Babies are born in blood and chaos; stars and galaxies come into being amid the release of massive primordial cataclysms. Conception occurs at the primal level. I’m not being facetious when I stress, throughout this book, that it is better to be primitive than to be sophisticated, and better to be stupid than to be smart.

“Why do you want it?”

Where do our own real thoughts come from? How can we access them? From what source does our true, authentic self speak?

You can board a spaceship to Pluto and settle, all by yourself, into a perfect artist’s cottage ten zillion miles from Earth. Resistance will still be with you. The enemy is inside you.

End first, then beginning and middle.

That’s its danger. We need it, we love it. But we must never forget that research can become Resistance.

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.

The warrior and the artist live by the same code of necessity, which dictates that the battle must be fought anew every

Yeah, he’ll still be there. Yeah, you’ll still have to duel him every morning. And yeah, he’ll still fight just as hard and use just as many nasty tricks as he ever did. But you will have beaten him once, and you’ll know you can beat him again. That’s a game-changer. That will transform your life.