Hannah

I call [the first steps of a creative act] scratching. You know how you scratch at a lottery ticket to see if you’ve won? That’s what I’m doing when I begin a piece…

Scratching takes many shapes. A fashion designer is scratching when he visits vintage clothes stores, studies music videos…the act of changing your environment is the scratch.

—Twyla

"I was waiting for something extraordinary to happen, but as the years wasted on, nothing ever did unless I caused it.”

—Charles Bukowski

To that end, scheduling creative tasks for specific times of day, and then treating them like real nonnegotiable appointments, is imperative for productivity.

-Fay Wolf

Men who act, to the extent that they feel themselves to be the masters of their own futures, will forever be tempted to make themselves masters of the past, too.

-Hannah Arendt

[My father] says in his experience it is the man who has been in a war who understands that war is cruel and foolish and sinful, and anyone who defends war as natural to the human condition is a person of stunted imagination.

“For an actor, it’s the difference between planning how you’re going to behave, which looks like acting, and finding your performance in the other person’s eyes, which makes you respond to one another—and which looks like life.”

-Alan Alda

And in many ways, that complaint has only gotten louder over the decades. Stop talking to each other and start buying things. Stop providing content for free and start paying us for the privilege.

-Catherynne M. Valente catvalente.substack.com

Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media,

The Industrial Revolution had two phases: mechanizing the manufacturing of cloth, then mechanizing manufacturing itself. The Digital Revolution is experiencing the same two-step process. In the first phase, the white-collar side of industry—payroll, human resources, inventory management—was digitized and networked. Computers have been used to