Quotes About Process

We cannot control the reception of our work. We must find our dignity in the doing.

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything. EUGÈNE DELACROIX

If we are interested in a writing life - as opposed to a writing career - then we are in it for the process and not the product - for the body of work and not for the quick hit of one well-realised piece.

The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.

Mulling on the page is an artless art form. It is fooling around. It is doodling. It is the way that ideas slowly take shape and form until they are ready to help us see the light. All too often, we try to push, pull, outline, and control our ideas instead of letting them grow organically. The creative process is a process of surrender, not control.

Writing is like breathing, it's possible to learn to do it well, but the point is to do it no matter what.

Enthusiasm is not an emotional state. It is a spiritual commitment, a loving surrender to our creative process, a loving recognition of all the creativity around us.

The first trick, the one I am practicing now, is to just start where you are. It's a luxury to be in the mood to write. It's a blessing but it's not a necessity. Writing is like breathing, it's possible to learn to do it well, but the point is to do it no matter what.

The trick to finding writing time, then, is to write from love and not with an eye to product. Don't try to write something perfect; just write. Don't try to write the whole megillah; just start the whole megillah.

We must wait for an idea to hatch.

Many artists begin a piece of work, get well along in it, and then find, as they near completion, that the work seems mysteriously drained of merit. To therapists, this surge of sudden disinterest ... is a routine coping device employed to ... ward off vulnerability.

Aiming for that, I learned to write setting judgment aside and save a polish for later. I called this new, freer writing "laying track." For the first time I gave myself emotional permission to do rough drafts and for those rough drafts to be, well, rough.

I learned to just show up to the page and write down what I heard. Writing became more like eavesdropping ... I didn't have to be in the mood ... Good, bad? None of my business. I wasn't doing it.

When we chop and pare vegetables, we do so with our thoughts as well. Remember, art is an artist-brain pursuit. This brain is reached through rhythm—through rhyme, not reason. Scraping a carrot, peeling an apple—these actions are quite literally food for thought.

An act of art needs time to mature. Judged early, it may be judged incorrectly.

The fruit of your withdrawal is what you need to understand as a positive process, both painful and exhilarating.

By being willing to be a bad artist, you have a chance to be an artist, and perhaps, over time, a very good one.

Ye gods! But you're not standing around holding it by the hand all this time. No. [...] [T]he dough takes care of itself. [...] While you cannot speed up the process, you can slow it down at any point by setting the dough in a cooler place [...] then continue where you left off, when you are ready to do so. In other words, you are the boss of that dough.

After we'd moved into 81, we had placed an order for a phone, and waited. First a man came by to see if we lived where we said we did. Then two men visited to make a study of our situation. Then another man appeared to find out if we really wanted a phone. The process was very French, and made me laugh, especially when I thought of how quickly such a transaction would have taken place in the States.

Literature is] the best way of telling the truth; it's a process of producing grand, beautiful, well-ordered lies that tell more truth than any assemblage of facts.

Cooking is the transformation of uncertainty (the recipe) into certainty (the dish) via fuss.

And does history repeat itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce?No, that's too grand, too considered a process. History just burps, and we taste again that raw-onion sandwich it swallowed centuries ago.

Truth to life, at the start, to be sure; yet once the process gets under way, truth to art is the greater allegiance

What he didn't—or couldn't—tell Joan was his terrifying discovery that love, by some ruthless, almost chemical process, could resolve itself into pity and anger. The anger wasn't at Susan, but at whatever it was that had obliterated her. But even so, anger. And anger in a man caused him disgust. So now, along with pity and anger, he had self-disgust to deal with as well. And this was part of his shame.