Eric Maisel Quotes

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.

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.

The wise artist makes peace with the fact that he will understand less than he had anticipated.

Artists know failure. It is not tragic that they know failure; it is only tragic if they know failure and little else ...

An essential aspect of self-support is to remind yourself that success is not measurable, but a matter of feeling.

All space is space in which to create.

The primary challenge that smart people must deal with is making sense of meaning. Natural psychology suggests that the best answer to this problem is donning the mantle of meaning-maker and engaging in value-based meaning-making. No smart person is immune to this problem. In fact, it is the most significant emotional issue for our smartest 15 percent.

It goes against an artist's grain to retire. But whether he retires or not, he will age ... What work will get done in the remaining time? ... Can he find a little peace in this twilight? Or must he still rush on, restlessly and hungrily, to the very end?

Abstraction is itself an abstract word and has no single meaning ... Every word in our language is abstract, because it represents something else.

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.

If you wait for a better time to create, better than this very moment, if you wait until you feel settled, divinely inspired, perfectly centered, unburdened of your usual worries, or free of your own skin, forget about it. You will still be waiting tomorrow and the next day, wondering why you never managed to begin, wondering

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.

The song you write may be beautiful, the research you conceive may be beautiful, but you are the real beauty in life.

Almost nothing beautiful or brilliant happens unless a person has thought about it a lot.

Creativity is part sweat - not just beads of it, but sometimes buckets.

Revealing secrets can bring us pain or get us into trouble, but worse pain and worse trouble await us if we keep silent ... Revealing secrets can bring us pain or get us into trouble, but worse pain and worse trouble await us if we keep silent... we become habitually untruthful. The door to our creativity closes. gr we become habitually untruthful. The door to our creativity closes.

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.

Both the biological and psychological approaches are suspect since both posit an unreal world, completely at odds with human experience, in which people do not get depressed for good reasons having to do with their experience in life and their uneasiness about the facts of existence. Rather, people only get depressed because something in them is flawed or broken. Depression of any magnitude, these approaches claim, is always an illness and never a reaction to being dropped, willy-nilly, into a world not of their making, which they are forced to make mean something.

Affirmations are not bound up in rules. An affirmation can be long or short, poetic or plain. If you love a phrase and find that it helps you, that is a valid affirmation.

An artist must struggle to accept the shape of this universe - and achieve some important successes ...

Ambition is vital, but dangerous: it is a keen motive and a driving force, but over what edge can it drive the artist?

The result may be important but it's not the actual measure. The measure is the feeling you have made contact with something.

We can carve time out of thin air, or we can fill up even infinite stretches of time with nothingness. These are our choices.

Make creativity your religion ... because creating is soulful work.

Settle into mystery as you would settle into your most comfortable chair. Listen. Have visions. Lose yourself.

No muse shoots darts of insight into the unsuspecting artist.

The artist's personality, built upon strong desires and compassionate vision, is by its nature prone to depression.

The artist must possess at least as much conviction as does his enemy, the dogmatic, mealy-mouthed, anti-art bigot.

Creativity requires introspection, self-examination, and a willingness to take risks. Because of this, artists are perhaps more susceptible to self-doubt and despair than those who do not court the creative muses.

An artist ... must actively caress wonder: for fascination, like the desire to play, can be eradicated by the rigors of living.

It is in an artist's real interest to congratulate herself more often: not out of narcissism, but in her role as her own dear friend and advocate.

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.

Deconstruction is great for the intellect, but it hurts the heart terribly.

Because of our fear that we are merely excited matter and the consequent grudge that we hold against the universe, we feel lost and alienated, like a refugee far from home in a universe that cares nothing for us.

The strange, unbeautiful face beautiful in its ugliness; the perfect, beautiful face ugly in its perfection.

Creativity is the gift that keeps on giving.

Hurray for criticism, if it means that an artist's voice is heard. Let the wise artist invite criticism and survive it when it comes.

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.

A long, deep breath is the equivalent of a full stop and the key to centering.

The artist can't paint, sing, or dance without emotion: if he does, he is a machine masquerading as a person.

Write, even if you have a twinge, a doubt, a fear, a block, a noisy neighbor, a sick cat, thirteen unpublished stories, and a painful boil.

One visit with a child can supply us with enough creativity dust to last for a lifetime ... Visit with children like you're the child you ought to be more often.

Life is too short not to create, not to love, and not to lend a helping hand to our brothers and sisters.

Except under dire circumstances or as a day job to support creative endeavors, a smart person is not so likely to want to wait tables, file forms, work on an assembly line, or sell shoes. It isn't that he disparages these lines of work as beneath his dignity; rather, it is that he can see clearly how his days would be experienced as meaningless if he had to spend his time not thinking.

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.

The artist must reckon with his own character flaws, which do not disappear just because he has been called to be an artist.

The artist dreams of works of real breadth; but, limited by his personality and the nature of his medium, limited by inner disturbances and loss of purpose, he often works more narrowly than he'd intended.

Art and business may be strange bedfellows, but an artist must make room in her bed for both.

An artist's fine goal is to manifest a well-nigh heroic self-discipline, carefully attending to all that concerns him.

A key to a long, productive writing life is finding ways to support that life, emotionally and existentially.

The writer loves the fog as it pours in; he loves the sun when the fog pours out. The rest of California is Beach Boys country, but San Francisco has that moody thing going on, those blues notes wrapped in moisture, an atmosphere that tempers California dreaming and makes life more real. The fog brings reality, but it is still a California reality, one spent outdoors the whole year round.

Artists are often poignantly careless about making and keeping friends.

While it may feel natural to devote yourself to your creative work and succumb to feelings of separation and alienation, it nevertheless isn't a terrific idea in terms of your overall happiness and health.

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.

Many people are embarrassed to create in public. It feels unseemly to them, like kissing in plain view ... Make a spectacle of yourself.

When a thing is not done, continuing to work is the strength; but when it is done, the strength lies in stopping.

An ability to choose is a necessity for the artist.

An inability to choose is a hallmark of anxiety ... The too-anxious artist, afraid to choose, will halt dead in the water.

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.

Artists disbelieve and dispute society's most cherished notions.

Live intensely and dangerously. The world may not depend on your efforts, but you do.

You can sweat by not practicing or you can pick up your clarinet. There's good sweat and there's bad sweat.

We are the sort of creature who not only needs to put up firewood and food for the winter but who must also predict the distant future, make decisions about who or what created the universe and what sort of principles and path we should follow, deal with our fellow difficult and dangerous creatures, and in other ways make sense of things that would overtax any creature.

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.

The artist ... may suppose that ideas are his chief currency; but unless he is also attuned to feelings, in life and in art, he will not move his fellow human beings.

To create you must quiet your mind. You need a quiet mind so that ideas will have a chance of connecting.

If there is a soul, then it is a mistake to think that it is given to us completely created. It is created right here for a lifetime. Life is nothing but a long, painful process of creation.

Isn't today a day to devote to craft? Isn't tomorrow? Isn't every day, routinely, until the end of time?

An alive piece of art may be more alive than much of its audience, and with this odd truth artists must make peace.

Because she favours solitude and indwelling, an artist can live a significantly more claustrophobic life that she had ever intended.

Go directly to work' means ... when an idea strikes, you drop everything and when your work bell tolls, you answer it.

Creativity is the marriage humanity makes with eternity.

Artists have wild desires and a terrible hunger to achieve ... Without it they haven't the juice for striving or loving. But desire also can make them greedy and turn dreams into unrealizable obsessions.

A composition is an arrangement, built out of parts, that aims at seamlessness.

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.

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.

While some part of the artwork may fail, the whole may have its own unique importance.

Even though we require flexibility to negotiate our changing circumstances, we are rather built to anxiously turn away from alternatives.

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.

The middle way cannot be achieved by dividing two extremes in half.

As the artist matures she is continuously shaken by what she
manages to discover: by the earth shifting beneath her feet once again,
by her own amazed, ringing laughter.

That hundreds of millions of people believe that a man named Noah built an ark and put all of the world's species onto it two-by-two, that those species included dinosaurs - even though dinosaurs and man are separated by millions of years - that these people want this taught as science, that they want to get onto every school board and into every legislature to ensure that their view prevails, and that the mainstream media of a modern society
continues to take this seriously, may only mildly annoy one smart person, perhaps one who grew up in religion and is tempted to give religion a pass. But it will seriously outrage - and almost derange - another smart person
who is convinced that these views always come with an authoritarian edge and a coercive public agenda. It will likewise strike a smart person as a ludicrous claim that the collectivist farms in her country are working beautifully when there is no food to be found on the shelves of any grocery store anywhere or to claim that a
certain corporation is a mighty source for good and innovation when it is paying its employees peanuts and freely polluting. Misrepresentations of this sort affect our brain and our nervous system. They are an assault on
our senses as well as our sense of right and wrong, and they bring pain and distress.

A creative block is a fear about the future, a guess about the dangers dwelling in the dark computer and the locked studio.

Affirmations need to be used if they are to become incorporated into the fabric of your being.

There are an infinite number of rewards you could bestow on yourself for working at your creative projects, and you deserve every one of them.