“The two biggest influences in my life are magazines and addiction treatment. Those are the two main forces I’ve had looping in my brain, that have shown me how the world works.”— Cat Marnell, washingtonpost.com
“I knew I was going to be annoying. But I was thinking of the narrators I like most in this world, like Cher from ‘Clueless.’ Once I let go of what I thought a book should be, that’s when I found this voice that was grounded in pop music. I love pop music. I love Britney Spears albums.”— Cat Marnell, washingtonpost.com
“The reality is even things that you love, that you’re hungry for and passionate about, will occasionally be things you don’t want to do.”— Ari Eastman, thoughtcatalog.com
“The lie we tell people, especially artists, is that because you’re doing something you love, you should be grateful for every GLORIOUS moment. That’s…just…not how life works?”— Ari Eastman, thoughtcatalog.com
“There is a confidence, an assertion of self required in writing that we so often confuse with recklessness, but isn’t necessarily the same thing. I can be ruthless, daring, even ‘crazy’ in my writing and deliberate and thoughtful in the choices I make with it later; to doubt that is insulting, but I…”— Meaghan O'Connell, nymag.com
“Here's the self-defeating reasoning behind procrastination: 'I'm not going to do what I need to do. Instead I am going to try to distract myself from dreadful feelings, which are now growing inside me because I'm not doing what I need to do.' When you stop and put procrastination into words, you rea…”— Tommy Rosen, amazon.com
“I could not be a poet without the natural world. Someone else could. But not me. For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple.”— Mary Oliver, amazon.com
“Plenty of authors who appear to be successful in public are, in private, struggling to get by on dwindling royalty payments, or working an unglamorous day job, or are married to someone with a much more reliable income.”— Malinda Lo, amazon.com
“I mean, sure, do what you love, but do it on the nights-and-weekends plan.”— Austin Kleon, amazon.com
“But look, a lot of the people who ask me for advice, they're not just asking about how to be a writer. Because everyone knows that: How to be a writer is: you write all the time, and you read all the time, and eventually maybe you'll write something worth reading. The question people are really aski…”— Austin Kleon, amazon.com
“While working on her book, Marnell had stuck to a regimen: waking up at a normalish hour, Barry’s Bootcamp, prepackaged cut veggies and half-sandwiches from Starbucks and 7/11, Adderall just to focus and not to get high, a few drinks with friends, and maybe a little coke, ‘but not, like, lines of it…”— Emily Gould, nymag.com
“I got started by couch surfing and being broke, homeless, without healthcare.”— Tim Pool, reddit.com
“The number one rule of the online media business: You can’t profit off the suffering and pain of your employees forever.”— Eve Peyser, jezebel.com
“We could have easily become absorbed by the tragedy, lost in it and paralyzed by it, but what came back to us was the instinct to dance. I began as a dancer, and in those days of pain and shock I went back to where I started. Creating dance is the thing I know best. It is how I recognize myself.”— Twyla Tharp, amazon.com
“I read till all hours if I want to. If I get up at five and I can't sleep and I want to work, I go out and I go to work. So I work, I'm on call. I'm like a doctor and it's an emergency. And I'm the emergency.”— Phillip Roth, newyorker.com