the WAR of ART - by Steven Pressfield [scanned book].pdf

THE HIERARCHICAL ORIENTATION M ost of us define ourselves hierarchically and don't even know it. It's hard not to. School, adver ...

We humans seem to have been wired by our evolutionary past to function most comfortably in a tribe of twenty to, say, eight hund ...

THE ARTIST AND THE HIERARCHY F or the artist to define himself hierarchically is fatal. Let's examine why. First, let's look at ...

or his calling. If you don't believe me, ask Van Gogh, who produced masterpiece after masterpiece and never found a buyer in his ...

THE DEFINITION OF A HACK I learned this from Robert McKee. A hack, he says, is a writer who second-guesses his audience. When th ...

sold out your Muse, and your Muse is you, the best part of yourself, where your finest and only true work comes from. I was star ...

THE TERRITORIAL ORIENTATION T here's a three-legged coyote who lives up the hill from me. All the garbage cans in the neighborho ...

effort and love; the territory absorbs this and gives it back to us in the form of well-being. When experts tell us that exercis ...

THE ARTIST AND THE TERRITORY T he act of creation is by definition territorial. As the mother-to-be bears her child within her, ...

winging it every day. For us to try to second-guess our Muse the way a hack second-guesses his audience is conde- scension to he ...

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN TERRITORY AND HIERARCHY H ow can we tell if our orientation is territorial or hierarchical? One way is to ...

he'd still go the gym. Stevie Wonder would still pound the piano. The sustenance they get comes from the act itself, not from th ...

THE SUPREME VIRTUE S omeone once asked the Spartan king Leonidas to identify the supreme warrior virtue from which all others fl ...

THE FRUITS OF OUR LABOR W hen Krishna instructed Arjuna that we have a right to our labor but not to the fruits of our labor, he ...

earth to act as agents of the Infinite, to bring into existence that which is not yet, but which will be, through us. Every brea ...

PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST I n the end, we arrive at a kind of model of the artist's world, and that model is that there exist other ...

THE ARTIST'S LIFE A re you a born writer? Were you put on earth to be a painter, a scientist, an apostle of peace? In the end th ...

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WITH GRATITUDE For their generous permission to quote from their works, the author acknowledges the following sources: BOOGIE CH ...

STEVEN PRESSFIELD is the author of international bestsellers The Legend of Bagger Vance, Gates of Fire, Tides of War, and Last o ...