A Quote by Leonard Bernstein

You can sit there, tense and worried, freezing the creative energies, or you can start writing something. It doesn't matter what. In five or ten minutes, the imagination will heat, the tightness will fade, and a certain spirit and rhythm will take over.
You cannot stop smoking directly because it has many related things, implications. You are tense, and if you stop smoking you will start something else and the other may be more harmful. Don't go on escaping problems, face them. The problem is that you are tense, so the goal should be how to be non-tense, not, smoking or not smoking. Meditate. Relax your tensions without any object into the sky, allow catharsis to happen. When you are non-tense these things will become absurd, foolish, and they will drop. Food will change, your styles of living will change.
I meditate in the morning, and my daughter will do it with me, looking like the most perfect little Buddha. I'll do ten minutes of yoga, then two to ten minutes of meditation. She'll sit there quietly half the time.
I'm amazed that I can sit down, put a guitar in my hands and start playing kind of free style, and it will be four hours later and it will feel like it's been five minutes. I think that adds depth to your being, when something in your life can do that for you. Everybody should try to find something in their life that can do that for them. People find really elaborate self-destructive ways of killing time on this planet. That's why they take drugs or drink, trying to alter their state of being. If you can find something that doesn't destroy you, but deepens your character, you're really lucky.
Ever since we were little - and this goes from when we were babies through high school - everyone always said, 'The twins are so entertaining. Just sit down with them for five minutes, and you will see so much happen. They will fight, they will laugh, they will love each other, and then they will tell each other off.'
When you are not separate from the creative process, time ceases to exist. You might start to feel tired and suddenly realize that much time has passed. It isn't necessarily a happy time - and may be very difficult to start if it is a job or an obligation. But if' you start with all the concrete needs and proceed in a thorough way - the creative process will take over and you will forget whether it is work or play. Working in the here and now is one of the most uncontaminated ways to work.
Sometimes Thomas Mackee will stick an earphone into my ear and ask me to listen to a song. When I get over the revulsion of putting something in my ear that's been in his, I sit back and let the music take over, and for a half hour there's something comforting about someone's heart beating at the same rhythm as mine.
You have to fight against all the things that will keep you out of writing, because life doesn't go with writing. You will always have something more important to do: you will have to take your children to school, you will have to cook something, you have to meet friends. But you have to fight if you want to write.
Our [American] money system is structurally brittle. It doesn't matter if you put a very clever guy or a stupid guy at the wheel. The clever guy will take a half hour to have an accident, and the stupid guy will take ten minutes.
When you are in the final days of your life, what will you want? Will you hug that college degree in the walnut frame? Will you ask to be carried to the garage so you can sit in your car? Will you find comfort in rereading your financial statement? Of course not. What will matter then will be people. If relationships will matter most then, shouldn't they matter most now?
Men are like microwave ovens; they heat up immediately, but things start to boil over after about three minutes. Women are like conventional ovens; they take twenty minutes to heat up, but can go on cooking for hours.
You should be willing to do something that will take you five minutes or less for anybody.
The woman will sit eternally in the tall black armchair. I will be the one woman you will never have...excessive living weighs down the imagination: we will not live, we will only write and talk to swell the sails.
The problem is when you are writing something in retrospective, it needs a lot of courage not to change, or you will forget a certain reality, and you will just take in consideration your view today.
If you always dreamed of writing a novel or a memoir, and you used to love to write, and were pretty good at it, will it break your heart if it turns out you never got around to it? If you wake up one day at eighty, will you feel nonchalant that something always took precedence over a daily commitment to discovering your creative spirit? If not--if this very thought fills you with regret--then what are you waiting for?
I put a lot of pressure on myself to do well and score more, and it will be a matter of time. Once you get back into that rhythm, you will start getting balls that drop to you in positions where it wasn't before. I do have that feeling that it is going to come soon.
If you organize your family life to spend even ten or fifteen minutes a morning reading something that connects you with these timeless principles, its almost guaranteed that you will make better choices during the day--in the family, on the job, in every dimension of life. Your thoughts will be higher. Your interactions will be more satisfying. You will have a greater perspective. You will increase that space between what happens to you and your response to it. You will be more connected to what really matters most.
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