Eric Maisel Quotes
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Because she favours solitude and indwelling, an artist can live a significantly more claustrophobic life that she had ever intended.
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We can carve time out of thin air, or we can fill up even infinite stretches of time with nothingness. These are our choices.
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You can sweat by not practicing or you can pick up your clarinet. There's good sweat and there's bad sweat.
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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.
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The artist must possess at least as much conviction as does his enemy, the dogmatic, mealy-mouthed, anti-art bigot.
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A long, deep breath is the equivalent of a full stop and the key to centering.
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Boredom is the thing that regularly arrives between excitements and episodes of meaning: it is as natural as the tides, and in it an artist can drown.
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The artist must reckon with his own character flaws, which do not disappear just because he has been called to be an artist.
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The wise artist makes peace with the fact that he will understand less than he had anticipated.
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The artist who pictures sounds as colours, who feels the difference in microns between one sea green and another... is not attending to what the world considers important.
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If we had the consciousness of a cat or a dog, we would have it in us to become perfect Zen masters. We could gnaw on a bone, take a nap, play with a spider until we killed it, get our litter just right, and be innocently and serenely present. Meaning would mean nothing to us, nor would we need it to mean anything. We would be free, and we would be spared. But, we are human beings, and we posses that odd duck – human consciousness.
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An inability to choose is a hallmark of anxiety... The too-anxious artist, afraid to choose, will halt dead in the water.
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An artist who is too self-centered is liable to exhibit faults he abhors: carelessness, callousness, and even downright cruelty.
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The artist is a god, but he is also an idiot. That is the human way.
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Ambition is vital, but dangerous: it is a keen motive and a driving force, but over what edge can it drive the artist?
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An artist... must actively caress wonder: for fascination, like the desire to play, can be eradicated by the rigors of living.
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Dream, but expect nothing. Desire, but expect nothing. Hope, but expect nothing. Release your need to control and gain real control.
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No muse shoots darts of insight into the unsuspecting artist.
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The artist, who must venture into the studio and risk there, and then venture into the marketplace and risk again, is obliged to learn how her defences work, so that she can drop and raise her guard instantly.
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Settle into mystery as you would settle into your most comfortable chair. Listen. Have visions. Lose yourself.
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When you flow like water you bring all of your talents and resources to your creative work... Flow around every obstacle you encounter, including any you've erected yourself.
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A composition is an arrangement, built out of parts, that aims at seamlessness.
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To obsess too virulently is to walk alone in anxiety. But to obsess too little is to wall oneself off from one's own creativity.
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If you bring your sexual impulses to your creative work... you'll be working from deep in the genetic code, down where life wants to make new life and feel good in the process.