If you touch an idea too much without actually making it, just like a dough or plaster, it dies. I think it’s better to make and bake it and throw it away than to imagine how it would have worked or tasted.
—Zeynab Izadyar

Donna Tartt once said in an interview that if the writer’s not having fun the reader isn’t either. I think people make the best things when they love the process, when they willingly shoulder the inherent uncertainty and pain that comes with it. It’s almost like a form of prayer: you offer up what you can even though the reward is uncertain. You do it out of love.

“To create is not just to create objects,” he explained. “Coming up with a question is also creation—the very essence of a question is its power to elicit the possibilities of reply, to collect a variety of thoughts… I believe that the richness of thinking may be the critical resource needed to give this world a future.”

‪Lines aren't things running between two points; points are where several lines intersect. Lines never run uniformly, and points are nothing but inflections of lines. More generally, it's not beginnings and ends that count, but middles. Things and thoughts advance or grow out from the middle, and that's where you have to get to work, that's where everything unfolds.‬

• Gilles Deleuze, On Leibniz