The quotes for this book need curating
We’d love for you to do it. If you’re not yet registered as a curator, you’ll first need to do so.
The Artist’s Way (Julia Cameron)
- Art is born in attention.
- Creating does move us on.
- Leap, and the net will appear.
- Serious art is born from serious play.
- Art is an art of the soul, not the intellect.
- Artists and intellectuals are not the same animal.
- Pray to catch the bus, then run as fast as you can.
- Creativity – like human life itself – begins in darkness
- Creativity is an experience – to my eye, a spiritual experience.
- Creativity is not and never has been sensible. Why should it be?
- Anger is meant to be acted upon. It is not meant to be acted out.
- Creativity occurs in the moment, and in the moment we are timeless.
- Progress, not perfection, is what we should be asking of ourselves.
- Creativity requires faith. Faith requires that we relinquish control.
- Do what intrigues you, explore what interests you; think mystery not mastery.
- All too often, it is audacity and not talent that moves an artist to center stage.
- As you expect God to be more generous, God will be able to be more generous to you.
- Over any extended period of time, being an artist requires enthusiasm more than discipline.
- Food, work, and sex are all good in themselves. It is the abuse of them that makes them creativity issues.
- Difficult as it is to remember, it is our work that creates the market, not the market that creates our work.
- By being willing to be a bad artist, you have a chance to be an artist, and perhaps, over time, a very good one.
- Making art begins with making hay while the sun shines. It begins with getting into the now and enjoying your day.
- But do you know how old I will be by the time I learn to really play the piano / act / paint / write a decent play?”
- Listening to the siren song of more, we are deaf to the still small voice waiting in our soul to whisper, Youre enough.
- One of the chief barriers to accepting Gods generosity is our limited notion of what we are in fact able to accomplish.
- Growth is an erratic forward movement; two steps forward, one step back. Remember that and be very gentle with yourself.
- It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that they are difficult. SENECA
- Survival lies in sanity, and sanity lies in paying attention…the capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention.
- In order to work freely on a project, an artist must be at least functionally free of resentment (anger) and resistance (fear).
- Life is what we make of it. Whether we conceive of an inner god force or another outer God, doesnt matter. Relying on that force does.
- All too often it is audacity and not talent that moves an artist to center stage. As you move toward a dream, the dream moves toward you.
- For many of us, raised to believe that money is the real source of security, a dependence on God feels foolhardy, suicidal, even laughable.
- Once you accept that it is natural to create, you can begin to accept a second idea – that the creator will hand you whatever you need for the project.
- By seeking the creator within and embracing our own gift of creativity, we learn to be spiritual in this world, to trust that the universe is good and so are we and so is all of creation.
- Stumbles are normal. But do you know how old I’ll be by the time I learn to really play the piano/act/paint/write a decent play? Yes…the same age you will be if you don’t. So let’s start.
- Making a piece of art may feel a lot like telling a family secret. Secret telling, by its very nature, involves shame and fear. It asks the question, “What will they think of me once they know this?
- No matter what your age or your life path, whether making art is your career or your hobby or your dream, it is not too late or too egotistical or too selfish or too silly to work on your creativity.
- Our tears prepare the ground for our future growth. Without this creative moistening, we may remain barren. We must allow the bolt of pain to strike us. Remember, this is useful pain; lightning illuminates.
- Boredom is just Whats the use? in disguise. And Whats the use? is fear, and fear means you are secretly in despair. So put your fears on the page. Put anything on the page. Put three pages of it on the page.
- People frequently believe the creative life is grounded in fantasy. The more difficult truth is that creativity is grounded in reality, in particular, the focused, the well-observed or specifically imagined.
- Creativity is GOD ENERGY flowing through us, shaped by us, like light flowing through a crystal prism. When we are clear about who we are and what we are doing, the energy flows freely and we experience no strain.
- In times of pain, when the future is too terrifying to contemplate and the past too painful to remember, I have learned to pay attention to right now. The precise moment I was in was always the only safe place for me.
- It is my experience that this is the case. I have learned, as a rule of thumb, never to ask whether you can do something. Say, instead, that you are doing it. Then fasten your seat belt. The most remarkable things follow.
- God has lots of money. God has lots of movie ideas, novel ideas, poems, songs, paintings, acting jobs. God has a supply of loves, friends, houses that are available to us. By listening to the creator within, we are led to our right path.
- Judging your early artistic efforts is artist abuse. This happens in any number of ways: beginning work is measured against masterworks of other artists; beginning work is exposed to premature criticism, shown to overly critical friends.
- In order to thrive as artists – and, one could argue, as people – we need to be available to the universal flow. When we put a stopper on our capacity for joy by anorectically declining the small gifts of life, we turn aside the larger gifts as well.
- In filling the well, think magic. Think delight. Think fun. Do not think duty. Do not do what you should do—spiritual sit-ups like reading a dull but recommended critical text. Do what intrigues you, explore what interests you; think mystery, not mastery.
- Often people attempt to live their lives backwards: they try to have more things, or more money, in order to do more of what they want so that they will be happier. The way it actually works is the reverse. You must first be who you really are, then, do what you need to do, in order to have what you want.
- As artists, we cannot afford to think about who is getting ahead of us, and how they dont deserve it. The desire to be better than can choke off the simple desire to be. As artists, we cannot afford this thinking. It leads us away from our own voices and choices and into a defensive game that centers outside of ourselves and our sphere of influence.
- Most of us are not raised to actively encounter our destiny. We may not know that we have one. As children, we are seldom told we have a place in life that is uniquely ours alone. Instead, we are encouraged to believe that our life should somehow fulfill the expectations of others, that we will (or should) find our satisfactions as they have found theirs.
- Blocked creatives like to think they are looking at changing their whole life in one fell swoop. This form of grandiosity is very often its own undoing. By setting the jumps too high and making the price tag too great, the recovering artist sets defeat in motion. . . Creative people are dramatic, and we use negative drama to scare ourselves out of our creativity with this notion of wholesale and often destructive change. Fantasizing about pursuing our art full-time, we fail to pursue it part-time—or at all.
- Rather than being taugh to ask ourselves who we are, we are schooled to ask others. We are, in effect, trained to listen to others’ versions of ourselves. We are brought up in our life as told to us by someone else! When we survey our lives, seeking to fulfill our creativity, we often see we had a dream that went glimmering because we believed, and those around us believed, that the dream was beyond our reach. Many of us would have been, or at least might have been, done, tried something, if…If we had known who we really were.
- Most of us are not raised to actively encounter our destiny. We may not know that we have one. As children, we are seldom told we have a place in life that is uniquely ours alone. Instead, we are encouraged to believe that our life should somehow fulfill the expectations of others, that we will (or should) find our satisfactions as they have found theirs. Rather than being taugh to ask ourselves who we are, we are schooled to ask others. We are, in effect, trained to listen to others’ versions of ourselves. We are brought up in our life as told to us by someone else! When we survey our lives, seeking to fulfill our creativity, we often see we had a dream that went glimmering because we believed, and those around us believed, that the dream was beyond our reach. Many of us would have been, or at least might have been, done, tried something, if… If we had known who we really were.
