking, there was nobody left to please except myself – and that, of course, is the real secret of pleasing the audience. When you enjoy what you are doing, they will enjoy it with you.” (364)

As always, if you liked the quotes please buy the book here.

I recently finished reading The War for Late Night by Bill Carter. Here’s the quotes I found most interesting. Instead of my usual page numbers, they’re marked “KL” for Kindle Location.

“After a while you don’t bomb anymore. You do better than you might have done, or you do a little worse. But you don’t go out there and just bomb.” (KL 239-240).

“He got laughs—genuine, honest laughs. The sound wafted up from the audience and enveloped him, embraced him, cocoonlike—or maybe like the ring of smoke in an opium den. O’Brien had never used drugs and never would. But this? This was the same thing; this was cocaine.” (KL 1064-1066).

“Conan spent his free time fighting off anxiety and frustration—and depression. He had always been prone to falling into an occasional slough of despond, sometimes even when things were going relatively well.” (KL 1253-1255).

“That day Conan proved he had some mettle. When he entered the building, he stepped into an elevator and was immediately confronted by a reporter from the New York Post, who taunted, “I counted how many laughs Letterman got in his press conference leaving the show and I’m gonna count how many you get!” Far from throwing Conan, the encounter relaxed him. It was when things were calm that he leaned toward depression or panic. When his back was against the wall, he seemed to do things he didn’t know he could do.” (KL 1441-1444).

“The knock was that he didn’t delegate well, mainly because he always seemed certain he could do the job as well or better himself. “Sometimes it’s a curse to be too smart and think you can do too much,” said an NBC executive who worked closely with Zucker for a time.” (KL 1697-1699)

“Earning just enough to live on so that he could show up every night at the Comedy Cellar and go on as the last act. Every weeknight, somewhere near two a.m., Jon Stewart performed before the drunk and the lonely of the New York metropolitan area. “I sucked for two straight years,” Jon would later tell aspiring comics, partly as advice and partly as storm warning.” (KL 1884-1887)

“Leno seared that advice into his psyche. If he wasn’t as gifted as other kids—later, other comics—he would hit them where they might be weak: their work ethic.” (KL 1954-1955).

“He was living by what he called “the first rule of show business: Don’t create anything bigger than your act.” Jay interpreted the rule to mean that, if you found yourself consumed by something bigger than what you are known for, your downfall was assured. If something distracting or dispiriting was going on in his life, his duty was to shrug it off, get back in the game of telling jokes, and be funny, day in, day out.” (KL 2036-2039).

“As Zucker had often said before, “It’s sometimes easier to see the world when you’re flat on your back.” (KL 2909-2910).

“Michaels still believed that what worked on late-night talk shows was a host people could identify with and like. “The more time you fill on television, the more and more of you comes out,” Michaels said. “These jobs define overexposure.”  (KL 3093-3095).

“Every night the show, for good or for bad, defined who he was. The act of stepping out nearly daily onto a stage and standing in front of people, millions of people, and soliciting laughs almost defined the term narcissism. Every performer would have needed an outsize ego to get through that crucible every night. Clearly the two giants of this late-night era had that in common, but they reacted to it in totally opposite ways. Jay Leno told friends and colleagues he had the easiest job in the world. One friend remembered hearing Jay say that and replying, “Jay, I know you’re at ease with what you do. But you really think you have the easiest job in the world? Every night getting a report card? Nobody else’s job gives them a grade every time they finish up their work. No, Jay, really this is the opposite of the easiest job.” The same friend also knew Dave well. The significant difference between them, the friend said, was that “with Jay nothing is ever wrong and with Dave nothing is ever right.” Jay’s narcissism took the form of an overarching single-mindedness about his career and the material that fed it. To some close observers of Jay over the years, the Tonight Show star didn’t seem to be living life so much as he seemed to be living comedy material.” (KL 4013-4022).

“I think Conan chooses not to have a point of view, unlike Jay, who doesn’t really have the mentality to have one.” (KL 4189-4190).

“Conan thought they were working at looking sympathetic, following some lesson that had been taught at corporate school.” (Kindle Location 5364).

“Early on, Conan had said, “I don’t care what happens in my career as long as it’s interesting.” (Kindle Location 6351).

“Here’s big point number two in show business: Hang around! Just stay there, just be there! The old cliché: 95 percent is just showing up. OK, I’m on at twelve; I’m still showing up. You never leave!” (KL 7012-7013).

“Conan was trying to be both outrageous and mainstream. “You can’t be both things. He didn’t have enough time. He was three-quarters of the way there.” (KL 7045-7046).

Lorne walked into Segelstein’s office, sat down, and laid out all the reasons he had decided to resign. And Segelstein, who had a sardonic streak, listened patiently, not uttering a word until Michaels had finished. Then he launched into a story, a parable of sorts, one that touched on the religion of television. “Let me just take you through what will happen when you leave,” Segelstein began. “When you leave, the show will get worse. But not all of a sudden—gradually. And it will take the audience a while to figure that out. Maybe two, maybe three years. And when it gets to be, you know, awful, and the audience has abandoned it, then we will cancel it. And the show will be gone, but we will still be here, because we’re the network and we are eternal. If you read your contract closely, it says that the show is to be ninety minutes in length. It is to cost X. That’s the budget. Nowhere in that do we ever say that it has to be good. And if you are so robotic and driven that you feel the pressure to push yourself in that way to make it good, don’t come to us and say you’ve been treated unfairly, because you’re trying hard to make it good and we’re getting in your way. Because at no point did we ask for it to be good. That you’re neurotic is a bonus to us. Our job is to lie, cheat, and steal—and your job is to do the show.” (KL 7136-7145).

If you find these quotes interesting, please buy the whole book here.

I recently finished reading Do The Work by Steven Pressfield. Here’s the quotes I found useful (there’s no page numbers because I read an ebook version):

“Fear doesn’t go away. The warrior and the artist live by the same code of necessity, which dictates that the battle must be fought anew every day.”

“Bad things happen when we employ rational thought, because rational thought comes from the ego. Instead, we want to work from the Self, that is, from instinct and intuition, from the unconscious.”

“The problem with friends and family is that they know us as we are. They are invested in maintaining us as we are. The last thing we want is to remain as we are.”

“Ignorance and arrogance are the artist and entrepreneur’s indispensable allies. She must be clueless enough to have no idea how difficult her enterprise is going to be—and cocky enough to believe she can pull it off anyway.”

“Once we commit to action, the worst thing we can do is to stop.”

“Start Before You’re Ready Don’t prepare. Begin.”

“The enemy is our chattering brain, which, if we give it so much as a nanosecond, will start producing excuses, alibis, transparent self-justifications, and a million reasons why we can’t/shouldn’t/won’t do what we know we need to do.”

“Discipline yourself to boil down your story/new business/philanthropic enterprise to a single page.”

“Do you love your idea? Does it feel right on instinct? Are you willing to bleed for it?”

“Get your idea down on paper. You can always tweak it later.”

“Figure out where you want to go; then work backwards from there.”

“Your movie, your album, your new startup … what is it about? When you know that, you’ll know the end state.”

“I was thirty years old before I had an actual thought. Everything up till then was either what Buddhists call “monkey-mind” chatter or the reflexive regurgitation of whatever my parents or teachers said, or whatever I saw on the news or read in a book, or heard somebody rap about, hanging around the street corner.”

“Never do research in prime working time.”

“One trick they use is to boil down their presentation to the following: A killer opening scene. Two major set pieces in the middle. A killer climax. A concise statement of the theme.”

“Any project or enterprise can be broken down into beginning, middle, and end. Fill in the gaps; then fill in the gaps between the gaps.”

“One rule for first full working drafts: get them done ASAP. Don’t worry about quality. Act, don’t reflect. Momentum is everything. Get to THE END as if the devil himself were breathing down your neck and poking you in the butt with his pitchfork.”

“Get the first version of your project done from A to Z as fast as you can. Don’t stop. Don’t look down. Don’t think.”

“Ideas come according to their own logic. That logic is not rational. It’s not linear. We may get the middle before we get the end. We may get the end before we get the beginning. Be ready for this. Don’t resist it.”

“Let’s talk about the actual process—the writing/composing/ idea generation process. It progresses in two stages: action and reflection. Act, reflect. Act, reflect. NEVER act and reflect at the same time.”

“Our job is not to control our idea; our job is to figure out what our idea is (and wants to be)—and then bring it into being.”

“You are not to blame for the voices of Resistance you hear in your head.”

“The opposite of fear is love—love of the challenge, love of the work, the pure joyous passion to take a shot at our dream and see if we can pull it off.”

“Resistance puts two questions to each and all of us: 1)How bad do you want it? 2)Why do you want it?”

“Crashes are hell, but in the end they’re good for us. A crash means we have failed. We gave it everything we had and we came up short. A crash does not mean we are losers.”

“A crash means we’re at the threshold of learning something, which means we’re getting better, we’re acquiring the wisdom of our craft. A crash compels us to figure out what works and what doesn’t work—and to understand the difference.”

“A professional does not take success or failure personally.”

“Finishing is the critical part of any project. If we can’t finish, all our work is for nothing.”

I recently finished reading The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp. Here’s the quotes I found useful.

“Creativity is a habit, and the best creativity is a result of good work habits.” (7)

“Destiny, quite often, is a determined parent.” (8)

“Whether or not God has kissed your brow, you still have to work. Without learning and preparation, you won’t know how to harness the power of that kiss.” (8)

“Nobody worked harder than Mozart. By the time he was twenty-eight years old, his hands were deformed because of all the hours he had spent practicing, performing, and gripping a quill pen to compose.” (8)

“By making the start of the sequence automatic, they replace doubt and fear with comfort and routine.” (18)

“A Manhattan writer I know never leaves his apartment without reminding himself to “come back with a face.” Whether he’s walking down the street or sitting on a park bench or riding the subway or standing on a checkout line, he looks for a compelling face and works up a rich description of it in his mind. When he has a moment, he writes it all down in his notebook.” (30)

“Solitude is an unavoidable part of creativity. Self-reliance is a happy by-product.” (31)

“Doing is better than not doing, and if you do something badly you’ll learn to do it better.” (32)

“The golfer Ben Hogan said, “Every day you don’t practice you’re one day further from being good.” If it’s something you want to do, make the time.” (32)

“Make it your priority. Work around it. Once your basic needs are taken care of, money is there to be used. What better investment than in yourself?” (32)

“Immerse yourself in the details of the work. Commit yourself to mastering every aspect. At the same time, step back to see if the work scans, if it’s intelligible to an unwashed audience. Don’t get so involved that you lose what you’re trying to say.” (41)

“Traveling the paths of greatness, even in someone else’s footprints, is a vital means to acquiring skill.” (66)

“Every young person grows up with an overwhelming sense of possibility, and how life, in some ways, is just a series of incidents in which that possibility is either enlarged or smacked out of you. How you adapt is your choice.” (77)

“Never save for two meetings what you can accomplish in one.” (84)

“There’s a difference between a work’s beginning and starting to work.” (91)

“You don’t have a really good idea until you combine two little ideas.” (97)

“Art is not about minimizing risk and delivering work that is guaranteed to please. Artists have bigger goals. If being an artist means pushing the envelope, you don’t want to stuff your material in someone else’s envelope. You don’t want to know the envelope has been invented.” (105)

“Ideas will come to you more quickly if you’ve been putting in the time at your chosen craft.” (105)

“Mark Twain said, “the man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.” (110)

“What you are today and what you will be in five years depends on two things: the people you meet and the books you read.” (110)

“When you stimulate your body, your brain comes alive in ways you can’t simulate in a sedentary position.” (113)

“Giving yourself a handicap to overcome will force you to think in a new and slightly different way.” (114)

“A plan is like the scaffolding around a building. When you’re putting up the exterior shell, the scaffolding is vital. But once the shell is in place and you start work on the interior, the scaffolding disappears.” (119)

“In creative endeavors luck is a skill.” (120)

“The more you are in the room working, experimenting, banging away at your objective, the more luck has a chance of biting you on the nose.” (121)

“It’s vital to know the difference between good planning and too much planning.” (122)

“Give me a writer who thinks he has all the time in the world and I’ll show you a writer who never delivers.” (126)

“It’s tempting to believe that the quantity and quality of our creative productivity would increase exponentially if only we could afford everything we’ve imagined, but I’ve seen too many artists dry up the moment they had enough money in the bank.” (126)

“Obligation is not the same as commitment, and it’s certainly not an acceptable reason to stick with something that isn’t working.” (127)

“You only need one good reason to commit to an idea, not four hundred. But if you have four hundred reasons to say yes and one reason to say no, the answer is probably no.” (128)

“Obligation is a flimsy base for creativity, way down the list behind passion, courage, instinct, and the desire to do something great.” (128)

“Whom the gods wish to destroy, they give unlimited resources.” (129)

“You can’t overthink when you don’t have time to think at all.” (132)

“Too much planning implies you’ve got it all under control. That’s boring, unrealistic, and dangerous. It lulls you into a complacency that removes one of the artist’s most valuable conditions: being pissed.” (133)

“Art is competitive with yourself, with the past, with the future.” (133)

“Creativity is an act of defiance. You’re challenging the status quo. You’re questioning accepted truths and principles. You’re asking three universal questions that mock conventional wisdom:
“Why do I have to obey the rules?”
“Why can’t I be different?”
“Why can’t I do it my way?”” (133)

“To force change, you have to attack the work with outrage and violence.” (135)

“My perfect world does not exist, but it’s there as a goal. What are the conditions of your perfect world? Which of them are essential, and which can you work around?” (136)

“How to be lucky: Be generous. Generosity is luck going in the opposite direction, away from you.” (136)

“New collaborators bring new vectors of energy into your static world – and they can be combustible.” (137)

“Every work of art needs a spine – an underlying theme, a motive for coming into existence. It doesn’t have to be apparent to the audience. But you need it at the start of the creative process to guide you and keep you going.” (144)

“Skill gives you the wherewithal to execute whatever occurs to you. Without it, you are just a font of unfulfilled ideas. Skill is how you close the gap between what you can see in your mind’s eye and what you can produce; the more skill you have, the more sophisticated and accomplished your ideas can be. With absolute skill comes absolute confidence, allowing you to dare to be simple.” (163)

“Never worry that rote exercises aimed at developing skills will suffocate creativity. At the same time, it’s important to recognize that demonstrating great technique is not the same as being creative.” (164)

“Learn to do for yourself. It’s the only way to broaden your skills.” (165)

“Personality is a skill.” (165)

“One of her skills, and a great deal of her charm, was this built-in sense of humility. The greatest dancers have that.” (165)

“Confidence is a trait that has to be earned honestly and refreshed constantly; you have to work as hard to protect your skills as you did to develop them.” (165)

“Perfect practice makes perfect.” (165)

“The great ones never take fundamentals for granted.” (166)

“Practice without purpose, however, is nothing more than exercise. Too many people practice what they’re already good at and neglect the skills that need more work.” (167)

“The great ones shelve the perfected skills for a while and concentrate on their imperfections.” (167)

“The golfer Davis Love III was taught by his father to think of practice as a huge circle, like a clock. You work on a skill until you master it, and then you move on to the next one. When you’ve mastered that, you move on to the next, and the next, and the next, and eventually you’ll come full circle to the task that you began with, which will now need remedial work because of all the time you’ve spent on other things.” (167)

“Switching genres was Beethoven’s way of maintaining his inexperience, and as a result, enlarging his art.” (168)

“Analyze your own skill set. See where you’re strong and where you need dramatic improvement, and tackle those lagging skills first.” (169)

“Japanese sword fighter Miyamoto Musashi counseled, “Never have a favorite weapon.” (169)

“We need this breadth and passion if we’re going ot keep perfecting our craft, whether or not there is approval, validation, or money coming from it.” (173)

“Without passion, all the skill in the world won’t lift you above craft. Without skill, all the passion in the world will leave you eager but floundering. Combining the two is the essence of the creative life.” (173)

“The willingness to take directions is a skill noticed mostly when absent.” (175)

“The more you know, the better you can imagine.” (177)

““We’ve always done it this way” is not a good enough reason to keep doing it if it isn’t working.” (186)

“When you’re in a rut, you have to question everything except your ability to get out of it.” (187)

“You’ve got two minutes to come up with sixty uses for the stool. A lot of interesting things happen when you set an aggressive quota, even with ideas. People’s competitive juices are stirred. Instead of panicking they focus, and with that comes an increased fluency and agility of mind. People are forced to suspend critical thinking. To meet the quota, they put their internal critic on hold and let everything out. They’re no longer choking off good impulses.” (191)

“Sometimes you can’t identify a good idea until you’ve considered and discarded the bad ones.” (192)

“If you’re in a creative rut, the easiest way to challenge assumptions is to switch things around them and make the switch work. The process goes like this:

1. Identify the concept that isn’t working.
2. Write down your assumptions about it.
3. Challenge the assumptions.
4. Act on the challenge.” (193)

“Jerry Robbins made a point of going to see everything because he could find something useful in even the worst productions. He’d sit there, viewing the catastrophe onstage, and imagine how he would have done it differently. A bad evening at the theater for everyone else was a creative workout for him.” (195)

“There’s no point in analyzing it. If you could figure out how you get into a groove you could figure out how to maintain it. That’s not going to happen. The best you can hope for is the wisdom and good fortune to occasionally fall into a groove.” (196)

“Knowing when to stop is almost as critical as knowing how to start.” (207)

“There comes a point where you have to let your creation out into the world or it isn’t worth a tinkerer’s damn.” (208)

“You can’t be stoic and strong about everything. Some things in life are just meant to be enjoyed simply because you enjoy them. They are their own rationale.” (209)

“You do your best work after your biggest disasters.” (214)

“It’s vital to be able to forget the pain of failure while retaining the lessons from it.” (214)

“You won’t get very far relying on your audience’s ignorance.” (218)

“If you don’t have a broad base of skills, you’re limiting the number of problems you can solve when trouble hits.” (222)

“When people who have demonstrated talent fizzle out or disappear after early creative success, it’s not because their gifts, that famous “one percent inspiration,” abandoned them; more likely they abandoned their gift through a failure of perspiration.” (233)

“An artist’s ultimate goal is the achievement of mastery.” (240)

“Every time you set out to create something new, you have to prove to yourself you can still do it at least as well as, if not better than, you did it before. You can not rest on your creative laurels.” (241)

As always, if you find these quotes useful, please buy the full book here.