Quotes from Stephen Nachmanovitch

The conception, composition, practice, and performance of a piece of music can blossom in a single moment.

As an improvising musician, I am not in the music business, I am not in the creativity business; I am in the surrender business.

The most potent muse of all is our own inner child.

Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of ones chosen form.

Play is the taproot from which original art springs. It is the raw stuff that the artist channels with all his learning and technique.

Every moment of life is unique-a kiss, a sunset, a dance, a joke. None will ever recur in quite the same way. Each happens only once in the history of the universe.

Structure ignites spontaneity. Limits yield intensity. When we play... by our self-chosen rules, we find that containment of strength amplifies strength.

The easiest way to do art is to dispense with success and failure altogether and just get on with it.

Creative living, or the life of a creator, seems like a leap into the unknown only because "normal life" is rigid and traumatized.

Mastery means responsibility, ability to respond in real time to the need of the moment. Intuitive or inspired living means not just passively hearing the voice, but acting on it.

If we operate with a belief in long sweeps of time, we build cathedrals; if we operate from fiscal quarter to fiscal quarter, we build ugly shopping malls.

The beauty of playing together is meeting in the One.

Writing, playing, composing, painting, reading, listening, looking-all require that we submit to being swept away by Eros, to a transformation of self of the kind that happens when we fall in love.

Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of one's chosen form.

The most potent muse of all is our own inner child

We can depend on the world being a perpetual surprise in perpetual motion.

Structure ignites spontaneity.

When we are totally faithful to our own individuality, we are actually following a very intricate design.

These interreflecting themes, the prerequisites of creation, are playfulness, love, concentration, practice, skill, using the power of limits, using the power of mistakes, risk, surrender, patience, courage, and trust. Creativity is a harmony of opposite tensions, as encapsulated in our opening idea of lila, or divine play.

But somehow, even when we are grown up and "adjusted," everything we do and are—our handwriting, the vibrato of our voice, the way we handle the bow or breathe into the instrument, our way of using language, the look in our eyes, the pattern of whorling fingerprints on our hand—all these things are symptomatic of our original nature.

For art to appear, we have to disappear

The noun of self becomes a verb. This flashpoint of creation in the present moment is where work and play merge.

If your mind is empty, it is open to everything. In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities; in the expert's mind there are few.

The harder we press on a violin string, the less we can feel it. The louder we play, the less we hear. . . . If I 'try' to play, I fail; if I race, I trip. The only road to strength is vulnerability.