Quotes About Creativity

Nature places a simple constraint on those who leave the flock to go their own way: they get eaten. In society it's a bit more complicated. Nonetheless the admonition stands: avoiding the unknown has considerable survival value. Society, nature, and artmaking tend to produce guarded creatures.

In the end it all comes down to this: you have a choice (or more accurately a rolling tangle of choices) between giving your work your best shot and risking that it will not make you happy, or not giving it your best shot — and thereby guaranteeing that it will not make you happy. It becomes a choice between certainty and uncertainty. And curiously, uncertainty is the comforting choice.

Only those who commit to following their own artistic path can look back and see this issue in clear perspective: the real question about acceptance is not whether your work will be viewed as art, but whether it will be viewed as your art. APPROVAL

Your imagination is free to race a hundred works ahead, conceiving pieces you could and perhaps should and maybe one day will execute - but not today, not in the piece at hand. All you can work on today is directly in front of you. Your job is to develop an imagination of the possible.

We tell the stories we have to tell, stories of the things that draw us in-and why should any of us have more than a handful of those? The only work really worth doing-the only work you can do convincingly-is the work that focuses on the things you care about. To not focus on those issues is to deny the constants in your life.

For the artisan, craft is an end in itself. For you, the artist, craft is the vehicle for expressing your vision. Craft is the visible edge of art.

Fears about artmaking fall into two families: fears about yourself and fears about your reception by others.

But curiously, while artists always have a myriad of reasons to quit, they consistently wait for a handful of specific moments to quit. Artists quit when they convince themselves that their next effort is already doomed to fail. And artists quit when they lose the destination for their work — for the place their work belongs.

As far as most people are concerned, art may be acceptable as a profession, but certainly not as an occupation.

HENRY JAMES once proposed three questions you could productively put to an artist's work. The first two were disarmingly straightforward: What was the artist trying to achieve? Did he/she succeed? The third's a zinger: Was it worth doing?

Quitting is fundamentally different from stopping. The latter happens all the time. Quitting happens once. Quitting means not starting again — and art is all about starting again.

We do not long remember those artists who followed the rules more diligently than anyone else. We remember those who made the art from which the "rules" inevitably follow.

Control, apparently, is not the answer. People who need certainty in their lives are less likely to make art that is risky, subversive, complicated, iffy, suggestive or spontaneous. What's really needed is nothing more than a broad sense of what you are looking for, some strategy for how to find it, and an overriding willingess to embrace mistakes and surprises along the way.

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

Art is all about starting again

But while you may feel you're pretending that you're an artist, there's no way to pretend you're making art. Go ahead, try writing a story while pretending you're writing a story. Not possible.

Consider that if artist equals self, then when (inevitably) you make flawed art, you are a flawed person, and when (worse yet) you make no art, you are no person at all!

well, David Bayles, to be exact — who began piano studies with a Master. After a few months' practice, David lamented to his teacher, "But I can hear the music so much better in my head than I can get out of my fingers." To which the Master replied, "What makes you think that ever changes?

It's a simple premise: follow the leads that arise from contact with the work itself, and your technical, emotional and intellectual pathway becomes clear.

THOSE WHO WOULD MAKE ART might well begin by reflecting on the fate of those who preceded them: most who began, quit. It's a genuine tragedy. Worse yet, it's an unnecessary tragedy. After all, artists who continue and artists who quit share an immense field of common emotional

vision is always ahead of execution, knowledge of materials is your contact with reality, and uncertainty is a virtue.

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.

As Adam Gopnik remarked in The New Yorker, "Post-modernist art is, above all, post-audience art." In

It's easier to paint the angel's feet to another masterwork than to discover where the angels live within yourself.