Quotes from Eric Maisel

Except under dire circumstances or as a day job to support creative endeavors, a smart person is not so likely to want to wait tables, file forms, work on an assembly line, or sell shoes. It isn't that he disparages these lines of work as beneath his dignity; rather, it is that he can see clearly how his days would be experienced as meaningless if he had to spend his time not thinking.

Creativity is not a talent or ability. It is the fruit of a person's decision to matter.

The song you write may be beautiful, the research you conceive may be beautiful, but you are the real beauty in life.

If there is a soul, then it is a mistake to think that it is given to us completely created. It is created right here for a lifetime. Life is nothing but a long, painful process of creation.

Write, even if you have a twinge, a doubt, a fear, a block, a noisy neighbor, a sick cat, thirteen unpublished stories, and a painful boil.

A key to a long, productive writing life is finding ways to support that life, emotionally and existentially.

Because of our fear that we are merely excited matter and the consequent grudge that we hold against the universe, we feel lost and alienated, like a refugee far from home in a universe that cares nothing for us.

An essential aspect of self-support is to remind yourself that success is not measurable, but a matter of feeling.

The result may be important but it's not the actual measure. The measure is the feeling you have made contact with something.

The primary challenge that smart people must deal with is making sense of meaning. Natural psychology suggests that the best answer to this problem is donning the mantle of meaning-maker and engaging in value-based meaning-making. No smart person is immune to this problem. In fact, it is the most significant emotional issue for our smartest 15 percent.

That as a smart person, whose brain races faster and harder than the next person's, you can't accomplish something like stopping your racing mind from worrying doesn't mean that you have a disorder or that you are a failure.

How can a person brim over with life energy and big plans one moment and feel suicidal the next? She can cycle exactly that way because of the god-bug syndrome.

A smart person is even more likely to suppose that his brain is equal to the challenges he faces, even such frankly impossible ones. What a setup to send your brain racing! And what will it do when, racing, it realizes the magnitude of its challenges and the extent to which they can't be solved just by thinking? It will worry.

We are the sort of creature who not only needs to put up firewood and food for the winter but who must also predict the distant future, make decisions about who or what created the universe and what sort of principles and path we should follow, deal with our fellow difficult and dangerous creatures, and in other ways make sense of things that would overtax any creature.

Picture a litter of kittens. One is more curious than the next. One is more aggressive than the next. One is a leader, and another is a follower. The first is not potentially curious; she is already curious. The second is not potentially aggressive; he is already aggressive. The third and the fourth are not potentially leaders and followers; they are already that. In exactly the same way a human infant is not potentially smart; he is already smart.

We see how boredom arises as a special, terrible problem for smart people. A smart person has a lively brain; that brain wants to work; it is primed to think; and if you give it nothing to do, it will do nothing for as long as it can bear to do nothing, but it will not be happy. It will be bored and, worse, begin to doubt the meaningfulness of life.

But at heart what we are talking about is not pathology but an intense conflictual knowing, a knowing that we are worthy smacking up against a knowing that we are just passing through: a knowing, that is, that we matter and that we do not matter. This is a true and not a pathological understanding. Every smart person possesses this understanding and can't help but feel distressed by this understanding.

Isn't today a day to devote to craft? Isn't tomorrow? Isn't every day, routinely, until the end of time?

We can carve time out of thin air, or we can fill up even infinite stretches of time with nothingness. These are our choices.

Affirmations are not bound up in rules. An affirmation can be long or short, poetic or plain. If you love a phrase and find that it helps you, that is a valid affirmation.

It is the artist's job to revere beauty without being enchanted by it, to aim for it but also to aim for truth and goodness - just in case they, and not beauty, are the real things of value.

An alive piece of art may be more alive than much of its audience, and with this odd truth artists must make peace.

Love is the spirit that motivates the artist's journey. The love may sublime, raw, obsessive, passionate, awful. or thrilling, but whatever its quality, it's a powerful motive in the artist's life.

If you create you will also wait, and while you're waiting you will want to be patient but not idle... responses from the world often take a long time.