"'I never promised the universe that I would be a great writer, goddamn it!  I just promised the universe that I would be a writer'"

At seventy-five pages in, I nearly stopped.  It felt too terrible to continue, too deeply embarrassing.  But I pushed through my own shame only because I decided that I refused to go to my grave with seventy-five pages of an unfinished manuscript sitting in my desk drawer.  I did not want to be that person.  The world is filled with too many unfinished manuscripts as it is, and I didn't want to add another one to that bottomless pile.  So no matter how much I thought my work stank, I had to persist.

I also kept remembering what my mother always used to say: 'Done is better than good.'"
-Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert