David Pennington

Mastery is fine, but you must retain the ability to think like a beginner.

Roland Allen’s The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper . Allen points out that “people often start diaries in times of upheaval,”

Mary Oliver said, “Attention is the beginning of devotion.”

"Life is bristling with thorns, and I know no other remedy than to cultivate one's garden."

- Voltaire

Work, family, or friends: pick two. You can have it all, just not all at once.

Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit – all these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided.

It’s the sound of failure: so much of modern art is the sound of things going out of

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“Right now, we need writers who know the difference between the production of a market commodity and the practice of an art.”

Stories don’t sell, they invite and inspire.