Latest Steven Pressfield Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• Right now with blogs and the flood of internet access, a multitude of aspiring writers think they're ready for prime time. They're not. Be great. Read. Write. Bust your ass. Learn and find your voice. As hard as you think it is, it's a hundred times harder.

  Steven Pressfield

  Writing, Thinking, Voice

  "10 Questions with Steven Pressfield, Author of The War of Art". Interview with Jeff Goins, goinswriter.com. May 11, 2011.

• Reading is alive and well and will get more alive and more well. Reading on tablets (or whatever the next tech device will be) is the future - and the future is now.

  Steven Pressfield

  Reading, Alive, Tablets

  "10 Questions with Steven Pressfield, Author of The War of Art". Interview with Jeff Goins, goinswriter.com. May 11, 2011.

• Art is a war - between ourselves and the forces of self-sabotage that would stop us from doing our work. The artist is a warrior.

  Steven Pressfield

  Art, War, Self

  "10 Questions with Steven Pressfield, Author of The War of Art". Interview with Jeff Goins, goinswriter.com. May 11, 2011.

• Traditional publishers will be dominant, and they should be because they really do assure quality. But eBooks, which are huge already, are going to eclipse everything. They will save traditional publishing the way DVDs saved movie studios (for a while) and they'll greatly expand the number of readers.

  Steven Pressfield

  Numbers, Dvds, Quality

  Source: goinswriter.com

• You are a writer when you tell yourself you are. No one else's opinion matters. Screw them. You are when you say you are.

  Steven Pressfield

  Matter, Opinion, Screws

  "10 Questions with Steven Pressfield, Author of The War of Art". Interview with Jeff Goins, goinswriter.com. May 11, 2011.

• When you're a working writer, sooner or later friends and acquaintances will get you alone and confide that they, too, have a book in them.

  Steven Pressfield

  Book, Acquaintance, Sooner Or Later

  Source: goinswriter.com

• One thing I've found in any project is almost universally about three quarters of the way through - or maybe a little father, maybe seventh eighths on the way through - any project will explode.

  Steven Pressfield

  Father, Three, Littles

  "Special Interview with Steven Pressfield and Ishita Gupta". "Marketing Over Coffee" podcast with John Wall, www.marketingovercoffee.com. May 16, 2011.

• The problem I've always discovered in my own work when this kind of thing happens when you hit the wall is there's almost always a reason. You've almost always made a mistake in the initial conception of the project. You misapprehended something or you thought something would work and now you're three quarters on the way through and you see that it doesn't work.

  Steven Pressfield

  Wall, Mistake, Way

  "Special Interview with Steven Pressfield and Ishita Gupta". "Marketing Over Coffee" podcast with John Wall, www.marketingovercoffee.com. May 16, 2011.

• A great trick that I learned having worked as a screenwriter for many years, the way screenwriters work, is they break the project down into three-act structure: Act 1, Act 2, Act 3. I think that is a great way to break down any project, whether it's a new business or anything at all.

  Steven Pressfield

  Thinking, Years, Way

  "Special Interview with Steven Pressfield and Ishita Gupta". "Marketing Over Coffee" podcast with John Wall, www.marketingovercoffee.com. May 16, 2011.

• Resistance in my experience always kicks in when you're trying to move from a lower level to a higher level or to identify with a braver part of yourself or your higher nature. So it's that negative repelling force. It's kind of the dragon that we have to slay every day if we're artists or entrepreneurs.

  Steven Pressfield

  Moving, Artist, Dragons

  "Special Interview with Steven Pressfield and Ishita Gupta". "Marketing Over Coffee" podcast with John Wall, www.marketingovercoffee.com. May 16, 2011.

• Resistance really takes the shape, for me, in voices in my head telling me why I can't do something or why I should put it off for another day, procrastinate for another day.

  Steven Pressfield

  Voice, Shapes, Resistance

  "Special Interview with Steven Pressfield and Ishita Gupta". "Marketing Over Coffee" podcast with John Wall, www.marketingovercoffee.com. May 16, 2011.

• There's a phrase you hear in Israel: "We're not Jews, we're Israelis." What that means is that the stereotype we're familiar with here in the States of the Diaspora Jew, i.e. Jews in America or Europe or Russia, etc. does not fit at all with the reality of the homegrown "sabras" of Israel.

  Steven Pressfield

  Mean, Reality, America

  Interview with Will Duquette, www.patheos.com. May 21, 2014.

• I'm superstitious. I keep mum while I'm working on something.

  Steven Pressfield

  Mum, Superstitious

  Source: www.patheos.com

• I love memoirs, particularly obscure ones because the writer is usually a regular guy just telling what happened to him and to his friends. What these tales lack in artfulness they make up for in passion and authenticity. For a writer of fiction, they are solid gold. I have stolen so much from memoirs it's ridiculous.

  Steven Pressfield

  Passion, Guy, Gold

  Interview with Will Duquette, www.patheos.com. May 21, 2014.

• The great thing about writing about the ancient Spartans or Athenians is that so much knowledge is no longer extant that no one, except maybe a Cambridge or Oxford don, can call you out and prove you wrong.

  Steven Pressfield

  Writing, Oxford, Ancient

  Interview with Will Duquette, www.patheos.com. May 21, 2014.

• Every artist has to face his own demons and evolve his own method of working.

  Steven Pressfield

  Artist, Faces, Demon

  Interview with Will Duquette, www.patheos.com. May 21, 2014.

• A contemporary or near-future book is much harder because you can't fake the facts. There are people alive who know much more than you do about the subject. You have to really have your research together - and of course no one can know everything about a topic.

  Steven Pressfield

  Book, People, Fake

  Source: www.patheos.com

• When a novelist or screenwriter is looking for a subject, the element he's seeking is conflict. Conflict makes drama. Conflict produces great characters and memorable scenes. So war is a natural topic.

  Steven Pressfield

  Drama, War, Character

  Interview with Will Duquette, www.patheos.com. May 21, 2014.

• The last element in drama is high stakes. War, of course, is life and death - survival, not only for the story's characters, but often for the society itself. That's why I'm drawn to stories that are built around wars, even if they're not technically "war stories."

  Steven Pressfield

  Drama, War, Character

  Interview with Will Duquette, www.patheos.com. May 21, 2014.

• I had always been an enthusiastic reader of stuff about ancient Greece. I would read Herodotus and Thucydides just for fun.

  Steven Pressfield

  Fun, Stuff, Ancient

  Interview with Will Duquette, www.patheos.com. May 21, 2014.