Quotes About Process

Our lifestyle is evolutionarily unstable--and is therefore in the process of eliminating itself in the perfectly ordinary way.

NEVER start sketching screens and then try to reverse-engineer a CM from them. This is a rookie mistake that can get you ejected from the Jedi academy.

I had eventually come to understand that friendship was a delicate, gradual process that mustn't be rushed or seized upon but allowed and encouraged to take its course over time. I pictured it as a butterfly, simultaneously beautiful and fragile, that once afloat belonged to the air and any attempt to grab at it would only destroy it.

There are no bad drawings. Drawings are experiences. The more you draw, the more experienced you'll get. In fact, you'll learn more from bad or unpredictable or weird experiences than from those that go exactly as you'd hoped and planned. So let it go. Release your ego's desire for perfection. Take risks. Stretch. Grow. Create as much as you can, whenever you can.

Un disegno dieci minuti di pan tostato è un zilione di volte meglio di un disegno a zero minuto di pan tostato.

Economic institutions shape economic incentives: the incentives to become educated, to save and invest, to innovate and adopt new technologies, and so on. It is the political process that determines what economic institutions people live under, and it is the political institutions that determine how this process works.

Given time, a cold will cure itself.

That's not how the system works.

What if Jesus had stopped at level one? What would have happened to Christianity after He ascended into heaven? Christianity would definitely not have spread throughout the world. It probably would have disappeared soon after that first generation of believers passed away. Why is Christianity on a steep decline in North America? Could it be that, in part, we have failed to take people all the way through the process. We have stopped too soon, failing to lead people past level one?

To get over artist's block, make shitty art.

Part of the discipline of the person-centred approach is not to make assumptions about the client's appropriate process, but to follow the process laid out by the client.

Knowledge is a dynamic cultural and historical process, not some timeless product waiting to be discovered "out there".

Free-flowing thoughts can be our greatest asset when we are in a creative mode, but when an unruly mental process limits our awareness, the mind becomes an oppressor.

They say no one should see how sausage or laws get made,

It's true that what can be done will be done. It's inevitable, a law of nature, and neither right nor wrong has much to do with it. The moral argument in the end is just a commentary. It doesn't control the process, or even influence it much.

When I stop working, I go out and start working again. Most people paint a picture, or whatever they do, and go home. For me, it has to be continuous.

You make good work by (among other things) making lots of work that isn't very good, and gradually weeding out the parts that aren't good, the parts that aren't yours. It's called feedback, and it's the most direct route to learning about your own vision. It's also called doing your work. After all, someone has to do your work, and you're the closest person around.

Artists don't get down to work until the pain of working is exceeded by the pain of not working.

What artist has not experienced the feverish euphoria of composing the perfect thumbnail sketch, first draft, negative or melody — only to run headlong into a stone wall trying to convert that tantalizing hint into the finished mural, novel, photograph, sonata. The artist's life is frustrating not because the passage is slow, but because he imagines it to be fast.

Between the initial idea and the finished piece lies a gulf we can see across, but never fully chart. The truly special moments in artmaking lie in those moments when concept is converted to reality — those moments when the gulf is being crossed.

The truth is that the piece of art which seems so profoundly right in its finished state may earlier have been only inches or seconds away from total collapse.

Writing is easy: all you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead. — Gene Fowler

What separates artists from ex-artists is that those who challenge their fears, continue; those who don't, quit. Each step in the artmaking process puts that issue to the test.

This book is about what it feels like to sit in your studio or classroom, at your wheel or keyboard, easel or camera, trying to do the work you need to do.