David Whyte Quotes

I make time to write.

You are the only boss you have. And I want you to be the most demanding boss that you can be. If you really want to make a success of this business, then you must put yourself on a schedule.

A writer never finds the time to write. A writer makes it. If you don't have the drive, the discipline, and the desire, then you can have all the talent in the world, and you aren't going to finish a book.

Getting up early is one of the gifts I give myself.

We cannot waste time. We can only waste ourselves.

Until you value yourself, you won't value your time. Until you value your time, you will not do anything with it.

The most valuable of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it has to be done, whether you like it or not.

I lived a sloppy life. So I took very small increments in my life. I started making my bed. I started cleaning my room. There were dishes in the sink. It started off with doing small house chores. I saw that the yard needed to be mowed. So instead of being told it needed to be mowed, I would mow it.

You have to take care of yourself so you can manage the workload of a very, very full plate.

I grew up while I was in college. I learned how to take care of myself. I learned how to prioritize things. I learned how to get things done.

I get up when I feel like getting up. That's the deal I've made with myself: I can stay in bed as long as my dog's bladder holds. The other half of that deal is that once the dog is walked, the very next thing I do is write. It's mechanical. It's programming, very nearly brainwashing.

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.

The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything.

Sometimes people say to me, “I want to write, but I have five kids, a full-time job, a wife who beats me, a tremendous debt to my parents,” and so on. I say to them, “There is no excuse. If you want to write, write. This is your life. You are responsible for it. You will not live forever. Don’t wait. Make the time now, even if it is ten minutes once a week."

There isn't a single day I don't do some writing -- if you don't, you won't have a book. When you're self-employed it is very easy to burn away your time instead -- answering e-mails, surfing the Internet, or hanging out with friends. You really must have the discipline to sit down and write every day. Most of what I am writing is living in the back of my head or in my subconscious. I find if I write every day, my subconscious will do the job for me.

I am a highly disciplined person. I get up at seven every morning and, still in my pajamas, sit down at my desk where my checkered ring binders and my fountain pen are ready for use. I try to write two pages every day.

Say not: “When I have free time I shall study”, for you may perhaps never have any free time

If you say you don't have time to do it once a day, then you're the one who probably needs it twice a day.

Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not. It is the first lesson that ought to be learned and however early a man's training begins, it is probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly.

If you wait until you feel like doing something, you will likely never accomplish it.

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.

Stop complaining about having no time for yourself and get up an hour earlier. You have the option, why not exercise it?

If you have work to do, don't wait to feel like it; set to work and you will feel like it.

If you do the things you need to do when you need to do them, then someday you can do the things you want do when you want to do them.

Do what you gotta do so you can do what you wanna do.