The Artist's Journey Quotes

“Subject is deeper than topic. It's not "what it's about," it's what it's really about.”
― Steven Pressfield, The Artist's Journey: The Wake of the Hero's Journey and the Lifelong Pursuit of Meaning

“On our hero's journey, we see, we experience, we suffer. We learn. On our hero's journey, we acquire a history that is ours alone. It's a secret history, a private history, a personal history. No one has it but us. No one knows it but us. This secret history is the most valuable possession we hold, or ever will hold. We will draw upon it for the rest of our lives.”
― Steven Pressfield, The Artist's Journey: The Wake of the Hero's Journey and the Lifelong Pursuit of Meaning

“found that what I had desired all my life was not to live—if what others are doing is called living—but to express myself. I realized that I had never had the least interest in living, but only in this which I am doing now, something which is parallel to life, of it at the same time, and beyond it. What is true interests me scarcely at all, nor even what is real; only that interests me which I imagine to be, that which I had stifled every day in order to live. —Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn”
― Steven Pressfield, The Artist's Journey: The Wake of the Hero's Journey and the Lifelong Pursuit of Meaning

“What was clear to me was that something was happening, and that something was a train I couldn't stop or slow down or get off. What was clear too was when it ended. I knew the exact moment. I could feel it. Even then, in that hour, I understood that the experience was of supreme value and importance. I didn't need hindsight. I knew in the moment. My family may have been repelled, even appalled by where I had been and what I had done; my friends may have feared for my sanity; others who cared for me may have shaken their heads at the waste and folly and futility. Even I understood it would take me years to recover. I didn't care. The trip was worth it. Why? Because I now had a history that was mine alone. I had an ordeal that I had survived and a passage that I had paid for with my own blood. Nobody knew about this passage but me. Nobody would ever know, nor did I feel the slightest urge to communicate it. This was mine, and nobody could ever take it away from me. I had punched my ticket. I had filled in the blanks.”
― Steven Pressfield, The Artist's Journey: The Wake of the Hero's Journey and the Lifelong Pursuit of Meaning

“The pain of not doing it (page 149):

That pain is the pain of the daimon, imprisoned in its owner's body and prevented by its owner's fear from stepping forth and living out its destiny. When James Rhodes plunged into his "piano course," he set his daimon free. He followed it. He surrendered to it.

That's how the daimon expresses itself. It inflicts such inner torment on us that it compels us to respond to its demands.”
― Steven Pressfield, The Artist's Journey: The Wake of the Hero's Journey and the Lifelong Pursuit of Meaning

“My hero, James Rhodes (page 146):

I didn't play the piano for 10 years. A decade of slow death by greed working in the City, chasing something that never existed in the first place [security, self-worth, etc.] And only when the pain of not doing it got greater than the imagined pain of doing it did I somehow find the balls to pursue what I really wanted and had been obsessed by since the age of seven—to be a concert pianist.”
― Steven Pressfield, The Artist's Journey: The Wake of the Hero's Journey and the Lifelong Pursuit of Meaning

“The artist learns to be brave (page 91):

Elite warriors are trained to "run toward the sound of the guns."

The artist lives by that principle too.

What projects terrifies her most? What work is she certain she can never pull off? What role will push her past her limits, take her into place she has never gone? What journey will carry her off the map entirely?”
― Steven Pressfield, The Artist's Journey: The Wake of the Hero's Journey and the Lifelong Pursuit of Meaning

“The artist learns how to be alone (page 81):

She trains herself to find emotional and spiritual sustenance in the work.

Her need for third-party validation attenuates. She may still ask you of her work, "What do you think?" But she evaluates your response within the framework of her own self-grounded assessment of her gifts and aspirations...”
― Steven Pressfield, The Artist's Journey: The Wake of the Hero's Journey and the Lifelong Pursuit of Meaning

“The artist learns how to let go (page 80):

I couldn't stop my eye from returning to those abandoned paintings. I asked Bob if he ever hauled any back out and tried again to make them work.

"I used to," he said.

Then he shook his head.

"You gotta know when to let go.”
― Steven Pressfield, The Artist's Journey: The Wake of the Hero's Journey and the Lifelong Pursuit of Meaning

“The artist's journey is a journey of dreams (page 49):

The conventional truism is "Write what you know." But something mysterious and wonderful happens when we write what we don't know. The Muse enters the arena. Stuff comes out of us from a source we can neither name nor locate.”
― Steven Pressfield, The Artist's Journey: The Wake of the Hero's Journey and the Lifelong Pursuit of Meaning

“The artist's journey is internal (page 34):

I don't care about the view outside.
My focus is interior.
The book or movie I'm writing is playing inside my head.”
― Steven Pressfield, The Artist's Journey: The Wake of the Hero's Journey and the Lifelong Pursuit of Meaning

“What is the artist's journey? (page 33):

Everything in her life that is not-artist now falls away.

On the surface her new life may look ordinary, even boring. No more catastrophic romances. No more self-destructive binges. (Okay, maybe a few.) No more squandering or disrespecting her gift, her voice, her talent.

The artist is on a mission now.
Her life has acquired a purpose.
What is the artist's life about now?
It's about following her Muse.
It's about finding her voice.
It's about becoming who she really is.

On her journey, the artist will produce the works she was born to bring into being.

She will be on that journey for the rest of her life.”
― Steven Pressfield, The Artist's Journey: The Wake of the Hero's Journey and the Lifelong Pursuit of Meaning

“An artist has a point of view (page 23):

In other words, the director knew what movie he was making.

He knew what it was about (subject).

He knew what he wanted it to look and sound like (voice, medium of expression, and style).”
― Steven Pressfield, The Artist's Journey: The Wake of the Hero's Journey and the Lifelong Pursuit of Meaning

“It took me nineteen years to earn my first dollar as a pure creative writer and twenty-eight years to get my first novel published.”
― Steven Pressfield, The Artist's Journey: The Wake of the Hero's Journey and the Lifelong Pursuit of Meaning

“Monarch butterfly (with a brain the size of the head of a pin), three thousand miles from eastern North America to the Sierra Madre mountains in Mexico, even though not a single butterfly in the migration has made the trip before.”
― Steven Pressfield, The Artist's Journey: The Wake of the Hero's Journey and the Lifelong Pursuit of Meaning

“EACH INCREMENT OF THE ARTIST'S JOURNEY IS A HERO'S JOURNEY We experience our life as dull and ordinary. But beneath the surface, something powerful and transformative is brewing. Suddenly the light bulb goes off. We've got a new idea! An idea for a novel, a movie, a startup . . . Except immediately we perceive the downside. We become daunted. Our idea is too risky, we fear. We're afraid we can't pull it off. We hesitate, until . . . We're having coffee with a friend. We tell her our idea. "I love it," she says. "You've gotta do it." Fortified, we rally. We commit. We begin. This is the pattern for the genesis of any creative work. It's also, in Joseph Campbell terms, "the Ordinary World," "The Call," "Refusal of the Call," "Meeting with the Mentor," and "Crossing the Threshold." In other words, the first five stages of the hero's journey. Keep going. As you progress on your project, you'll hit every other Campbellian beat, right down to the finish and release/publication, i.e., "The Return," bearing a "Gift for the People." This pattern will hold true for the rest of your life, through every novel, movie, dance, drama, work of architecture, etc. you produce. Every work is its own hero's journey.”
― Steven Pressfield, The Artist's Journey: The Wake of the Hero's Journey and the Lifelong Pursuit of Meaning

“Once you have given up the ghost [wrote Henry Miller], everything follows with dead certainty, even in the midst of chaos. The ghost that we give up is the ego. The illusion of control. The "everything" that follows is our artist's power—our subject, our voice, our point of view, our medium of expression, and our style.”
― Steven Pressfield, The Artist's Journey: The Wake of the Hero's Journey and the Lifelong Pursuit of Meaning

“PICASSO HAD A POINT OF VIEW When Georges Braque and the early Cubists first painted portraits that had two eyes on one side of a woman's face, critics were outraged. Art lovers were appalled. Intellectuals were brawling with each other in bistros in Montmartre and Saint-Germain-des-Prés. But Braque knew. Picasso knew. Leger knew. They had a point of view. The Cubists could draw a representational face. But that wasn't what they wanted. That wasn't their point of view. Caesar had a point of view. Gandhi had a point of view. Martin Luther King, Jr. had a point of view. The artist can answer any question (including those posed by herself) when she has a point of view.”
― Steven Pressfield, The Artist's Journey: The Wake of the Hero's Journey and the Lifelong Pursuit of Meaning

“I can say truthfully of every book I've written that, before I saw it as a subject, I had no idea I was even interested in it. In fact I wasn't interested in it. Or if I was, I dismissed that interest as purely idiosyncratic—a feeling that applied to me only but would never apply to anyone else. The books picked me. I didn't pick them.”
― Steven Pressfield, The Artist's Journey: The Wake of the Hero's Journey and the Lifelong Pursuit of Meaning

“Show me someone who claims he doesn't give a shit and I'll show you a born artist who's scared out of his wits to become that artist.”
― Steven Pressfield, The Artist's Journey: The Wake of the Hero's Journey and the Lifelong Pursuit of Meaning

“The artist's journey comes after the hero's journey. Everything that has happened to us up to this point is rehearsal for us to act, now, as our true self and to find and speak in our true voice. The artist's journey is the process of self-discovery that follows. It will last as long as we're alive, and maybe longer.”
― Steven Pressfield, The Artist's Journey: The Wake of the Hero's Journey and the Lifelong Pursuit of Meaning

“From the epiphanal moment at the end of her hero's journey, the artist's life is about the works she will produce. These taken in sum will comprise her body of work. They're her "oeuvre." They're also her destiny. If she does it right, they will constitute upon completion a pretty fair expression of why she was put on Earth. They'll define who she is. They will be her "gift for the people.”
― Steven Pressfield, The Artist's Journey: The Wake of the Hero's Journey and the Lifelong Pursuit of Meaning

“Tell me who you are, Junah. Who, in your deepest parts, when all that is unauthentic has been stripped away. Are you your name, Rannulph Junah? Will that hit this shot for you? Are you your illustrious forebears? Will they hit it? "Are you your roles, Junah? Scion, soldier, Southerner? Husband, father, lover? Slayer of the foe in battle, comforter of the friend at home? Are you your virtues, Junah, or your sins? Your deeds, your feats? Are you your dreams or your nightmares? Tell me Junah. Can you hit the ball with any of these?”
― Steven Pressfield, The Artist's Journey: The Wake of the Hero's Journey and the Lifelong Pursuit of Meaning

“I’ve read a dozen different versions of Stanislavski's famous Three Questions, i.e. the queries an actor must ask him- or herself before playing any scene. Here's my version: Who am I? Why am I here? What do I want? The second two are pretty easy. It's the first that's the killer.”
― Steven Pressfield, The Artist's Journey: The Wake of the Hero's Journey and the Lifelong Pursuit of Meaning

“No matter what a writer or artist may tell you, they have no clue what they're doing before they do it—and, for the most part, while they're doing it.”
― Steven Pressfield, The Artist's Journey: The Wake of the Hero's Journey and the Lifelong Pursuit of Meaning

“The hero's journey software in our heads is demanding to be lived out. The blanks are insisting on being filled in.”
― Steven Pressfield, The Artist's Journey: The Wake of the Hero's Journey and the Lifelong Pursuit of Meaning