Quote

You have to put in many, many, many tiny efforts that nobody sees or appreciates before you achieve anything worthwhile.

If you try to create something people enjoy, and it happens to be made in a responsible way, then that's when you can really strike an incredible balance.

Suffering is too strong a word, but writing is serious work. I pull the stuff up from me - it's not as if it's a pleasure.

I've come to believe that all my past failure and frustration were actually laying the foundation for the understandings that have created the new level of living I now enjoy.

Creating things sometimes is difficult.

Your personal life, your professional life, and your creative life are all intertwined. I went through a few very difficult years where I felt like a failure. But it was actually really important for me to go through that. Struggle, for me, is the most inspirational thing in the world at the end of the day - as long as you treat it that way.

For a long time, I thought it was all down to dedication, hard work, and visualising doing well - that worked for a bit, but then it stopped. I've realised you have to be more practical and mature to make things actually happen.

To have striven, to have made the effort, to have been true to certain ideals - this alone is worth the struggle.

I constantly try to reinvent my sensibilities and my ideas. I enjoy some of the satisfaction that I get when I feel good about what I've done. But the process is quite lonely and quite painful.

Once you make it to your point of making it, you'll appreciate the struggle.