Quotes from Eric Maisel

The artist's personality, built upon strong desires and compassionate vision, is by its nature prone to depression.

The wise artist makes peace with the fact that he will understand less than he had anticipated.

The growth that an artist seeks is a fine combination of mastering craft, garnering an audience, maintaining one's mental health, and working mightily from a ever-expanding base of experience.

Humanitarian convictions are the linchpins of our salvation, and these an artist must champion.

The artist is a god, but he is also an idiot. That is the human way.

You must be able to create in the middle of things, or else you will not create. You must learn to take whatever practical and psychological actions are necessary to combat the anticreating forces that surround you and live within you.

People who think a lot are more prone to mania than people who do not think a lot. That intelligent, creative, and thoughtful people are the ones more regularly afflicted by mania is beyond question.

You do not want to avoid creating just because creating or the prospect of creating is making you anxious.

It is not a race that can be won, a truth the brain-aware manic knows somewhere in his being and a truth that brings with it additional sadness even at the height of the racing, as the manic races but knows that he can't outrace existential distress.

A smart person ought to be smart enough to see clearly the limitations of his species.

we can take a kinder view of our species, as one not built well enough to handle what it has been tasked to handle, and also a tougher view, demanding of our species that it look at its shortfalls and do what it can to rise above them.

The only time I can get the thoughts to stop is when I get lost in something very creative and puzzle-like—and then I only get lost briefly. This way of life is exhausting

With success came a new, deeper doubt that any activity, even his cherished writing, could make life mean anything.

The ascending spiral, one of the central images of early American letters and employed especially by Emerson, is probably an unconscious piece of every American's personal mythology. Its shorthand name is progress.

People who are accomplished at anything have learned that "perfect" is the enemy of the good.

That is awareness; that is honesty; but you do not need to put yourself in the docket and indict yourself.

To put it aphoristically, no experience can feel meaningful to a nihilist—that is, to someone who has already decided that life is meaningless.

The artist's task is to become a successful eccentric, a strange but wise duck able to venture out of solitary confinement and mingle among society.

Whatever pain and suffering you've experienced in your life has been a blessing at least in this one regard: you now know some true things that you couldn't have learned any other way.

The artist... may suppose that ideas are his chief currency; but unless he is also attuned to feelings, in life and in art, he will not move his fellow human beings.

Because she favours solitude and indwelling, an artist can live a significantly more claustrophobic life that she had ever intended.

A time comes, after years in the trenches, when the artist begins to fathom what his career has looked like so far and what it will look like if he continues as he's proceeded.

Almost nothing beautiful or brilliant happens unless a person has thought about it a lot.

If you wait for a better time to create, better than this very moment, if you wait until you feel settled, divinely inspired, perfectly centered, unburdened of your usual worries, or free of your own skin, forget about it. You will still be waiting tomorrow and the next day, wondering why you never managed to begin, wondering