Mickey Patel

You can almost always improve your writing by being more specific. Don’t write “I got in my car” when you can write “I got in my ‘65 Mustang.”

​

"Creativity is the focused combination of unlikely things. Your mind locks onto a certain element and then searches widely for something unexpected that fits with it. What can scuba diving teach you about agriculture? What can trees teach you about public speaking? There is always some connective tissue between disciplines. If you wish to be more

Full-time authors, for example, don’t actually type for 40 hours per week because they’d have little to say if they did. Instead, they spend most of their time collecting experiences. By the time they sit down to write, they’ve already experienced what they plan to write about, even if they aren’t entirely sure about what they’re going to say. By

Living safely generally means living in imitation and therefore in fear. Surely, the function of education is to help each one of us to live freely and without fear, is it not? And to create an atmosphere in which there is no fear requires a great deal of thinking on your part as well as on the part of the teacher, the educator.

Concrete writing resonates. Abstract writing puts people to sleep. Bring your words to life by making them vivid and tangible. Use specific examples. Talk about things people can see, touch, taste, smell, and hear.

There’s no dishonor in having a job. What is dishonorable is scaring away your creativity by demanding that it pay for your entire existence.

M: I shall explain this to you on many levels, my student. Firstly, trust not the face that man shows to the world. He has had much practice in concealing himself. He projects a certain image to the world, yet this image is vastly different in the quiet of his home.