Donald Miller Quotes

The world is your exercise book, the pages on which you do your sums. It is not reality, though you may express reality there if you wish. You are also free to write lies, or nonsense, or to tear the pages.

I got a bit obsessed with the whole English language and was writing journals and poetry. I've always been intrigued about psychology and philosophy and how people's minds work.

See, you can't rewrite, 'cause to rewrite is to deceive and lie, and you betray your own thoughts. To rethink the flow and the rhythm, the tumbling out of the words, is a betrayal, and it's a sin, Martin, it's a sin." --Hank (Kerouac)to Martin (Ginsberg) in the film Naked Lunch

Artists use lies to tell the truth. Yes, I created a lie. But because you believed it, you found something true about yourself.

Arts and the Sciences are a natural symbiosis. They stem from the same human existential impulse - exploration. Exploration of what lies beneath the surface, and re-confuguration of elements of what we call reality.

This is where we are at right now, as a whole. No one is left out of the loop. We are experiencing a reality based on a thin veneer of lies and illusions. A world where greed is our God and wisdom is sin, where division is key and unity is fantasy, where the ego-driven cleverness of the mind is praised, rather than the intelligence of the heart.

Writing is like breathing, it's possible to learn to do it well, but the point is to do it no matter what.

Lying is the only art form that the public sanctions and instinctively prefers to reality.

What the really great artists do is they're entirely themselves. They're entirely themselves. They've got their own vision, they have their own way of fracturing reality, and if it's authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings.

The highest prize we can receive for creative work is the joy of being creative. Creative effort spent for any other reason than the joy of being in that light filled space, love, god, whatever we want to call it, is lacking in integrity. . .

You are perfectly entitled to invent your life and to claim that it's true.

The world is a lie...not you and me.

I want to write, but more than that, I want to bring out all kinds of things that lie buried deep in my heart.

Where my heart lies is in the real-life, but at the same time part of it lies in this creative realm where I need to go in and put out that fire, scratch that itch, in order to be all rounded.

Basically, I thought for a very long time that making music and art projects, that that was just something that I did, and real life was separate. And I'm starting to realize that the things that I do, making music and art and photography and all that, it's not just something that I do. It's who I am. So I don't think I'll ever be able to stop. It's like that curse that you live with, this thing that you love but you also hate it at the same time. It brings you a lot of joy but also a lot of heartbreak.

Art is individualism, and individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. There lies its immense value. For what it seeks is to disturb monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine. It seeks to show new perspectives and other choices. It is a way to help expand and liberate the consciousness; our experiences, understandings, imaginings, options and thereby our lives.

I want you to invent it. I want you to have that skill. To create your own reality. Your own set of laws. I want to try and teach you that.

Or -- and this she knew was a far more accurate way of looking at it -- the book was true and reality was lying.

Sometimes we mask ourselves to further reveal ourselves, and it's always been connected to me with being a writer: We tell lies to tell a greater truth. The story is a mask; the characters you create are masks. That appeals to me. Aside from that, too, in the carnival the masks were beautiful, and offered a vision of Haitian creativity.

You can lie to your wife or your boss, but you cannot lie to your typewriter. Sooner or later you must reveal your true self in your pages.

Writing is mysterious, and it's supposed to be...any path that gets you there is a good path in the end. But one true thing among all these paths is the need to tap a deep vein of connection between our own uncontrollable interior preoccupations and what we're most concerned about in the world around us. We write in response to that world; we write in response to what we read and learn; and in the end we write out of our deepest selves, the live, breathing, bleeding place where the picture forms, and where it all begins.

…words have been all my life, all my life--this need is like the Spider's need who carries before her a huge Burden of Silk which she must spin out--the silk is her life, her home, her safety--her food and drink too--and if it is attacked or pulled down, why, what can she do but make more, spin afresh, design anew….

That is my reality. It's that important to nurture and foster my own creativity. There are plenty of birthday parties I haven't been able to go to, weddings I haven't been able to go to because I've been working. Those are things that have not been easy to give up, but at the same time, it is my reality. It's my responsibility.

The essence of a sound style is that it cannot be reduced to rules-that it is a living and breathing thing with something of the devilish in it-that it fits its proprietor tightly yet ever so loosely, as his skin fits him. It is, in fact, quite as seriously an integral part of him as that skin is. . . . In brief, a style is always the outward and visible symbol of a man, and cannot be anything else.

The best training is to read and write, no matter what. Don't live with a lover or roommate who doesn't respect your work. Don't lie, buy time, borrow to buy time. Write what will stop your breath if you don't write.