Eric Maisel Quotes
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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 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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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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Even though we require flexibility to negotiate our changing circumstances, we are rather built to anxiously turn away from alternatives.
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It is the job of each artist to believe in the possibility of meaningful, substantial, and sustainable change.
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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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Creativity is the marriage humanity makes with eternity.
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To decide to reach for this blue and not that one, to switch styles or subject matter, to move, in the middle of a sentence, in one direction or another, to commit to this book when that one is also calling, are the sorts of choices that artists must make if they are to function.
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Whatever pain and suffering you've experienced in your life has been a blessing at least in this one regard: you now know some true things that you couldn't have learned any other way.
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A time comes, after years in the trenches, when the artist begins to fathom what his career has looked like so far and what it will look like if he continues as he's proceeded.
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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 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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Love is the spirit that motivates the artist's journey. The love may sublime, raw, obsessive, passionate, awful. or thrilling, but whatever its quality, it's a powerful motive in the artist's life.
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Creativity is the gift that keeps on giving.
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While artists fervently believe that the art marketplace was invented by the devil and remains in his henchman's hands, they have no choice but to carry long spoons and sup there.
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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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Art is manipulation, the management of material, the directing of fate... Who does that directing?
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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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Keenly aware of their limitations, artists often remain insecure even as their list of successes grows.
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Love is the spirit that motivates the artist's journey.
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An artist must struggle to accept the shape of this universe - and achieve some important successes.
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Creativity is part sweat - not just beads of it, but sometimes buckets.
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A wild person with a calm mind can make anything.
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When you consciously decide to breathe more slowly and deeply, you alert your body to the fact that you want it to behave differently. You are not just changing your breathing pattern, you are making a full-body announcement that you are entering into a different relationship with your mind and your body.