Govt Cheese a memoir Quotes

“I’m trying to copy that. When you haul yourself up into the cab of a tractor-trailer, where does your foot go? What grab-handle do you seize? With which hand? Is the metal cold? What do you see as you slide into the driver’s seat? Smell? Hear? What does the instrument panel look like? What do you see through the windshield? What emotions are you feeling? Are you excited? Scared? Bored? Do you hate being here? Do you love it? What does it mean to you? How can I, the writer, reproduce that in you, the reader?”
― Steven Pressfield, Govt Cheese: A Memoir

“I read R.D. Laing, I read Victor Frankl. Anything by Ken Kesey or Peter Matthiessen, Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, Alan Ginsberg, R. Crumb, Bob Dylan. These sacred texts are passed from one hand to another like relics of a religious past or harbingers of a new faith.”
― Steven Pressfield, Govt Cheese: A Memoir

“There are gods who watch over lost souls, particularly those who dream, and when these divinities’ unknowable purposes align with the enterprise of these exiled souls, a force begins to flow that is as unquenchable as it is pure, and as knowing as it is indefatigable.”
― Steven Pressfield, Govt Cheese: A Memoir

“And partly because it seemed to be a place that hadn’t yet been rendered plastic by American commercial culture.”
― Steven Pressfield, Govt Cheese: A Memoir

“There’s two kinds of females in this world.” He’s got his boots off and his stocking feet up on the bare-metal dash. “Ones you love and ones you love like crazy.”
― Steven Pressfield, Govt Cheese: A Memoir

“One, working means you’re getting paid. I know you’re getting peanuts for this job. It doesn’t matter. It’s money, it’s validation. Every buck means you’re a working pro, you’re toiling in your chosen field.”
― Steven Pressfield, Govt Cheese: A Memoir

“What was going through my mind during this time? Nothing. Blue smoke was pouring out of the van’s exhaust. My tires were shot. I couldn’t think beyond that. I was utterly miserable with no plan and not even the thought of hope. I didn’t think about the past. I had no concept of a future. I was happy to be working, though. I was happy to have a bunk and a place to stay. Things could be a lot worse. The first paycheck came after two weeks. I actually opened an account at a rolling branch of the Mississippi River Bank.”
― Steven Pressfield, Govt Cheese: A Memoir

“I stayed nine weeks. The last four were offshore. Pay doubled on the rigs to four dollars an hour but the best part was meals were free (steak for dinner every night with unlimited milk from the machine) and every week was eighty hours with forty of that counting as time-and-a-half.”
― Steven Pressfield, Govt Cheese: A Memoir

“Everything happens to me exactly opposite from how it happens to everyone else.”
― Steven Pressfield, Govt Cheese: A Memoir

“I don’t know what your story is, son, and I don’t wanna know. I can see you’re working something out in your life. I can see you’re trying your best. I can cut you slack. I’m trying to. But there’s one thing you have to understand.”
― Steven Pressfield, Govt Cheese: A Memoir

“We emerge from prison bearing agonies that would crush a stone. How do we survive these? We transform them. We get a tattoo. We ink an entire sleeve. We cover our chest and back with swastikas, death’s-heads, and quotes in bogus Mandarin from Kill Bill, Volume Two. We blast our pecs. We pierce our flesh. We customize Harleys. We shave our skull. We craft an image of ourselves, even if it’s one—especially if it’s one—as predictable as low-ride jeans and chrome-link wallet chains. That’s art. That’s our novel. This is what the writer wrestles with. This is the passage. You pound keyboards until you wear the sonsofbitches out. Each page is trash. Unreadable. Unpublishable.”
― Steven Pressfield, Govt Cheese: A Memoir

“The pain expressed is derived from real pain. Its genesis is actual suffering, endured by a real person. But the song itself and its rendition are not the real pain, or the artist would choke up and break down. Instead the warble in her voice, the catching of the throat in her performance is art. It is not life. It is artifice. There’s something very deep here. How do we endure pain? How do we transcend it? We turn it into art.”
― Steven Pressfield, Govt Cheese: A Memoir

“We become friends instantly. I simply gravitate to him. Tony is the first person I’ve ever met who actually possesses self-discipline. I have never encountered this before. Other individuals I’ve admired for their focus and commitment have jobs or are in the military. They adhere to their institution’s norms and protocols. That’s discipline, but it’s not self-discipline. It’s externally imposed, not generated from within.”
― Steven Pressfield, Govt Cheese: A Memoir

“The only thing I want is to exorcise and eradicate from my psyche every belief, assumption, thought, aspiration, dream, hope and moral principle I have been taught or imbibed in my entire life. They don’t work. They have led me to this. I hate them. I abhor every person and institution that has brainwashed or indoctrinated me into believing them. I hate myself for buying into this bullshit. I want to replace it all as fast and as permanently as I can with whatever long-haired, counter-culture, freakazoid Mr. Natural doctrine and belief system I can derive from my new friends in the house and from Charles and David. I want to be like the freaks I saw at Buster Holmes’ in the French Quarter. Can I pass through a membrane that will deposit me, somehow, on the other side? I want it. I want to find that portal and transmigrate through. Does there exist a state of mind, a mode of being, a sphere of consciousness that will somehow obliterate everything I have ever believed? I want to find this and jump through with both feet. In the meantime, I have to find work.”
― Steven Pressfield, Govt Cheese: A Memoir

“I sit at my table with The Sun Also Rises open and Mo snoozing beside the typewriter. I put on a bathrobe and slippers and went to the door. It was Brett. Back of her was the count. He was holding a great bunch of roses. I type that. I type the whole chapter and the one after that and the one after that. Do I have a plan? Am I taking notes? I’m working mindlessly, like a chimpanzee. I want Hemingway’s stuff to sink into me by osmosis. But I’m paying attention too. Hemingway’s style is cinematic. He makes you see. I went to the door. It was Brett. Back of her was the count. I’m trying to copy that. When you haul yourself up into the cab of a tractor-trailer, where does your foot go? What grab-handle do you seize? With which hand? Is the metal cold? What do you see as you slide into the driver’s seat? Smell? Hear? What does the instrument panel look like? What do you see through the windshield? What emotions are you feeling? Are you excited? Scared? Bored? Do you hate being here? Do you love it? What does it mean to you? How can I, the writer, reproduce that in you, the reader?”
― Steven Pressfield, Govt Cheese: A Memoir

“I type that. I type the whole chapter and the one after that and the one after that. Do I have a plan? Am I taking notes? I’m working mindlessly, like a chimpanzee. I want Hemingway’s stuff to sink into me by osmosis.”
― Steven Pressfield, Govt Cheese: A Memoir

“I’m trying. I’m giving it my all. The thought of tailoring my output to any market or to please any imagined audience never enters my mind. This is for me. I’m writing to save my own life.”
― Steven Pressfield, Govt Cheese: A Memoir

“I’m not motivated by greed, fame, or recognition. I’m in it for the game itself. Ambition, yes. I want to be good. Like myself at thirteen, I can’t hit the ball for shit. I can’t make it go right or left, I can’t hit it as long as I want, and I sure as hell can’t do it on demand. So I do it over and over, and when I’m done I do it over again. I do it in all weathers. And when I’m too tired to keep doing it myself, I watch other players whose level of skill I aspire to. I watch them do it.”
― Steven Pressfield, Govt Cheese: A Memoir

“That’s how I feel now, here in California, in my little house behind the big house. I have my list of approved players—Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Mark Twain, Virginia Woolf, Melville, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Chekhov, Harper Lee, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Homer, Plato, Xenophon, Shakespeare, King David.”
― Steven Pressfield, Govt Cheese: A Memoir

“Marty has one other mantra: “Talent is bullshit.” “I’ve seen a million writers with talent. It means nothing. You need guts, you need stick-to-it-iveness. It’s work, you gotta work. That’s why you’re gonna make it, son. You work. No one can take that away from you. “And I’ll tell you something else,” Marty says. “Appreciate these days. These days when you’re broke and struggling, they’re the best days of your life. You’re gonna break through, my boy. And when you do, you’ll look back on this time and think this is when I was really an artist, when everything was pure and I had nothing but the dream and the work. Enjoy it now. Pay attention. These are the good days. Be grateful for them.”
― Steven Pressfield, Govt Cheese: A Memoir

“When you’re alone with your solitary obsession, each day builds upon the one before. Energy concentrates. Your passion and intensity create a planet all your own, like the one the Little Prince lived on in Saint-Exupery’s book. This planet possesses its own gravitational field, and that field draws unto itself like-minded particles from space, from the aether, from the Big Bang. I mean ideas. Ideas for scenes, for dialogue, for characters, for conflicts. This field draws phrases you have never spoken. It attracts words you never knew you knew.”
― Steven Pressfield, Govt Cheese: A Memoir

“I wish every aspiring writer or artist could have a year or two years like this—a season when you have no responsibilities except to your own Muse and your own daimon, a run of months when you’re invisible to everybody but yourself, when you don’t give a shit about anything except the challenge before you, when you could drop dead on the street and no one would stop except to step over your cold corpse, and you don’t care.”
― Steven Pressfield, Govt Cheese: A Memoir

“I read everything you’re supposed to read in high school and college but never do, or if you do, you’re so psyched to read to the test that you don’t learn a damn thing. Am I learning anything now? Fuck no. The books pass through my consciousness like sunlight through glass. I don’t care. They’re in my cells now. I love them. Their impress has etched itself in some occult recess of my heart.”
― Steven Pressfield, Govt Cheese: A Memoir

“I read War and Peace, I read Madame Bovary, I read Fathers and Sons, The Red and the Black, Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov. I read Hunger, Anna Karenina, Don Quixote. I read Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn, Sexus, Nexus, Plexus, Quiet Days in Clichy. I read Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch. My friend Paul is a character in this one.”
― Steven Pressfield, Govt Cheese: A Memoir

“And I read. I write all day and read all night.”
― Steven Pressfield, Govt Cheese: A Memoir

“I write all day. I have no idea what I’m doing. I have never heard of narrative structure or theme or concept or act 1, act 2, act 3. I work entirely on instinct. I’m writing, as I said, about Burton Lines, about the trucking company. I’m writing about myself.”
― Steven Pressfield, Govt Cheese: A Memoir

“I don’t know what you’re writing, Steve. I don’t want to know. I’ll never read it. I’ll never judge it. All I ask of it, and of you, is that it come from that sacred space inside you and that it stay true, as you write it, to the ideals of that hallowed precinct.”
― Steven Pressfield, Govt Cheese: A Memoir

“Paul lectures me on self-discipline. Nothing else counts but getting your pages every day. Be ruthless with yourself. This is life or death. Don’t kid yourself that it’s anything else. Paul doesn’t admire writers personally. “The ones I’ve known are mostly self-involved pricks and egomaniacs. I don’t condemn them. It’s the agony of the process. I wouldn’t want a son or daughter of mine to write. I would try to talk you out of it too, Steve, but I can see there’s no chance of that.”
― Steven Pressfield, Govt Cheese: A Memoir

“In my little house I have my worktable, I have my Smith-Corona, my mattress, my box springs, my bed frame. I have a couch I found on the street in Pacific Grove. I have kitchen utensils—a pot, a teakettle, a frying pan. I have one spoon and one fork. I have a knife. I have no TV, no radio, no stereo. This is before computers, so no email, no Instagram, no social media. I have no correspondents. I write to nobody—not friends, not family. Nobody. And nobody writes to me. My day goes like this. I wake before dawn, eat a breakfast for a lumberjack. Four eggs, raw milk, potatoes, tomatoes. Bacon or sausage are too weak for me. Liver. A big slab for power. I walk for an hour. The sun is coming up now.”
― Steven Pressfield, Govt Cheese: A Memoir

“I understand pulling the pin. I pulled the pin on my first book. I pulled the pin on my marriage. I pulled the pin on Hugh Reaves and Burton Lines. I have never undertaken anything in my life that didn’t end with me pulling the pin. I am determined, now, not to pull the pin. When I came out to California from New York twenty-two months ago, I had twenty-seven hundred dollars in savings from my advertising job. That money is to finish my trucking book. I will finish that sonofabitch or kill myself trying.”
― Steven Pressfield, Govt Cheese: A Memoir