Quotes

That’s me? I did that?

“It doesn’t occur to many viewers that the artist often has difficulty accepting the painting himself. You can’t assume that I gloried in it, or celebrated it. I didn’t. I’m a night painter, so when I come into the studio the next morning the delirium is over. I know I won’t remember detail, but I will remember the feeling of the whole thing. I come into the studio very fearfully, I creep in to see what happened the night before. And the feeling is one of, ‘My God, did I do that?’ That is about the only measure I have. The kind of shaking, trembling of…’That’s me? I did that?'” – Philip Guston

You’ll Never Learn It

“What I feel fortunate about is that I’m still astonished, that things still amaze me. And I think that that’s the great benefit of being in the arts, where the possibility for learning never disappears, where you basically have to admit you never learn it.” – Milton Glaser

Hungry for Stories

“People are hungry for stories. It’s part of our very being. Storytelling is a form of history, of immortality too. It goes from one generation to another.” – Studs Terkel

Developing Our Wings

“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.”
— Kurt Vonnegut

A Deadline

“I don’t need time. What I need is a deadline.”
– Duke Ellington

Ideas Are Like Fish

Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper. Down deep the fish are more powerful and more pure. They’re huge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful. – David Lynch

Need for Mystery

The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer. – Ken Kesey

Wildly Self-Confident

“If you find yourself asking yourself (and your friends), “Am I really a writer? Am I really an artist?” chances are you are. The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death.”
— Steven Pressfield

Moonshine

“We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.”

— H.L. Mencken

Look Deep Enough

“If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.”
― Thomas Carlyle

Eunuchs in a Harem

“Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how it’s done, they’ve seen it done every day, but they’re unable to do it themselves.”
— Brendan Behan

God Is An Artist

“God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat. He has no real style, He just goes on trying other things.”

― Pablo Picasso

Write the Truest Sentence

“Sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, ‘Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.'” – Ernest Hemingway

Friend

“There is no friend as loyal as a book.”
— Ernest Hemingway

No tears, No Surprise

“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”
― Robert Frost

Pour Some Music

If you pour some music on whatever’s wrong, it’ll sure help out.
– Levon Helm

Always Take the Initiative

“Always take the initiative. There is nothing wrong with spending a night in jail if it means getting the shot you need. Send out all your dogs and one might return with prey. Never wallow in your troubles; despair must be kept private and brief. Learn to live with your mistakes. Expand your knowledge and understanding of music and literature, old and modern. That roll of unexposed celluloid you have in your hand might be the last in existence, so do something impressive with it. There is never an excuse not to finish a film. Carry bolt cutters everywhere. Thwart institutional cowardice. Ask for forgiveness, not permission. Take your fate into your own hands. Learn to read the inner essence of a landscape. Ignite the fire within and explore unknown territory. Walk straight ahead, never detour. Manoeuvre and mislead, but always deliver. Don’t be fearful of rejection. Develop your own voice. Day one is the point of no return. A badge of honor is to fail a film theory class. Chance is the lifeblood of cinema. Guerrilla tactics are best. Take revenge if need be. Get used to the bear behind you.” – Werner Herzog

He…or She

Discover Within

“You cannot teach creativity—how to become a good writer. But you can help a young writer discover within himself what kind of writer he would like to be.”
— Mario Vargas Llosa

The Simple & The Complicated

Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creative.”
— Charles Mingus

Conflict

“Conflict brings out truth, creativity, and resolution.”
— Chris Voss

The Entire Self

“The truth is that creative activity is one that involves the entire self – our emotions, our levels of energy, our characters, and our minds.”
— Robert Greene 

Validation

“The artist cannot look to others to validate his efforts or his calling. If you don’t believe me, ask Van Gogh, who produced masterpiece after masterpiece and never found a buyer in his whole life.”
— Steven Pressfield 

Time and Patience

“When one does a thing, it appears good, otherwise one would not write it. Only later comes reflection, and one discards or accepts the thing. Time is the best censor, and patience a most excellent teacher.”
— Frédéric Chopin

Never Hope More Than You Work

“Creativity comes from trust. Trust your instincts. And never hope more than you work.”
— Rita Mae Brown

Don’t Let This Happen

Craft and Art

“Craft is what we are expected to know; art is the unexpected use of our craft.”
— Ed Catmull 

Reflection

“When one does a thing, it appears good, otherwise one would not write it. Only later comes reflection, and one discards or accepts the thing. Time is the best censor, and patience a most excellent teacher.”
— Frédéric Chopin

Guts

“The professional learns to recognize envy-driven criticism and to take it for what it is: the supreme compliment. The critic hates most that which he would have done himself if he had had the guts.”
— Steven Pressfield

Eh

The Earth without art is just ‘eh’. – Banksy

Live Out Loud

“If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud.” – Emile Zola

Creatives In A Box

“You can’t force creatives into a box. If you try, they’ll no longer be creative. And no one will want your box.”
— Ryan Lilly

Two Stories

“All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.”
— Leo Tolstoy

Found Something True

“Artists use lies to tell the truth. Yes, I created a lie. But because you believed it, you found something true about yourself.”
— Alan Moore 

Even You Leave

“When you start working, everybody is in your studio…the past, your friends, enemies…and above all, your own ideas all are there. But as you continue…they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you’re lucky, even you leave.” – Philip Guston

Recreate Constructively

“We’re not really taught how to recreate constructively. We need to do more than find diversions; we need to restore and expand ourselves. Our idea of relaxing is all too often to plop down in front of the television set and let its pandering idiocy liquefy our brains. Shutting off the thought process is not rejuvenating; the mind is like a car battery — it recharges by running. You may be surprised to find how quickly daily routine and the demands of “just getting by” absorb your waking hours. You may be surprised to find how quickly you start to see your politics and religion become matters of habit rather than thought and inquiry. You may be surprised to find how quickly you start to see your life in terms of other people’s expectations rather than issues. You may be surprised to find out how quickly reading a good book sounds like a luxury.”
— Bill Watterson

Fishing in the Deep

“Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper. Down deep the fish are more powerful and more pure. They’re huge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful.” David Lynch

The Right Story at the Right Moment

“Sometimes the right person tells the right story at the right moment, and through a combination of luck and design, a creative expression gains new force.”
— Lin-Manuel Miranda 

A Baton

Let the Mind Go

Fear of a Mistake

“Nothing will stop you being creative more effectively as the fear of making a
mistake.”
— John Cleese

It Lights My Way

“I do not know anything about Art with a capital A. What I do know about is my art. Because it concerns me. I do not speak for others. So I do not speak for things which profess to speak for others. My art, however, speaks for me. It lights my way.”
— Mark Z. Danielewski 

A Conversation

“Every artist joins a conversation that’s been going on for generations, even millennia, before he or she joins the scene.”
— John Barth

Receiving and Bearing

“The deepest experience of the creator is feminine, for it is experience of receiving and bearing.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke

Marry Observation and Imagination

“Vision without execution is hallucination. .. Skill without imagination is barren. Leonardo [da Vinci] knew how to marry observation and imagination, which made him history’s consummate innovator.”
— Walter Isaacson

Discovers The Self

“It is in playing and only in playing that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self.”
— D.W. Winnicott 

Safe

“Basically, your fear is like a mall cop who thinks he’s a Navy SEAL: He hasn’t slept in days, he’s all hopped up on Red Bull, and he’s liable to shoot at his own shadow in an absurd effort to keep everyone “safe.”
— Elizabeth Gilbert 

Demonic and Divine

The Human Spirit

“The human spirit lives on creativity and dies in conformity and routine.”
— Vilayat Inayat Khan

It’s Easier to Do…

“Because, as we all know, it’s easier to do trivial things that are urgent than it is to do important things that are not urgent, like thinking. And it’s also easier to do little things we know we can do than to start on big things that we’re not so sure about.”
— John Cleese

Get Smarter

“When faced with a challenge, get smarter.”
— Ed Catmull 

Fear Being Wrong

“To live a creative life we must first lose the fear of being wrong.”
— Joseph Chilton Pearce

With Every Sentence

“No writing is a waste of time – no creative work where the feelings, the imagination, the intelligence must work. With every sentence you write, you have learned something. It has done you good.”
— Brenda Ueland 

Imaginary

“You know, they ask me if I were on a desert island and I knew nobody would ever see what I wrote, would I go on writing. My answer is most emphatically yes. I would go on writing for company. Because I’m creating an imaginary — it’s always imaginary — world in which I would like to live.
— William S. Burroughs

Complaint

“All great art is a form of complaint”
— John Cage

Uncertainty

“If uncertainty is unacceptable to you, it turns into fear. If it is perfectly acceptable, it turns into increased aliveness, alertness, and creativity.”
— Eckhart Tolle

The Object It Loves

“The creative mind plays with the object it loves.”
— C.G. Jung

Pain

“Creative work is often driven by pain. It may be that if you don’t have something in the back of your head driving you nuts, you may not do anything. It’s not a good arrangement. If I were God, I wouldn’t have done it that way.
— Cormac McCarthy

Invent

“Because of the routines we follow, we often forget that life is an ongoing adventure. . . Life is pure adventure, and the sooner we realize that, the quicker we will be able to treat life as art: to bring all our energies to each encounter, to remain flexible enough to notice and admit when what we expected to happen did not happen. We need to remember that we are created creative and can invent new scenarios as frequently as they are needed.”
— Maya Angelou

What to Eat

The More Resistance

“Rule of thumb: The more important a call or action is to our soul’s evolution, the Resistance we will feel toward pursuing it.”
— Steven Pressfield 

The Essence of God

“A tree gives glory to God by being a tree. For in being what God means it to be it is obeying [God]. It “consents,” so to speak, to [God’s] creative love. It is expressing an idea which is in God and which is not distinct from the essence of God, and therefore a tree imitates God by being a tree”
— Thomas Merton

Reality

Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.

John Lennon

Relax

“The more relaxed you are, the better you are at everything: the better you are with your loved ones, the better you are with your enemies, the better you are at your job, the better you are with yourself.” — Bill Murray

The True Artist

“The true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art. To women he is half vivisector, half vampire. He gets into intimate relations with them to study them, to strip the mask of convention from them, to surprise their inmost secrets, knowing that they have the power to rouse his deepest creative energies, to rescue him from his cold reason, to make him see visions and dream dreams, to inspire him, as he calls it. He persuades women that they may do this for their own purpose whilst he really means them to do it for his. He steals the mother’s milk and blackens it to make printer’s ink to scoff at her and glorify ideal women with. He pretends to spare her the pangs of child-bearing so that he may have for himself the tenderness and fostering that belong of right to her children. Since marriage began, the great artist has been known as a bad husband. But he is worse: he is a child-robber, a blood-sucker, a hypocrite, and a cheat. Perish the race and wither a thousand women if only the sacrifice of them enable him to act Hamlet better, to paint a finer picture, to write a deeper poem, a greater play, a profounder philosophy! For mark you, Tavy, the artist’s work is to shew us ourselves as we really are. Our minds are nothing but this knowledge of ourselves; and he who adds a jot to such knowledge creates new mind as surely as any woman creates new men. In the rage of that creation he is as ruthless as the woman, as dangerous to her as she to him, and as horribly fascinating. Of all human struggles there is none so treacherous and remorseless as the struggle between the artist man and the mother woman. Which shall use up the other? that is the issue between them. And it is all the deadlier because, in your romanticist cant, they love one another.”
— George Bernard Shaw

Zen

“The truth of Zen, just a little bit of it, is what turns one’s humdrum life, a life of monotonous, uninspiring commonplaceness, into one of art, full of genuine inner creativity.”
— D.T. Suzuki

A By-Product of Work

“The professional has learned that success, like happiness, comes as a by-product of work. The professional concentrates on the work and allows rewards to come or not come, whatever they like.”
— Steven Pressfield

The Energy of the Possible

“In this moment
Do not wait to be beautiful. Be your beautiful, authentic self right now.
If the world offers up negativity and despair, surprise the world by giving back love and kindness. Send out the energy that you wish to experience, and you are certain to experience it.

Happiness and fulfillment are alive in this moment. Allow them to flow freely and creatively through your life.
Fall in love all over again with the miracle of being. Your imagination is great and magnificent, yet it cannot hold even a fraction of the possibilities.

You’ll do, say and act your best when you feel your best. Feel the limitless wonder of this very moment.
Be beautiful, alive, aware and filled with the energy of the possible. In this moment, is every dream made and fulfilled”
— Ralph S. Marston Jr.

Art

“Art is essentially the affirmation, the blessing, and the deification of existence.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche

Stare

“Stare. It is the way to educate your eye, and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.”
— Walker Evans

Don’t Wait

“Don’t wait for inspiration. It comes while one is working.” — Henri Matisse

Bad For You

“You can clear out whatever obstacles are preventing you from living your most creative life, with the simple understanding that whatever is bad for you is probably also bad for your work.”
— Elizabeth Gilbert

Loafing

“It takes a heap of loafing to write a book.”
— Gertrude Stein

Swoopers and Bashers

“Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn’t work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they’re done they’re done.”
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

The Bird of Thought

“The mind travels faster than the pen; consequently, writing becomes a question of learning to make occasional wing shots, bringing down the bird of thought as it flashes by. A writer is a gunner, sometimes waiting in the blind for something to come in, sometimes roaming the countryside hoping to scare something up.”
— E.B. White 

Strange, Special Air

“Any great art work … revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world – the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air.”
— Leonard Bernstein

The Noble and the Sublime

“The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the political state, but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in thought and dull in feeling.”
— Albert Einstein

Schools

“Schools train you to be ignorant with style […] they prepare you to be a usable victim for a military industrial complex that needs manpower. As long as you’re just smart enough to do a job and just dumb enough to swallow what they feed you, you’re going to be alright […] So I believe that schools mechanically and very specifically try and breed out any hint of creative thought in the kids that are coming up.”
— Frank Zappa

The Air is Cluttered

“Creativity is a gift. It doesn’t come through if the air is cluttered.”
— John Lennon

Ruthless

“The writer’s only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is worth any number of old ladies.”
— William Faulkner

Failure is Death

“The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this:
A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive.
To him… a touch is a blow,
a sound is a noise,
a misfortune is a tragedy,
a joy is an ecstasy,
a friend is a lover,
a lover is a god,
and failure is death.”
— Pearl S. Buck

Creative Evolution

“We are the facilitators of our own creative evolution.”
— Bill Hicks

Polite Society

Perfectionism

Getting Burned

“It has always been simple, but making it hard was always your way of avoiding pain. If you want to change your life, you have to change what you are doing. It wasn’t his fault, her fault, their fault or the circumstances. It was your inability to choose. So, life chose for you. Somewhere in that crazy mind of yours time stopped. You thought someone would rescue you, but they didn’t. You have to rescue yourself. This is not a fire you can put out; you have to walk through it, in order to reach life. Getting burned is apart of growth, didn’t you know?”
— Shannon L. Alder

Inspiration Strikes

“Someone once asked Somerset Maughham if he wrote on a schedule or only when struck by inspiration. “I write only when inspiration strikes,” he replied. “Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp.”
— Steven Pressfield 

You Know Who You Are

“Maybe it’s just in America, but it seems that if you’re passionate about something, it freaks people out. You’re considered bizarre or eccentric. To me, it just means you know who you are.”
— Tim Burton

Give Us What You’ve Got

We Cannot Be Idle

“All of our days are numbered; we cannot afford to be idle. To act on a bad idea is better than to not act at all because the worth of the idea never becomes apparent until you do it. Sometimes this idea can be the smallest thing in the world, a little flame that you hunch over and cup with your hand and pray will not be extinguished by all the storm that howls about it. If you can hold on to that flame great things can be constructed around it that are massive and powerful and world changing – all held up by the tiniest of ideas.”
— Nick Cave

Play

“If you want creative workers, give them enough time to play”
— John Cleese

Undeniable

“Be undeniably good.”
— Steve Martin

Small Details

Serious

“Serious art is born from serious play.”
— Julia Cameron

Familiar and Surprising

“To sell something surprising, make it familiar; and to sell something familiar, make it surprising” Raymond Loewy

To Cease

“To cease to think creatively is to cease to live”
— Benjamin Franklin

Sit Down

Self-Revelation

“All good work requires self-revelation.”
— Sidney Lumet 

Invent

“We need to remember that we are all created creative and can invent new scenarios as frequently as they are needed.”
— Maya Angelou

Where Were You?

Moss Hart used to turn to actors who tried to change #dialogue and say, “Where were you when the pages were blank?” – Tom Mankiewicz

Cruft

Cruft is a jargon word for anything that is left over, redundant and getting in the way. It is used particularly for defective, superseded, useless, superfluous, or dysfunctional elements in computer software.

Wild

“To be fully human is to be wild. Wild is the strange pull and whispering wisdom. It’s the gentle nudge and the forceful ache. It is your truth, passed down from the ancients, and the very stream of life in your blood. Wild is the soul where passion and creativity reside, and the quickening of your heart. Wild is what is real, and wild is your home.”
— Victoria Erickson

Creative Character

“A good way to rid one’s self of a sense of discomfort is to do something. That uneasy, dissatisfied feeling is actual force vibrating out of order; it may be turned to practical account by giving proper expression to its creative character.”
— William Morris

Nonconforming Minority

“The saving of our world from pending doom will come, not through the complacent adjustment of the conforming majority, but through the creative maladjustment of a nonconforming minority.”
— Martin Luther King Jr.

The Work Has Been Done

Relinquish Control

“Creativity requires faith. Faith requires that we relinquish control.”
— Julia Cameron

Dedicated Minority

“Almost always the creative, dedicated minority has made the world better. ” — Martin Luther King Jr.

Failure

“If you aren’t experiencing failure, then you are making a far worse mistake: You are being driven by the desire to avoid it.”
— Ed Catmull 

A Statue

“I’ve been all over the world and I’ve never seen a statue of a critic.”
— Leonard Bernstein

Discovery

Aroused Thought

“Follow the path of your aroused thought, and you will soon meet this infernal inscription: There is nothing so beautiful as that which does not exist.”
— Paul Valéry

Advice

“when people give you advice, they’re really just talking to themselves in the past.”
— Austin Kleon 

The Last Person On Earth

“Of any activity you do, ask yourself: If I were the last person on earth, would I still do it?”
— Steven Pressfield 

Time Wasted

“Creativity is the residue of time wasted.”
— Albert Einstein

Resistance

“Resistance is always lying and always full of shit.”
— Steven Pressfield 

It’s Not Too Late

How Old?

“But do you know how old I will be by the time I learn to really play the piano / act / paint / write a decent play?”
Yes . . . the same age you will be if you don’t.”
— Julia Cameron

Contageous

“Creativity is contagious. Pass it on.”
— Albert Einstein

Dimensional Mind

“The conventional mind is passive – it consumes information and regurgitates it in familiar forms. The dimensional mind is active, transforming everything it digests into something new and original, creating instead of consuming.”
— Robert Greene 

Inspiration and Darkness

Forget Your Theories

“You must forget all your theories, all your ideas before the subject. What part of these is really your own will be expressed in your expression of the emotion awakened in you by the subject.”
— Henri Matisse

Loneliness

My Future

“My future starts when I wake up every morning. Every day I find something creative to do with my life.”
— Miles Davis

Captive and Driven

“A creative person has little power over his own life. He is not free. He is captive and driven by his daimon.”
— C.G. Jung

Melancholy

“Freedom is only to be found where there is burden to be shouldered. In creative achievements this burden always represents an imperative and a need that weighs heavily upon man’s mood, so that he comes to be in a mood of melancholy. All creative action resides in a mood of melancholy, whether we are clearly aware of the fact or not, whether we speak at length about it or not. All creative action resides in a mood of melancholy, but this is not to say that everyone in a melancholy mood is creative.”
— Martin Heidegger

Violate the Rules

“It’s not wise to violate the rules until you know how to observe them.”
— T.S. Eliot

Authentic Creativity

“Classes will dull your mind, destroy the potential for authentic creativity.”
— John Nash

Adjectives

Drink and Be Filled Up

“Some of this book—perhaps too much—has been about how I learned to do it. Much of it has been about how you can do it better. The rest of it—and perhaps the best of it—is a permission slip: you can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will. Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up. “
— Stephen King 

The Mind I Love Most

“The mind I love most must have wild places, a tangled orchard where dark damsons drop in the heavy grass, an overgrown little wood, the chance of a snake or two, a pool that nobody fathomed the depth of, and paths threaded with flowers planted by the mind.”
— Katherine Mansfield 

Creative Power

“Creative power is mightier than its possessor.”
— C.G. Jung

The Very Seeing of Beauty is an Art

“You cannot reconcile creativeness with technical achievement. You may be perfect in playing the piano, and not be creative. You may be able to handle color, to put paint on canvas most cleverly, and not be a creative painter…having lost the song, we pursue the singer. We learn from the singer the technique of song, but there is no song; and I say the song is essential, the joy of singing is essential. When the joy is there, the technique can be built up from nothing; you will invent your own technique, you won’t have to study elocution or style. When you have, you see, and the very seeing of beauty is an art.”
— Jiddu Krishnamurti

O Divine Poesy

“O Divine Poesy, goddess, daughter of Zeus, sustain for me this song of the various-minded man who, after he had plundered the innermost citadel of hallowed Troy, was made to stay grievously about the coasts of men, the sport of their customs, good and bad, while his heart, through all the sea-faring, ached with an agony to redeem himself and bring his company safe home. Vain hope – for them. The fools! Their own witlessness cast them aside. To destroy for meat the oxen of the most exalted Sun, wherefore the Sun-god blotted out the day of their return. Make this tale live for us in all its many bearings, O Muse.” – from Homer’s Odyssey, translation by T.E. Lawrence

Work in Clay

Wholeness

“The discipline of creation, be it to paint, compose, write, is an effort towards wholeness.”
— Madeleine L’Engle 

Play

“Creativity is sacred, and it is not sacred. What we make matters enormously, and it doesn’t matter at all. We toil alone, and we are accompanied by spirits. We are terrified, and we are brave. Art is a crushing chore and a wonderful privilege. Only when we are at our most playful can divinity finally get serious with us. Make space for all these paradoxes to be equally true inside your soul, and I promise—you can make anything. So please calm down now and get back to work, okay? The treasures that are hidden inside you are hoping you will say yes.”
— Elizabeth Gilbert

Perfectionism

“perfectionism is just fear in fancy shoes and a mink coat,”
— Elizabeth Gilbert 

10,000

“We all have 10,000 bad drawings in us. The sooner we get them out the better.”
— Walt Stanchfield

The Heart and the Head

“If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing.”
— Marc Chagall

Horny

“I can always be distracted by love, but eventually I get horny for my creativity.”
— Gilda Radner

The Unlike

Insanity

“Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination.”
— G.K. Chesterton

Teacher and Pupil

“Creative activity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.”
— Arthur Koestler 

In the Arena

“It’s better to be in the arena, getting stomped by the bull, than to be up in the stands or out in the parking lot.”
— Steven Pressfield 

We Are Cups

“From now on I hope always to stay alert, to educate myself as best I can. But lacking this, in Future I will relaxedly turn back to my secret mind to see what it has observed when I thought I was sitting this one out. We never sit anything out.

We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out. “
— Ray Bradbury

Steady and Well-Ordered

“Be steady and well-ordered in your life so that you can be fierce and original in your work.” ― Gustave Flaubert

Conformity Meaningless

“I am convinced that creativity is a priori to the integrity of the universe and that life is regenerative and conformity meaningless.”
— R. Buckminster Fuller 

An Alchemical Thing

“To me, all creativity is magic. Ideas start out in the empty void of your head – and they end up as a material thing, like a book you can hold in your hand. That is the magical process. It’s an alchemical thing. Yes, we do get the gold out of it but that’s not the most important thing. It’s the work itself.”
— Alan Moore

Make It Clear

New Frontiers

“The principal mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers.”
— Arthur Koestler

Yelling At a Cat

“But to yell at your creativity, saying, “You must earn money for me!” is sort of like yelling at a cat; it has no idea what you’re talking about, and all you’re doing is scaring it away, because you’re making really loud noises and your face looks weird when you do that.”
— Elizabeth Gilbert 

Cares

“Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.”
— John Updike

Every Act

Infinite Patience

“At one time I thought the most important thing was talent. I think now that — the young man or the young woman must possess or teach himself, train himself, in infinite patience, which is to try and to try and to try until it comes right. He must train himself in ruthless intolerance. That is, to throw away anything that is false no matter how much he might love that page or that paragraph. The most important thing is insight, that is … curiosity to wonder, to mull, and to muse why it is that man does what he does. And if you have that, then I don’t think the talent makes much difference, whether you’ve got that or not.
— William Faulkner

Maladjusted

“Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.”
— Martin Luther King Jr.

Fear

Not Everybody Will Get It

“Not everybody will get it. People will misinterpret you and what you do. They might even call you names. So get comfortable with being misunderstood, disparaged, or ignored — the trick is to be too busy doing your work to care.”
— Austin Kleon 

Perfectionism

The Spectator

Look

“look for a long time at what pleases you, and longer still at what pains you…”
— Colette

Every story Has Already Been Told

“Every story has already been told. Once you’ve read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird and A Wrinkle in Time, you understand that there is really no reason to ever write another novel. Except that each writer brings to the table, if she will let herself, something that no one else in the history of time has ever had.”
— Anna Quindlen

The Spirit

“Whoever uses the spirit that is in him creatively is an artist. To make living itself an art, that is the goal.”
— Henry Miller

Bonkers

“You’re mad, bonkers, completely off your head. But I’ll tell you a secret. All the best people are.”
— Lewis Carroll

An Outcast

“The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.”
— Julian Barnes 

Stimulate

“A society’s competitive advantage will come not from how well its schools teach the multiplication and periodic tables, but from how well they stimulate imagination and creativity.”
— Albert Einstein

Done

“Done is better than good.”
— Elizabeth Gilbert

Don’t Cheat Us

“Are you a born writer? Were you put on earth to be a painter, a scientist, an apostle of peace? In the end the question can only be answered by action.

Do it or don’t do it.

It may help to think of it this way. If you were meant to cure cancer or write a symphony or crack cold fusion and you don’t do it, you not only hurt yourself, even destroy yourself,. You hurt your children. You hurt me. You hurt the planet.

You shame the angels who watch over you and you spite the Almighty, who created you and only you with your unique gifts, for the sole purpose of nudging the human race one millimeter farther along its path back to God.

Creative work is not a selfish act or a bid for attention on the part of the actor. It’s a gift to the world and every being in it. Don’t cheat us of your contribution. Give us what you’ve got.”
— Steven Pressfield

Train Your Unconscious

“But how?” my students ask. “How do you actually do it?”
You sit down, I say. You try to sit down at approximately the same time every day. This is how you train your unconscious to kick in for you creatively. So you sit down at, say, nine every morning, or ten every night. You put a piece of paper in the typewriter, or you turn on the computer and bring up the right file, and then you stare at it for an hour or so. You begin rocking, just a little at first, and then like a huge autistic child. You look at the ceiling, and over at the clock, yawn, and stare at the paper again. Then, with your fingers poised on the keyboard, you squint at an image that is forming in your mind — a scene, a locale, a character, whatever — and you try to quiet your mind so you can hear what that landscape or character has to say above the other voices in your mind.”
— Anne Lamott

Creating Ourselves

“We are all in search of feeling more connected to reality—to other people, the times we live in, the natural world, our character, and our own uniqueness. Our culture increasingly tends to separate us from these realities in various ways. We indulge in drugs or alcohol, or engage in dangerous sports or risky behavior, just to wake ourselves up from the sleep of our daily existence and feel a heightened sense of connection to reality. In the end, however, the most satisfying and powerful way to feel this connection is through creative activity. Engaged in the creative process we feel more alive than ever, because we are making something and not merely consuming, Masters of the small reality we create. In doing this work, we are in fact creating ourselves.”
— Robert Greene 

We Fear

“We fear discovering that we are more than we think we are. More than our parents/children/teachers think we are. We fear that we actually possess the talent that our still, small voice tells us. That we actually have the guts, the perseverance, the capacity. We fear that we truly can steer our ship, plant our flag, reach our Promised Land. We fear this because, if it’s true, then we become estranged from all we know. We pass through a membrane. We become monsters and monstrous.”
— Steven Pressfield 

Resistance

“Fear is good. Like self-doubt, fear is an indicator. Fear tells us what we have to do.

Remember our rule of thumb: The more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it.

Resistance is experienced as fear; the degree of fear equates to the strength of Resistance. Therefore the more fear we feel about a specific enterprise, the more certain we can be that that enterprise is important to us and to the growth of our soul. That’s why we feel so much Resistance. If it meant nothing to us, there’d be no Resistance.”
— Steven Pressfield

Take It Personally

Naivete

“Despite a lack of natural ability, I did have the one element necessary to all early creativity: naïveté, that fabulous quality that keeps you from knowing just how unsuited you are for what you are about to do.”
— Steve Martin

The Weight of Your Intention

Practice

“It’s a simple and generous rule of life that whatever you practice, you will improve at.”
— Elizabeth Gilbert 

Uninterrupted Solitude

“The mind is sharper and keener in seclusion and uninterrupted solitude. No big laboratory is needed in which to think. Originality thrives in seclusion free of outside influences beating upon us to cripple the creative mind. Be alone, that is the secret of invention; be alone, that is when ideas are born. That is why many of the earthly miracles have had their genesis in humble surroundings.”
— Tesla

Authenticity

“Anyhow, the older I get, the less impressed I become with originality. These days, I’m far more moved by authenticity. Attempts at originality can often feel forced and precious, but authenticity has quiet resonance that never fails to stir me.”
— Elizabeth Gilbert 

Soulless Cretins

“I think it’s a shame that something as creative and vital to the nature of the human species as story-telling is largely controlled by the soulless cretins known as publishers.”
— Piers Anthony

Decay

“The five marks of the Roman decaying culture:

Concern with displaying affluence instead of building wealth;

Obsession with sex and perversions of sex;

Art becomes freakish and sensationalistic instead of creative and original;

Widening disparity between very rich and very poor;

Increased demand to live off the state.”
— Edward Gibbon

The Last Thing

“The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.”
— Blaise Pascal

Balance

“The artist seeks contact with his intuitive sense of the gods, but in order to create his work, he cannot stay in this seductive and incorporeal realm. He must return to the material world in order to do his work. It’s the artist’s responsibility to balance mystical communication and the labor of creation.”
— Patti Smith 

10 Steps to Becoming a Better Writer

“10 Steps to Becoming a Better Writer

Write.
Write more.
Write even more.
Write even more than that.
Write when you don’t want to.
Write when you do.
Write when you have something to say.
Write when you don’t.
Write every day.
Keep writing.”
— Brian Clark

Connecting Things

“Creativity is just connecting things.”
— Steve Jobs

The Most Creative Thing

“You’re always believing ahead of your evidence. What was the evidence I could write a poem? I just believed it. The most creative thing in us is to believe in a thing.”
— Robert Frost

A Sacred Place

Be Distracted

“All profound distraction opens certain doors. You have to allow yourself to be distracted when you are unable to concentrate.”
— Julio Cortázar

Catch the Big Fish

“Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure.They’re huge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful.”
— David Lynch

The Anarchist

“The artist, and particularly the poet, is always an anarchist in the best sense of the word. He must heed only the call that arises within him from three strong voices: the voice of death, with all its foreboding, the voice of love and the voice of art.”
— Federico García Lorca

That Muse-Guy

Painstaking Work

“I feel such a creative force in me: I am convinced that there will be a time when, let us say, I will make something good every day , on a regular basis…I am doing my very best to make every effort because I am longing so much to make beautiful things. But beautiful things mean painstaking work, disappointment, and perseverance.”
— Vincent van Gogh

One Day’s Work

“When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I write one page and then another. One day’s work is all I can permit myself to contemplate.”
— John Steinbeck 

A Professional

“There was a moment when I changed from an amateur to a professional. I assumed the burden of a profession, which is to write even when you don’t want to, don’t much like what you’re writing, and aren’t writing particularly well.”
— Agatha Christie

Insights Accrete

“This is the other secret that real artists know and wannabe writers don’t. When we sit down each day and do our work, power concentrates around us. The Muse takes note of our dedication. She approves. We have earned favor in her sight. When we sit down and work, we become like a magnetized rod that attracts iron filings. Ideas come. Insights accrete.”
— Steven Pressfield 

Nunc Coepi

“If I should fall even a thousand times a day, a thousand times, with peaceful repentance, I will say immediately, Nunc Coepi [Now I begin]”

– Venerable Bruno Lanteri

Creating the World

Play

“When we treat children’s play as seriously as it deserves, we are helping them feel the joy that’s to be found in the creative spirit. It’s the things we play with and the people who help us play that make a great difference in our lives.”
— Fred Rogers

Choose

“You don’t get to pick your family, but you can pick your teachers and you can pick your friends and you can pick the music you listen to and you can pick the books you read and you can pick the movies you see. You are, in fact, a mashup of what you choose to let into your life. You are the sum of your influences. The German writer Goethe said, “We are shaped and fashioned by what we love.”
— Austin Kleon

Awaken

“The beginning of freedom is the realization that you are not “the thinker.” The moment you start watching the thinker, a higher level of consciousness becomes activated. You then begin to realize that there is a vast realm of intelligence beyond thought, that thought is only a tiny aspect of that intelligence. You also realize that all the things that truly matter – beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace – arise from beyond the mind. You begin to awaken.”
— Eckhart Tolle 

Creative Observation

The Lyf & the Craft

“The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.”
— Geoffrey Chaucer

Comfortable Little Standards

“If critics say your work stinks it’s because they want it to stink and they can make it stink by scaring you into conformity with their comfortable little standards. Standards so low that they can no longer be considered “dangerous” but set in place in their compartmental understandings.”
— Jack Kerouac