The most important possible thing you can do is do a lot of work.
What nobody tells people who are beginners… is that all of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, and it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not… your taste is why your work disappoints you… We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this… It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions.
You can criticize yourself to a point to do something better, or you criticize yourself to a point where you inhibit yourself.
Great stories happen to those who can tell them.
If you're not failing all the time, you're not creating a situation where you can get lucky.
You will be stupid. You will worry your parents. You will question your own choices, your relationships, your jobs, your friends, where you live, what you studied in college, that you went to college at all... If that happens, you're doing it right.
Not enough gets said about the importance of abandoning crap.
We live in a world where joy and empathy and pleasure are all around us, there for the noticing.
It takes a while. It's gonna take you a while. It's normal to take a while. You just have to fight your way through that.
Where do ideas come from? Ideas come from other ideas.
I cannot stress enough that the answer to a lot of your life's questions is often in someone else's face. Try putting your iPhones down every once in a while and look at people's faces.
Don't wait till you're older, or in some better job than you have now. Don't wait for anything. Don't wait till some magical...idea drops into your lap. That's not where ideas come from. Go looking for an idea and it'll show up. Begin now.
Everything is more compelling when you talk like a human being, when you talk like yourself.
I wish somebody had given me the news that ideas don't just fall on your head like fairy dust. You have to treat that like a job. You have to spend hours each day, where you're just like, 'This is the part of the day when I'm looking for an idea.'
I wish that someone had said to me that it's normal to feel lost for a little while.
The entire culture was organized for people who are happy. People who are miserable need reassurance that other people are miserable.
You'll hit gold more often if you simply try out a lot of things.
It's hard to make something that's interesting. It's really, really hard. It's like a law of nature, a law of aerodynamics, that anything that's written or anything that's created wants to be mediocre. The natural state of all writing is mediocrity... So what it takes to make anything more than mediocre is such an act of will.
You will be fierce. You will fearless. And you will make work you know in your heart is not as good as you want it to be.
I would just like say to you with all my heart is that most everybody I know who does interesting creative work, they went through a phase of years where they had really good taste and they could tell what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be.
You'd think that radio was around long enough that someone would have coined a word for staring into space.
It's not a terribly original thing to say, but I love Raymond Carver. For one thing, he's fun to read out loud.
I don't like that whole "art should challenge you" thing. Because I don't feel like art actually does challenge you. I was a semiotics major at Brown, and there's this idea that stories are better, books are better, and movies are better if they cocked you off your axis and you were completely disoriented and you'd really have to rethink everything.
I remember clearly that when I was little it was explained to me [that] the way that babies were made was that God put the baby into some lady's stomach, right? And, at some point, I learned how it really happened, and really that was the beginning of the end of my belief in God. Up until that point, it had always been a really weird act of intervention on God's part.
We're Jews, my family, and Jews break down into two distinct subcultures: book Jews and money Jews. We were money Jews.
