Steven Pressfield Quotes

Look in your own heart. Unless I'm crazy, right now a still small voice is piping up, telling you as it has ten thousand times, the calling that is yours and yours alone. You know it. No one has to tell you. And unless I'm crazy, you're no closer to taking action on it than you were yesterday or will be tomorrow. You think Resistance isn't real? Resistance will bury you.

You know, I hate to sound self-involved, but I feel like I haven't peaked yet.

Most of us have two lives: the life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance.

I've learned how my own perfectionism can cripple me.

We fear our highest possibility. We are generally afraid to become that which we can glimpse in our most perfect moments.

Here’s the million-dollar question: how are you going to write this book if you’re afraid to start writing? Give your friend Doubt a name, and then block his calls.

My wanting to write books annihilates the original root impulse that would have me bravely and blunderingly working on them.

There's a secret that real writers know that wannabe writers don't, and the secret is this: It's not the writing part that's hard. What's hard is sitting down to write. What keeps us from sitting down is Resistance.

I just try to get out of my own way because if anyone is their own worst enemy, it's usually you.

Too often, I have not been what I wanted to be; I've succumbed to pressures. Yes, I have. The things I've done that I liked, I've always done against advice.

I used to want to be a war photographer, and I used to want to be a ballerina and a comedian. I used to want to be a writer. I invalidated myself; it's a mistake for me.

I realised that I had always been writing things that other people wanted me to write and not what I really wanted to write, so I felt like I was losing my way.

Too many of us fail to fulfill our needs because we say no rather than yes, or perhaps later in life, yes when we should say no.

As a young woman, I had been seeking experience, knowledge, truth, the stuff writers need in their work, but when the artist actually kicked in, I came to understand that in this romantic relationship I was not free to be myself, or to find myself, in order to begin the true work I needed to do.

I sometimes truly despair at ever being meaningfully altered and affected by the things I claim are so important to me.

I started to realise that it wasn't for me. Perhaps I didn't have to give my Hamlet before I died, that the world might be an OK place without my Hamlet, in fact.

More and more, it feels like I'm doing a really bad impersonation of myself.

Self-doubt kills talent.

I've always wanted to do a photo book, but I've never done one because I've never felt ready; I just didn't feel my work was good enough.

I always had a repulsive need to be something more than human.

By the time I hit college, my secret shame was the reason I was an actor was my own words sort of dried up. I stopped writing. I stopped being able to form my own vision. That's actually what my first feature is about - looking back at two different selves.

Lack of confidence - every time I start a new piece of work, it seems I have to spend a long while under the duvet thinking I can't do it.

I'm a minor player in my own life story.

The honest truth is - and I have felt this way forever - is my largest competitor is myself. Always. I am intimidated by my own hang-ups about acting more so than anything, any part, any director.

I'm not talented enough to drop everything and become somebody different.