Eric Maisel Quotes
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The three elements of creativity are thus: loving, knowing, and doing - or heart, mind, and hands - or, as Zen Buddhist teaching has it; great faith, great question, and great courage.
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You honor your writing space by recovering, if you are an addict. You honor your writing space by becoming an anxiety expert, a real pro at mindfulness and personal calming. You honor your writing space by affirming that you matter, that your writing life matters, and that your current writing project matters. You honor your writing space by entering it with this mantra: “I am ready to work.” You enter, grow quiet, and vanish into your writing.
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The artist at her best - wild, passionate, rebellious, and human - is often too large and truthful a creature for society's taste. The artist at her most outlandish - profane, eccentric, even a little mad - is at least as disquieting a figure.
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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.
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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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If, because of anxiety and self-doubt, you procrastinate and only think about working, you'll feel more exhausted than if you'd created for hours.
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The more sophisticated we become - as we pierce reality and see the void beyond - the more our sense of wonder is destroyed, along with our reasons for being.
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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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The artist, busy and unsettled, can find a moment's peace - and even whole-being rejuvenation - by quietly attuning to a red sky, a gray sky, a black sky, a blue sky.
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Remind yourself of the value of detaching from work that's out of your hands and committing to new work that wants to be born.
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The artist is a god, but he is also an idiot. That is the human way.
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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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Creativity is the marriage humanity makes with eternity.
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Love is the spirit that motivates the artist's journey.
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Talent is so loaded a word, so full to the brim with meanings, that an artist might be wise to forget about it altogether and just keep on working.
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You can't plan in advance for everything - every mood swing, every mistake you might make in execution, every shift in your circumstances. But you can keep updating your plan.
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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.
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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.
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Go directly to work' means... when an idea strikes, you drop everything and when your work bell tolls, you answer it.
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A key to a long, productive writing life is finding ways to support that life, emotionally and existentially.
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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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The middle way cannot be achieved by dividing two extremes in half.
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Chaos is everywhere - and artists, to fashion art and live truthfully, have no choice but to invite this unwanted guest right into the studio.
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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.