Eric Maisel Quotes
The strange, unbeautiful face beautiful in its ugliness; the perfect, beautiful face ugly in its perfection.
It is the job of each artist to believe in the possibility of meaningful, substantial, and sustainable change.
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.
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.
To create you must quiet your mind. You need a quiet mind so that ideas will have a chance of connecting.
By 'expecting nothing' you are not 'giving up.' Far from it! You are making a decision to focus on what needs to be done rather than on outcomes.
Even though we require flexibility to negotiate our changing circumstances, we are rather built to anxiously turn away from alternatives.
An artist who is too self-centered is liable to exhibit faults he abhors: carelessness, callousness, and even downright cruelty.
Artists know failure. It is not tragic that they know failure; it is only tragic if they know failure and little else.
The artist can't paint, sing, or dance without emotion: if he does, he is a machine masquerading as a person.
A creative block is a fear about the future, a guess about the dangers dwelling in the dark computer and the locked studio.
Because she favours solitude and indwelling, an artist can live a significantly more claustrophobic life that she had ever intended.
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.
Art and business may be strange bedfellows, but an artist must make room in her bed for both.
You can sweat by not practicing or you can pick up your clarinet. There's good sweat and there's bad sweat.
Settle into mystery as you would settle into your most comfortable chair. Listen. Have visions. Lose yourself.
A key to a long, productive writing life is finding ways to support that life, emotionally and existentially.
The wise artist makes peace with the fact that he will understand less than he had anticipated.
Keenly aware of their limitations, artists often remain insecure even as their list of successes grows.
Go directly to work' means... when an idea strikes, you drop everything and when your work bell tolls, you answer it.
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.
An artist must struggle to accept the shape of this universe - and achieve some important successes.
Abstraction is itself an abstract word and has no single meaning ... Every word in our language is abstract, because it represents something else.
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.
I am one powerful self made up of so many selves that sometimes I throw myself a get-acquainted party.
Isn't today a day to devote to craft? Isn't tomorrow? Isn't every day, routinely, until the end of time?
Art is manipulation, the management of material, the directing of fate... Who does that directing?
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.
Many people are embarrassed to create in public. It feels unseemly to them, like kissing in plain view... Make a spectacle of yourself.
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.
We can carve time out of thin air, or we can fill up even infinite stretches of time with nothingness. These are our choices.
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.
The song you write may be beautiful, the research you conceive may be beautiful, but you are the real beauty in life.
The result may be important but it’s not the actual measure. The measure is the feeling you have made contact with something.
A writer sets up his own amazing experiment: his work of fiction.
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.
Even your sweetest character has claws, no matter how well they may be retracted and hidden (hidden even from herself).
Typically, we start out with enthusiasm and then grow unsure--sometimes about everything.