Quotes from Julia Cameron

To be an artist is to recognize the particular. To appreciate the peculiar. To allow a sense of play in your relationship to accepted standards. To ask the question "Why?" To be an artist is to risk admitting that much of what is money, property, and prestige strikes you as just a little silly.

Mystery is at the heart of creativity. That, and surprise.

Every time you don't follow your inner guidance, you feel a loss of energy, loss of power, a sense of spiritual deadness. SHAKTI GAWAIN Blocked

Each of us has an inner dream that we can unfold if we will just have the courage to admit what it is. And the faith to trust our own admission. The admitting is often very difficult.

When people do not want to see something, they get mad at the one who shows them.

Art is not about thinking something up. It is about the opposite—getting something down.

So much of an artist's career hinges on the sense that we are going somewhere, that we are not just trapped by the four walls of wherever we are. For creative sanity, I must believe that if I just do the next right thing, a path will unfold for me.

It is all too easy as an artist to allow the shape of our career to be dictated to us by others. We can so easily wait to be chosen. Such passivity invites despair. To remain healthy and vital, artists must stay proactive in their own behalf.

When we forget ourselves, when we let go of being good and just settle into just being a writer, we begin to have the experience of writing through us. We retire as the self-conscious author and become something else - the vehicle for self-expression. When we are just the vehicle, the storyteller and not the point of the story, we often write very well - we certainly write more easily.

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong. JOSEPH CHILTON PEARCE

when we move out of faith into the act ofJ creation, the universe is able to advance.

Once writing becomes an act of listening instead of an act of speech, a great deal of the ego goes out of it.

There is no such thing as being done with an artistic life. Frustrations and rewards exist at all levels on the path.

There is a treadmill quality to workaholism.

reaching toward God has made me more me and not less me. I was always afraid you would erase me. Instead, you are helping me to sketch me in.

as we are creative beings, our lives become our work of art.

Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent.

We must trust our process, look beyond "results.

always remember that your Censor's negative opinions are not the truth.

In order to achieve escape velocity, we must learn to keep our own counsel, to move silently among doubters, to voice our plans only among our allies, and to name our allies accurately.

There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening, that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost. MARTHA GRAHAM

Make your own recovery the first priority in your life. ROBIN NORWOOD

Creativity requires activity…And most of us hate to do something when we can obsess about something else instead.

'Faith and Will' sprang from my personal experience with passing through a dark spiritual time.