Susan Sontag Quotes

I want to be surprised by what people do, I don't want to work with people who need to be told what to do. I want people to show me what they've got.

For true success ask yourself these four questions: Why? Why not? Why not me? Why not now?

If one has fear, there can be no initiative in the creative sense of the word. To have initiative in this sense is to do something original - to do it spontaneously, naturally, without being guided, forced, controlled. It is to do something which you love to do.

The motivation to do anything - like change your entire life around - doesn't just come from some magical, mystical place within you. Action is both the effect of motivation and the cause of it.

What I wanted to hear didn't exist, so it was necessary for me to go out and create it.

I do believe in self-help.

I'm just trying to do things that are interesting for me.

Hold up a mirror and ask yourself what you are capable of doing, and what you really care about. Then take the initiative - don't wait for someone else to ask you to act.

Men who do things without being told draw the most wages.

At the end of the day, I don't need to work, and I think it's good that I have the drive and willpower to get up and do something in the morning even though I don't need to.

I'm the type of person that doesn't like to wait for people to do things for me, and I never want to feel stuck. Why sit around and be like, 'I wish my label would book me some studio time,' if I can just buy my own studio equipment and figure out how to run Pro Tools and record it myself?

I tell people if I want to make a film I just go make it so you can make yours.

I plan on doing a lot more work on my own, and discovering and doing more.

Just as appetite comes by eating, so work brings inspiration, if inspiration is not discernible at the beginning.

Action, so to speak, is the genius of nature.

You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.

You just have to do; you can't live by the rules of what you're supposed to do. I think every person is good at something, and you just have to push that forward.

Inspiration is highly overrated. If you sit around and wait for the clouds to part, it's not liable to ever happen. More often than not, work is salvation.

I just love the idea of going into a room and creating something by myself.

I talk often about being intrinsically motivated by learning. It's the primary driver of most of my activity.

I definitely feel like I'm at that point where it's nice to not have to sit at home and wait to be invited to the party, but to be creating work for yourself.

I think, since I was a kid, I had that independence of being driven and being motivated in whatever I did, whether school work or a sport or even a hobby.

By the time I was 14, I had become self-motivated. Whatever raced inside me was more demanding than any pressure applied by parents or teachers.

One philosophy I have at AngelList is I would rather have someone working on the wrong thing and do it their way and be motivated, than working on the right thing and do it my way and not be motivated.

Typically, my advice to young artists is not to wait for someone to allow you to do the thing. Just do the thing, and they'll catch up.