I hate clean, orderly countries where everything works. I like hot, messy, passionate countries that are barely keeping their shit together.

- Anthony Bourdain (via soupsoup)

Things to worry about:

Worry about courage
Worry about Cleanliness
Worry about efficiency
Worry about horsemanship
Worry about…

Things not to worry about:

Don’t worry about popular opinion
Don’t worry about dolls
Don’t worry about the past
Don’t worry about the future
Don’t worry about growing up
Don’t worry about anybody getting ahead of you
Don’t worry about triumph
Don’t worry about failure unless it comes through your own fault
Don’t worry about mosquitoes
Don’t worry about flies
Don’t worry about insects in general
Don’t worry about parents
Don’t worry about boys
Don’t worry about disappointments
Don’t worry about pleasures
Don’t worry about satisfactions

Things to think about:

What am I really aiming at?
How good am I really in comparison to my contemporaries in regard to:

(a) Scholarship
(b) Do I really understand about people and am I able to get along with them?
(c) Am I trying to make my body a useful instrument or am I neglecting it?

-

In a 1933 letter to his 11-year-old daughter Scottie, F. Scott Fitzgerald produced this poignant and wise list of things to worry, not worry, and think about – the best father’s advice since John Steinbeck’s letter to his son on falling in love and this beautiful letter to 16-year-old Jackson Pollock by his dad.

From F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters.

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Develop your eccentricities while you are young. That way, when you get old, people won’t think you’re going gaga.

- David Ogilvy

Write without pay until somebody offers pay; if nobody offers within three years, sawing wood is what you were intended for.

-

Mark Twain in Advice to Writers, “a compendium of quotes, anecdotes, and writerly wisdom from a dazzling array of literary lights,” including Kurt Vonnegut, Stephen King, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Charles Bukowski, and more. (via curiositycounts)

Off to saw wood.

Always do sober what you said you’d do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.

- Ernest Hemingway

All May-December relationships end in humiliation. Sexual incompatibility, social faux pas, meeting their parents.

It’s classic.

- Jack Donaghy (30 Rock, Season 2 Episode 7)

When people talk to themselves, it’s called insanity. When companies talk to themselves, it’s called marketing.

- Steve Bautista

You can never correct your work well until you have forgotten it.

- Voltaire (via writingadvice)

Everyone, at some point in their lives, wakes up in the middle of the night with the feeling that they are all alone in the world, and that nobody loves them now and that nobody will ever love them, and that they will never have a decent night’s sleep again and will spend their lives wandering blearily around a loveless landscape, hoping desperately that their circumstances will improve, but suspecting, in their heart of hearts, that they will remain unloved forever. The best thing to do in these circumstances is to wake somebody else up, so that they can feel this way, too.

-

Lemony Snicket

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I was never really insane except upon occasions when my heart was touched.

- Edgar Allan Poe (via lipsticksmiles)

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