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"When you are writing, you must treat it as the most important thing in the world, even when you know it is not. This helps you take the job seriously and do your best on everything you write."
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"Spill not the morning (the quintessence of the day!) in recreations for sleep is a recreation. Add not therefore sauce to sauce. ... Pastime like wine is poison in the morning. It is then good husbandry to sow the head which hath lain fallow all night with some serious work."

"If you can cope the pride when winning,then you can confront despair when lose."

"You must stop been so carnal and learn to say no to people, if it concerns the things of God."

"Turn the actions in achieving your goals into systematically repeated things and make them your routine."

"Control yourself every passing second and make sure that no unit of time is being wasted."

"It's always been important for writers to be disciplined but now even more so. In addition to the traditional displacement activities like cleaning the fridge or eating cake writers are faced with a plethora of online possibilities (some of which may be professionally worthwhile as well as interesting and fun). As a writer it's important to learn how to focus so you can do both as and when you need to."

"Do not whine... Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone."

"Without work, time cannot be converted and it will waste away."

"Being in the studio is okay but sitting in a room by yourself composing is a discipline that takes a certain type of mind set and Tommy has a great gift for that as did the previous guy."

"Your habits guide and sculpt your path. The same process that builds habits can break habits."
Explore more quotes by John Steinbeck

"Time interval is a strange and contradictory matter in the mind. It would be reasonable to suppose that a routine time or an eventless time would seem interminable. It should be so, but it is not. It is the dull eventless times that have no duration whatever. A time splashed with interest, wounded with tragedy, crevassed with joy - that's the time that seems long in the memory. And this is right when you think about it. Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all."

"Casy said solemnly, "This here ol' man jus' lived a life an' just died out of it. I don't know whether he was good or bad, but that don't matter much. He was alive, an' that's what matters. An' now his dead, an' that don't matter..."

"But think of the glory of the choice! That makes a man a man. A cat has no choice, a bee must make honey. There's no godliness there."

"...many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased. I remember a man in Salinas who in his middle years traveled to Honolulu and back, and that journey continued for the rest of his life. We could watch him in his rocking chair on his front porch, his eyes squinted, half-closed, endlessly traveling to Honolulu."

"Unless a reviewer has the courage to give you unqualified praise, I say ignore the bastard."

"We gather our arms full of guilt as though it were precious stuff. It must be that we want it that way."

"Lanser had been in Belgium and France twenty years before and he tried not to think what he knew-that war is treachery and hatred, the muddling of incompetent generals, the torture and killing and sickness and tiredness, until at last it is over and nothing has changed except for new weariness and new hatreds."

"I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature."
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