16 Quotes by Paul J. Silvia

Binge writers spend more time feeling guilty and anxious about not writing than schedule followers spend writing.

Academic writers are bad writers for three reasons. First, they want to sound smart. “If the water is dark,” goes a German aphorism, “the lake must be deep.” Instead of using good words like smart, they choose sophisticated or erudite.

Reading an endless litany of study after study-one article found this, and another experiment found this, and another study found this-is like watching laundry spinning in a dryer, except that something good eventually comes out of a dryer!

Never reward writing with not writing. Rewarding writing by abandoning your schedule is like rewarding yourself for quitting smoking by having a cigarette.

Novelists and poets are the landscape artists and portrait painters; academic writers are the people with big paint sprayers who repaint your basement.

Remember, you’re allocating time to write, not finding time to write.

Writing time is for writing, not for checking e-mail, reading the news, or browsing the latest issues of journals. Sometimes I think it would be nice to download articles while writing, but I can do that at the office. The best kind of self-control is to avoid situations that require self-control.