Creativity is not a talent or ability. It is the fruit of a person’s decision to matter.
Eric Maisel Quotes (Author of The Van Gogh Blues). (2020). Retrieved 14 January 2020, from https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/22561.Eric_Maisel
You must be able to create in the middle of things, or else you will not create. You must learn to take whatever practical and psychological actions are necessary to combat the anticreating forces that surround you and live within you.
Eric Maisel Quotes (Author of The Van Gogh Blues). (2020). Retrieved 14 January 2020, from https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/22561.Eric_Maisel
Picture a litter of kittens. One is more curious than the next. One is more aggressive than the next. One is a leader, and another is a follower. The first is not potentially curious; she is already curious. The second is not potentially aggressive; he is already aggressive. The third and the fourth are not potentially leaders and followers; they are already that. In exactly the same way a human infant is not potentially smart; he is already smart.
Eric Maisel Quotes (Author of The Van Gogh Blues). (2020). Retrieved 14 January 2020, from https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/22561.Eric_Maisel
Smartness is a smart person’s defining characteristic. Everything she thinks about the world—how she forms her identity, how she construes her needs, how she talks to herself about her life purposes and goals—is a function of how her particular brain operates. She is her smartness in a way that she is not her height, her gender, her moods, or her experiences. Her particular mind with its particular intelligence is the lens through which she looks at life, and it is also the engine that drives her days and her nights. It is her idiosyncratic brain, mind, and intelligence that determine how she will live—and why.
Eric Maisel Quotes (Author of The Van Gogh Blues). (2020). Retrieved 14 January 2020, from https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/22561.Eric_Maisel
The result may be important but it’s not the actual measure. The measure is the feeling you have made contact with something.
Eric Maisel Quotes (Author of The Van Gogh Blues). (2020). Retrieved 14 January 2020, from https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/22561.Eric_Maisel
A key to a long, productive writing life is finding ways to support that life, emotionally and existentially.
Eric Maisel Quotes (Author of The Van Gogh Blues). (2020). Retrieved 14 January 2020, from https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/22561.Eric_Maisel
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.
