Gene Luen Yang Quotes

Coming up with ideas isn't hard. The real challenge is finding the time to actually build something and then finding a home for it.

The sooner you learn to finish things, and as a matter of course finish your creative endeavors, the better. It took me a long time to learn that.

I would never finish a painting if I didn't have a deadline.

The thing with making your art your business is: It's a business. You can't sit around waiting for the muse, especially when you run a show, and you're in production, and an outline is due, a script is due, and a reshoot is due. No. You look at the calendar, and you go, 'OK. I can write from 4 to 6.' So you write.

A journalist also needs to be disciplined, and so do I. I am, essentially, lazy. Without discipline I'd be just a mass of gummy bears on the sofa instead of on book tour with my eighth novel.

I carry a notebook with me everywhere. But that's only the first step.

Writing is a dreadful labor, yet not so dreadful as Idleness.

I've always prided myself on my discipline as a writer. I do it like a job. I get up in the morning and go to my desk.

If I give myself a chore, for instance, when I was writing the songs for Shameless, I said to myself, Now, every day for 90 days you have to write a song; good, bad or indifferent. So that was really helpful.

Productivity is never an accident. It is always the result of a commitment to excellence, intelligent planning, and focused effort.

On a regular basis if you're trying to produce something, I think you should work every day and set achievable goals.

The habits of study in which I have been brought up have done much to support me. I never allow myself to be one moment unoccupied.

Effective leadership is putting first things first. Effective management is discipline, carrying it out.

So I thought I should write five pages a day. And that's what I did. Eventually I had a book.

I'm usually the one who creates most of my work. I have a lot of different ideas that I want to do, so I'm always like, 'Get on it, girl.'

The best piece of advice my father gave me was to always work hard. One thing he instilled: Proper preparation prevents poor performances.

I get up very early and write a lot.

Either I need an assignment with a strict deadline - like something for a movie or a TV show or whatever - or else I need to create a made-up deadline for myself for my own records. Otherwise, I don't write anything.

All one's work might have been better done; but this is a sort of reflection a worker must put aside courageously if he doesn't mean every one of his conceptions to remain forever a private vision, an evanescent reverie.

So it's always helped me to have a foundation, an ideal to strive for and goals. It's hard for me to be disciplined and plan things.

I would never tell myself, you have to write 20 pages today or something. But I do try to show up. Read what I wrote, fix things.

Ideas are cheap. I have more ideas now than I could ever write up. To my mind, it's the execution that is all-important.

The how-to is all about day in, day out finding a way to feed the monster, the drive that lives inside.

You really need to have that discipline. It's not even discipline. I just put down these rules. It's not like a vague, 'Motivate yourself!' and do something. It's specific hours set aside every day for certain things.

I like to work and it kind of keeps me in line, which is very good because I need that structure.