"If you have discipline and no talent, you're way better off than if you have giant talent and no discipline." Steven Pressfield thinks that you can't get through a 400-hour first draft without discipline: "If you're gonna write something that's gonna take two and a half or three years every day full time, you know?" "A first draft is four hundred hours, which when I heard that I thought that's about right." "That's ten forty hour weeks, and nobody can work a forty hour week as a writer. You know, you can't do that. So it's more like twenty hour weeks for a first draft when you're gonna do 10 drafts or something like that." "How are you gonna do that without discipline? It's everything."

"Suspense is the central thing in our lives. We don't know what's gonna happen to us an hour from now, a day from now." "We live always on the edge, and we've put it out of our mind because otherwise life wouldn't be very tolerable. But it is the essence of our lives." -Dean Koontz

"The character can carry the entire novel." Dean Koontz binged 34 John D. MacDonald books in 38 days fresh out of college. This is what he learned: "He'd wanna tell you about this character, so he'd just stop. And he'd write three to five pages about this character." "The first time I hit this, I went, 'what is this? I wanna read the rest of the story.' And then by the time I got to the end of page five of the character stuff when the story started again, I actually was saying, 'No! I wanna know more about this character.'" "Kurt Vonnegut actually said about John D. MacDonald, if thousands of years from now, some alien race came to Earth, and they stumbled across the work of John D. MacDonald buried under the ruin of a house, it would be the greatest finding they could ever make to understand how the human race works."

Long gone are the days where authors could just write and let everything else take care of itself. Jodi Picoult explains: "Nobody can sit in their ivory tower anymore and just write books and expect them to find their way to the masses. Doesn't work that way." "There's a lot of chaff out there. And if you've got wheat, you gotta make sure people know you got wheat."

Most children (and adults) can identify 100+ logos and nearly 0 native plant species This is not healthy for society Native wildlife roots us in our place and we should treat it with such reverence If we do not root ourselves in the land it is very easy to lose our ourselves

Gustave Flaubert was a method writer. Robert Greene says that's what makes Madame Bovary so alive: "Flaubert was this creature of the right word, and he would sometimes spend three days trying to figure out the right word for this one sentence." "He gets very much caught up in his stories. So when he wrote Madame Bovary, he was, like, literally becoming Madame Bovary. He becomes the characters that he writes about." "But at the same time, he's a very careful, conscientious writer who's pouring over every sentence. They're not contradictory. The two go together." "But because he's inside her world and he's a very disciplined writer who focuses on how language can create a world, he's able to bring the two together. That's sort of the dance that the greatest writers go through."

"Nobody thinks they're very good at it while they're doing it." Michael Pollan has been writing for 40 years. He's written multiple best-sellers. And yet: "Every time you start, every time you face that white screen, is, you know, why doesn't this come more easily?" "There's a tendency to think if it's hard, it's not for me, or I'm not good at it, or I'm not the right person. But it's hard for everybody, to one degree or another." "And I still struggle, you know, every time I sit down to write, play games with myself, how much I have to produce before I can go have a snack." "So just because you find it difficult doesn't mean you're not born to do it."

Robert Greene is rereading Dostoevsky to make sense of America today: "I was reading Demons. It's all about the nihilists in Russia who were kind of the starting point for the Russian revolution and a period where nihilism was in its ascendancy. And I kind of compare it to what's going on in America right now." "He loves the marginalized in culture. He loves the prostitutes that everyone's forgotten about. He loves criminals. He literally loves them in a Christ-like way." "Even the evil characters, the villains, he brings to life with this sort of love. That universe of not judging is an act of grace." "I read Brothers Karamazov when I was 16. I probably didn't understand a word of it, but I was so entranced by this guy."

Computers did to architecture what AI is doing to writers: "When you had to design a building, it was this process of working on paper and sketching things out. It was like art in a way." "At some point, it got computerized. You program it, and out comes your building." "You go to a hotel, and the faucet is in a location that doesn't make any sense. The whole building is designed that way. It's a formula." "People now don't know how to write because they depend on AI. They become lazy." "The whole art of architecture is disintegrating because people don't know how to design and sketch anymore." -Robert Greene

"Now things are so expensive, and there's so much pressure to make money." Robert Greene on why it's harder to make a living as an artist today: "Back in the day, you could be an artist and life wasn't so expensive. You could afford to write something a little bit unconventional and you'd still make a little bit of money, but you could still afford your loft in New York." "If you're a writer, how are you gonna make money? Well, you could become a professor, and that's pretty soul sucking. Or you can write books. Do you know how hard that is?" "It's easy for me. I am so lucky. But for most writers, you get a $20,000 to $50,000 advance. I have to write the book in a year, otherwise I can't live on it. And how often do you see royalties?" "So you have to write the book quickly, and you have to make a living. And that's what I think is making writing suffer, because it's no longer something that you can just take your time with."

Taylor Tomlinson on the key to good crowd work: "I like to do crowd work at my live shows, but I do it in a very structured way. I usually sprinkle it throughout the show every 15 to 20 minutes." "I ask the audience a specific question that is related to the hour. So it's generally something that I do wanna know. I think that's kind of the key to crowd work." "If it goes weird, I'll deflect or I'll make it about me. I never want anyone to feel bad or regret talking to me." "Sometimes it goes somewhere. Sometimes it doesn't. It's why I'm so meticulous about writing out my set and having clear transitions so that I can get back into the hour really seamlessly."

"People have forgotten about stand up, the actual art of it." This is what Mark Normand told me about how comedy has changed: "It's a bittersweet thing because before, you had the industry. When's David Letterman gonna put me on? When's The Tonight Show gonna put me on? You had to wait for the industry, but there was a lot less work. You can do the same hour for ten years." "Now it's, I gotta cut a clip. I gotta tweet. I gotta post something. I gotta write about the news. I gotta write my own act. I gotta do a podcast. I gotta do another guy's podcast. I gotta go on the road." "Now you can make your own career, but you're gonna do a lot more work." @marknorm

Mark Normand on the difference between Larry David and Seinfeld: "Larry has a darker bend. He's a little more sex, race, Judaism, religion. He'll go deeper into that stuff." "You see it on his show. He's got shows about Nazis, and there's one episode where his shoes get muddy, so he goes to the Holocaust museum and takes the old shoes, which is hilarious, but Seinfeld would never do that." "Seinfeld's more like zoning in on minutiae." "He has a great one where he's out to dinner as a double date, him and his wife, some other guy and his wife. And the other guy goes, 'I'll get the check.' And he goes, 'Wow. Thank you. Thank you, Bob.' And the wife goes, 'Well, aren't you gonna thank me?' And he's like, 'Why would I thank you? It's his money.'"

"Faith without doubt is a dogma and dogmas are very dangerous." Novelist Elif Shafak says the same about atheists who are certain of their non-belief: "People who are very sure of their atheism, they want to get rid of faith." "I think faith can also be a secular concept. It doesn't always have to be a religious concept." "When you start writing a novel, you really don't know what you're doing, but something tells you to keep going. For me, that's a secular act of faith." "When you fall in love with someone, you don't know if that person is the right person for you, but you do go with it." "I am interested in people who are not afraid of saying I don't know."

"Science fiction isn't a genre. It's a setting." Andy Weir, author of The Martian and Project Hail Mary, on what we get wrong about sci-fi: "You can have a science fiction romance. You can have a science fiction action movie. You can have a science fiction drama." "Isaac Asimov made a science fiction noir detective series, Caves of Steel. Noir detective is a genre, but the setting was science fiction."

it feels like it should shock us more than it does how much the bible seem to contemplate and anticipate the challenges that would arrive as a result of continued technological progress thousands of years before it would happen

Andy Weir began writing The Martian as a series of blog posts. It ended up becoming a best-seller. Here's the story of how he did it: "I'll just post [The Martian] to, like, basically a blog post, and I'll make it a serialized story, kinda like the old days of… Sherlock Holmes[, which] was serialized storytelling in the Strand magazine." "People said, like, well, I love your book, but I hate your website, which is fair." "I put it on Amazon via Kindle Direct Publishing. And so I charged the minimum, which at the time was 99¢. So I'm like, okay, everybody. You can read it on my website. You can download the e-reader version from my website, or you can pay Amazon a buck to put it on your Kindle for you. And people paid the buck." "People said like, ah, now here's an opportunity for me to give money. I'm gonna buy the book even though I've already read it." "So Amazon's automated system went well, this is selling well, which popped it into the list of, like, top sellers, which got other people's attention, which… so it snowballed from there."

"It doesn't put butts in seats." A set on late-night TV used to be a comedian's "I made it" moment. Mark Normand says those days are gone: "You work on the set, and then it comes out. And you're like, hey. That got maybe a 100,000 views, but then you can just shoot a video of you on a comedy club, post it, and it'll get a million." "You only do it now just for the fun of it." "I hate to say that because it's an American tradition." @marknorm