Artist Block Quotes

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There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. ... No artist is pleased. [There is] no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others
Martha Graham
There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique, and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium; and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, not how it compares with other expression. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.
Martha Graham
Up on the Brooklyn Bridge a man is standing in agony, waiting to jump, or waiting to write a poem, or waiting for the blood to leave his vessels because if he advances another foot the pain of his love will kill him.
Henry Miller (Black Spring)
Allowing yourself to make mistakes can ultimately go beyond a writer’s block.
Neeraj Agnihotri (Procrasdemon - The Artist's Guide to Liberation from Procrastination)
To get over artist's block, make shitty art.
Dave Horowitz
The way to get over creative block is to simply place some constraints on yourself. It seems contradictory, but when it comes to creative work, limitations mean freedom.
Austin Kleon (Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative)
Every time you don’t follow your inner guidance, you feel a loss of energy, loss of power, a sense of spiritual deadness. SHAKTI GAWAIN Blocked
Julia Cameron (The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity)
And it was about then, about that time, that I began to find life unsatisfactory as an explanation of itself and was forced to adopt the method of the artist of not explaining but putting the blocks together in some other way that seems more significant to him. Which is a rather fancy way of saying I started writing.
Tennessee Williams (Collected Stories)
One reason that people have artist’s block is that they do not respect the law of dormancy in nature. Trees don’t produce fruit all year long, constantly. They have a point where they go dormant. And when you are in a dormant period creatively, if you can arrange your life to do the technical tasks that don’t take creativity, you are essentially preparing for the spring when it will all blossom again.
Marshall Vandruff
We are at our most creative when we have something to push against. Creativity does not require perfect conditions. In fact, it thrives in imperfect ones. The block of marble from which Michelangelo carved his masterpiece, the David, had been discarded by other artists. They considered it defective, and they were right. But Michelangelo saw that defect as a challenge, not a disqualifier.
Éric Weiner (The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World's Most Creative Places from Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley)
A river of material flows through us. When we share our works and our ideas, they are replenished. If we block the flow by holding them all inside, the river cannot run and new ideas are slow to appear. In the abundant mindset, the river never runs dry. Ideas are always coming through. And an artist is free to release them with the faith that more will arrive. If we live in a mindset of scarcity, we hoard great ideas.
Rick Rubin (The Creative Act: A Way of Being)
The hours tick by as I lie in bed. Memories keep surfacing, tormenting me into unbelievable sadness. I can't bring myself to move. I can't fight the memories that keep filling my thoughts. I stay curled in the fetal position as each memory plays out. I can't stop them from coming. I can't make them go away. Nothing can distract me. I can't block the memories, so they continue to come.
Ashley Earley (Alone in Paris)
To be a writer and know the pain of artistic block is to know real frustration (though it's not quite as bad as constipation)!
John D. Rhodes
There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening, that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost. MARTHA GRAHAM
Julia Cameron (The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity)
I see you drinking at a fountain with tiny blue hands, no, your hands are not tiny they are small, and the fountain is in France where you wrote me that last letter and I answered and never heard from you again. you used to write insane poems about ANGELS AND GOD, all in upper case, and you knew famous artists and most of them were your lovers, and I wrote back, it’ all right, go ahead, enter their lives, I’ not jealous because we’ never met. we got close once in New Orleans, one half block, but never met, never touched. so you went with the famous and wrote about the famous, and, of course, what you found out is that the famous are worried about their fame –– not the beautiful young girl in bed with them, who gives them that, and then awakens in the morning to write upper case poems about ANGELS AND GOD. we know God is dead, they’ told us, but listening to you I wasn’ sure. maybe it was the upper case. you were one of the best female poets and I told the publishers, editors, “ her, print her, she’ mad but she’ magic. there’ no lie in her fire.” I loved you like a man loves a woman he never touches, only writes to, keeps little photographs of. I would have loved you more if I had sat in a small room rolling a cigarette and listened to you piss in the bathroom, but that didn’ happen. your letters got sadder. your lovers betrayed you. kid, I wrote back, all lovers betray. it didn’ help. you said you had a crying bench and it was by a bridge and the bridge was over a river and you sat on the crying bench every night and wept for the lovers who had hurt and forgotten you. I wrote back but never heard again. a friend wrote me of your suicide 3 or 4 months after it happened. if I had met you I would probably have been unfair to you or you to me. it was best like this.
Charles Bukowski
I'm not the only one, of course. The last time I saw one of my male classmates from art school, he consoled me about my artist's block by telling me how few of the girls we studied with were painting anymore. It one one thing to have a body; it is another thing to struggle under the menacing weight of its meaning.
Zeyn Joukhadar (The Thirty Names of Night)
It is always necessary to acknowledge creative injuries and grieve them. Otherwise, they become creative scar tissue and block your growth.
Julia Cameron (The Artist's Way Workbook)
Often, creativity is blocked by our falling in with other people’s plans for us. We want to set aside time for our creative work, but we feel we should do something else instead.
Julia Cameron (The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity)
The last thing we discover in composing a work is what to put down first.
Blaise Pascal (The Mind on Fire: A Faith for the Skeptical and Indifferent)
To artists, a block of clay says possibility. To travelers, a weekend promises adventure. To the nervous, that lack of structure screams anxiety.
Judson Brewer (Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind)
There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. … No artist is pleased. [There is] no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.
Martha Graham
In my younger days dodging the draft, I somehow wound up in the Marine Corps. There's a myth that Marine training turns baby-faced recruits into bloodthirsty killers. Trust me, the Marine Corps is not that efficient. What it does teach, however, is a lot more useful. The Marine Corps teaches you how to be miserable. This is invaluable for an artist. Marines love to be miserable. Marines derive a perverse satisfaction in having colder chow, crappier equipment, and higher casualty rates than any outfit of dogfaces, swab jockeys, or flyboys, all of whom they despise. Why? Because these candy-asses don't know how to be miserable. The artist committing himself to his calling has volunteered for hell, whether he knows it or not. He will be dining for the duration on a diet of isolation, rejection, self-doubt, despair, ridicule, contempt, and humiliation. The artist must be like that Marine. He has to know how to be miserable. He has to love being miserable. He has to take pride in being more miserable than any soldier or swabbie or jet jockey. Because this is war, baby. And war is hell." Page 68
Steven Pressfield (The War of Art: Winning the Inner Creative Battle)
This book is about how to hold open that place in the sun. It is a field guide to doing nothing as an act of political resistance to the attention economy, with all the stubbornness of a Chinese “nail house” blocking a major highway. I want this not only for artists and writers, but for any person who perceives life to be more than an instrument and therefore something that cannot be optimized. A simple refusal motivates my argument: refusal to believe that the present time and place, and the people who are here with us, are somehow not enough. Platforms such as Facebook and Instagram act like dams that capitalize on our natural interest in others and an ageless need for community, hijacking and frustrating our most innate desires, and profiting from them. Solitude, observation, and simple conviviality should be recognized not only as ends in and of themselves, but inalienable rights belonging to anyone lucky enough to be alive. —
Jenny Odell (How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy)
Most of the time when we are blocked in an area of our life, it is because we feel safer that way. We may not be happy, but at least we know what we are—unhappy. Much fear of our own creativity is the fear of the unknown.
Julia Cameron (The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity)
I confessed that I had a burning desire to be excellent, but no faith that I could be. Martha said to me, very quietly: “There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. As for you, Agnes, you have so far used about one-third of your talent.” “But,” I said, “when I see my work I take for granted what other people value in it. I see only its ineptitude, inorganic flaws, and crudities. I am not pleased or satisfied.” “No artist is pleased.” “But then there is no satisfaction?” “No satisfaction whatever at any time,” she cried out passionately. “There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.
Agnes de Mille (Martha: The Life and Work of Martha Graham- A Biography)
As Schell had taught me, "a con starts when there is something you want and you are blocked from attaining it by certain obstacles. The good con artist elicits the assistance of those who mean to stand in the way of one's attainment by appealing to their vanity, pride, jealousy, ignorance, or fear. One must first throw into a pile the expected rules of engagement, morality, society, and thought, set them on fire, and then proceed. Think big, have confidence.
Jeffrey Ford (The Girl in the Glass)
Night has settled over Paris. The streets have cleared of the crowds, and the city has been lit up. I set my book down, deciding to go for a walk. The Eiffel Tower is only a few blocks away. Now that there aren't many people out, I can walk there without having to fight my way through mobs of gawking tourists.
Ashley Earley (Alone in Paris)
Staring at a blank piece of paper, I can't think of anything original. I feel utterly uninspired and unreceptive. It's the familiar malaise of 'artist's block' and in such circumstances there is only one thing to do: just start drawing. The artist Paul Klee refers to this simple act as 'taking a line for a walk', an apt description of my own basic practice: allowing the tip of a pencil to wander through the landscape of a sketchbook, motivated by a vague impulse but hoping to find something much more interesting along the way. Strokes, hooks, squiggles and loops can resolve into hills, faces, animals, machines -even abstract feelings- the meanings of which are often secondary to the simple act of making (something young children know intuitively). Images are not preconceived and then drawn, they are conceived as they are drawn. Indeed, drawing is its own form of thinking, in the same way birdsong is 'thought about' within a bird's throat.
Shaun Tan
There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium, and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.
Geneen Roth (This Messy Magnificent Life: A Field Guide)
There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and m akes us more alive than the others.
Martha Graham (Martha Graham)
Style is not how you write. It is how you do not write like anyone else. * * * How do you know if you're a writer? Write something everyday for two weeks, then stop, if you can. If you can't, you're a writer. And no one, no matter how hard they may try, will ever be able to stop you from following your writing dreams. * * * You can find your writer's voice by simply listening to that little Muse inside that says in a low, soft whisper, "Listen to this... * * * Enter the writing process with a childlike sense of wonder and discovery. Let it surprise you. * * * Poems for children help them celebrate the joy and wonder of their world. Humorous poems tickle the funny bone of their imaginations. * * * There are many fine poets writing for children today. The greatest reward for each of us is in knowing that our efforts might stir the minds and hearts of young readers with a vision and wonder of the world and themselves that may be new to them or reveal something already familiar in new and enlightening ways. * * * The path to inspiration starts Beyond the trails we’ve known; Each writer’s block is not a rock, But just a stepping stone. * * * When you write for children, don't write for children. Write from the child in you. * * * Poems look at the world from the inside out. * * * The act of writing brings with it a sense of discovery, of discovering on the page something you didn't know you knew until you wrote it. * * * The answer to the artist Comes quicker than a blink Though initial inspiration Is not what you might think. The Muse is full of magic, Though her vision’s sometimes dim; The artist does not choose the work, It is the work that chooses him. * * * Poem-Making 101. Poetry shows. Prose tells. Choose precise, concrete words. Remove prose from your poems. Use images that evoke the senses. Avoid the abstract, the verbose, the overstated. Trust the poem to take you where it wants to go. Follow it closely, recording its path with imagery. * * * What's a Poem? A whisper, a shout, thoughts turned inside out. A laugh, a sigh, an echo passing by. A rhythm, a rhyme, a moment caught in time. A moon, a star, a glimpse of who you are. * * * A poem is a little path That leads you through the trees. It takes you to the cliffs and shores, To anywhere you please. Follow it and trust your way With mind and heart as one, And when the journey’s over, You’ll find you’ve just begun. * * * A poem is a spider web Spun with words of wonder, Woven lace held in place By whispers made of thunder. * * * A poem is a busy bee Buzzing in your head. His hive is full of hidden thoughts Waiting to be said. His honey comes from your ideas That he makes into rhyme. He flies around looking for What goes on in your mind. When it is time to let him out To make some poetry, He gathers up your secret thoughts And then he sets them free.
Charles Ghigna
How do you feel when you read stuff written by dead authors? A visit by a ghost?
Bangambiki Habyarimana (Pearls Of Eternity)
Remember that it is far harder and more painful to be a blocked artist than it is to do the work.
Julia Cameron (The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity)
It is when I find myself playing more than trying that I find my way out of a block
Danielle Krysa (Creative Block: Get Unstuck Discover New Ideas: Advice & Projects from 50 Successful Artists)
It is amazing to think of how little it takes to make a girl, of a certain age and artistic temperament, believe she is in love.
Francesca Lia Block
You do not want to avoid creating just because creating or the prospect of creating is making you anxious.
Eric Maisel (Unleashing the Artist Within: Breaking through Blocks and Restoring Creative Purpose)
He looked at them and saw their faces did not fit. The skin on the skulls crawled and twitched like half-solid paste. All the heads in his angle of vision seemed irregular lumps, like potatoes but without a potato’s repose: potatoes with crawling surfaces punctured by holes which opened and shut, holes blocked with coloured jelly or fringed with bone stumps, elastic holes through which air was sucked or squirted, holes secreting salt, wax, spittle and snot. He grasped a pencil in his trouser pocket, wishing it were a knife he could thrust through his cheek and use to carve his face down to the clean bone. But that was foolish. Nothing clean lay under the face. He thought of sectioned brains, palettes, eyeballs and ears seen in medical diagrams and butcher’s shops. He thought of elastic muscle, pulsing tubes, gland sacks full of lukewarm fluid, the layers of cellular and fibrous and granular tissues inside a head. What was felt as tastes, caresses, dreams and thoughts could be seen as a cleverly articulated mass of garbage.
Alasdair Gray (Lanark)
All writers are demonic dreamers. Writing is an act of sharing experiences and offering of an individualistic perspective of our private attitudes pertaining to whatever topics of thought intrigues the author. Writing is a twitchy art, which attempts to employ linguist building blocks handed-down from past generations. Writers’ word choices form a structure of conjoined sentences when overlaid with the lingua of modern culture. Writers attempt to emulate in concrete form the synesthesia of our personal pottage steeped in our most vivid feelings. Writing a personal essay calls for us to sort out a jungle of lucid observations and express in a tangible technique our unique interpretation of coherent observations interlaced with that effusive cascade of yearning, the universal spice of unfilled desire, which turmoil of existential angst swamps us.
Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
Who hasn’t grown up knowing the bitchy cheerleader, a dumb jock, the computer nerd, an overbearing mother, a distant father, a misunderstood old person, or an alienated artist, writer, musician, or dancer? If everybody knows these people, are they really clichés or merely categories? Maybe the various cities, towns, neighborhoods, and blocks are really replicating microcosms? The same strands woven together to create one large tapestry of life?
Karen Wojcik Berner (Until My Soul Gets It Right (The Bibliophiles #2))
What makes community building so complex is that it occurs in an infinite number of small steps, sometimes in quiet moments that we notice out of the corner of our eye. It calls for us to treat as important many things that we thought we incidental. An afterthought becomes the point; a comment made in passing defines who we are more than all that came before. If the artist is one who captures the nuance of experience, then this is whom each of us must become.
Peter Block (Community: The Structure of Belonging)
When people are blocked creatively, they avoid fun. Why? Because fun leads straight to creativity. Fun leads to healthy anarchy, to festive rebellion, to sensing our own strength and power. Feeling our own power is often frightening.
Mark Bryan (Artists Way at Work: Riding the Dragon)
In 1996, the artist Gunter Demnig started laying stolpersteine, or "stumbling blocks" -- cobblestone-sized, brass memorials -- in front of houses where victims of the Nazis used to live. Now in over 800 German towns and villages, they make the number of victims palpable: In some streets there are stolpersteine in front of every other house, sometimes with a single name, sometimes with the names of an entire family. On these streets it would have been glaringly obvious that some neighbors were missing: the Jewish family, the girl with Down syndrome, the homosexual, the communist.
Jennifer Teege (My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me: A Black Woman Discovers Her Family's Nazi Past)
We want to set aside time for our creative work, but we feel we should do something else instead. As blocked creatives, we focus not on our responsibilities to ourselves, but on our responsibilities to others. We tend to think such behavior makes us good people. It doesn’t. It makes us frustrated people.
Julia Cameron (The Artist's Way Every Day: A Year of Creative Living)
Martha Graham, speaking to dancers, could have been speaking to any artist, any writer: There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening which is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist.
Pat Schneider (Writing Alone and with Others)
In the first place, I think there's going to be more and more merging of art and science. Scientists are already studying the creative process, and I think the whole line between art and science will break down and that scientists, I hope, will become more creative and writers more scientific. And I see no reason why the artistic world can't absolutely merge with Madison Avenue. Pop art is a move in that direction. Why can't we have advertisements with beautiful words and beautiful images? Already some of the very beautiful color photography appears in whiskey ads, I notice. Science will also discover for us how association blocks actually form.
William S. Burroughs
Does anyone ask a painter -- even the painter himself -- why he paints? Now me, I painted... used to... whatever I saw that was beautiful. It had to be beautiful to me, through and through, before I would paint it. And I used to be a pretty simple fellow, and found many completely beautiful things to paint. But the older you get the fewer completely beautiful things you see. Every flower has a brown spot somewhere, and a hippogriff has evil laughter. So at some point in his development an artist has to paint, not what he sees (which is what I've always done) but the beauty in what he sees. Most painters, I think, cross this line early; I'm crossing it late. ("To Here and the Easel", 1954)
Theodore Sturgeon (Sturgeon is Alive and Well)
Self-doubt can be an ally. This is because it serves as an indicator of aspiration. It reflects love, love of something we dream of doing, and desire, desire to do it. If you find yourself asking yourself (and your friends), “Am I really a writer? Am I really an artist?” chances are you are. The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death.
Steven Pressfield (The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles)
In order to understand how engineers endeavor to insure against such structural, mechanical, and systems failures, and thereby also to understand how mistakes can be made and accidents with far-reaching consequences can occur, it is necessary to understand, at least partly, the nature of engineering design. It is the process of design, in which diverse parts of the 'given-world' of the scientist and the 'made-world' of the engineer are reformed and assembled into something the likes of which Nature had not dreamed, that divorces engineering from science and marries it to art. While the practice of engineering may involve as much technical experience as the poet brings to the blank page, the painter to the empty canvas, or the composer to the silent keyboard, the understanding and appreciation of the process and products of engineering are no less accessible than a poem, a painting, or a piece of music. Indeed, just as we all have experienced the rudiments of artistic creativity in the childhood masterpieces our parents were so proud of, so we have all experienced the essence of structual engineering in our learning to balance first our bodies and later our blocks in ever more ambitious positions. We have learned to endure the most boring of cocktail parties without the social accident of either our bodies or our glasses succumbing to the force of gravity, having long ago learned to crawl, sit up, and toddle among our tottering towers of blocks. If we could remember those early efforts of ours to raise ourselves up among the towers of legs of our parents and their friends, then we can begin to appreciate the task and the achievements of engineers, whether they be called builders in Babylon or scientists in Los Alamos. For all of their efforts are to one end: to make something stand that has not stood before, to reassemble Nature into something new, and above all to obviate failure in the effort.
Henry Petroski
...Pat wondered what inspiration an artist might find in the attempts of twenty-first-century architects to impose their phallic triumphs on the cityscape. Had any artist ever painted a contemporary glass block, for instance, or any other product of architectural brutalism that had laid its crude hands here and there upon the city?...If a building did not lend itself to being painted, then surely that must be because it was inherently ugly, whatever its claims to utility. And if it was ugly, then what was it doing in this delicately beautiful city?
Alexander McCall Smith (Bertie Plays the Blues (44 Scotland Street, #7))
Gibbon who worked nonstop and seemed free of the self-doubt and crises of confidence that dog us mere mortals, there is a William James or a Franz Kafka, great minds who wasted time, waited vainly for inspiration to strike, experienced torturous blocks and dry spells, were racked by doubt and insecurity. In reality, most of the people in this book are somewhere in the middle—committed to daily work but never entirely confident of their progress; always wary of the one off day that undoes the streak. All of them made the time to get their work done. But there is infinite variation in how they structured their lives to do so.
Mason Currey (Daily Rituals: How Artists Work)
and confused if someone does not appreciate their niceness. Others often sense this and avoid giving them feedback not only, effectively blocking the nice person’s emotional growth, but preventing risks from being taken. You never know with a nice person if the relationship would survive a conflict or angry confrontation. This greatly limits the depths of intimacy. And would you really trust a nice person to back you up if confrontation were needed? 3. With nice people you never know where you really stand. The nice person allows others to accidentally oppress him. The “nice” person might be resenting you just for talking to him, because really he is needing to pee. But instead of saying so he stands there nodding and smiling, with legs tightly crossed, pretending to listen. 4. Often people in relationship with nice people turn their irritation toward themselves, because they are puzzled as to how they could be so upset with someone so nice. In intimate relationships this leads to guilt, self-hate and depression. 5. Nice people frequently keep all their anger inside until they find a safe place to dump it. This might be by screaming at a child, blowing up a federal building, or hitting a helpless, dependent mate. (Timothy McVeigh, executed for the Oklahoma City bombing, was described by acquaintances as a very, very nice guy, one who would give you the shirt off his back.) Success in keeping the anger in will often manifest as psychosomatic illnesses, including arthritis, ulcers, back problems, and heart disease. Proper Peachy Parents In my work as a psychotherapist, I have found that those who had peachy keen “Nice Parents” or proper “Rigidly Religious Parents” (as opposed to spiritual parents), are often the most stuck in chronic, lowgrade depression. They have a difficult time accessing or expressing any negative feelings towards their parents. They sometimes say to me “After all my parents did for me, seldom saying a harsh word to me, I would feel terribly guilty complaining. Besides, it would break their hearts.” Psychologist Rollo May suggested that it is less crazy-making to a child to cope with overt withdrawal or harshness than to try to understand the facade of the always-nice parent. When everyone agrees that your parents are so nice and giving, and you still feel dissatisfied, then a child may conclude that there must be something wrong with his or her ability to receive love. -§ Emotionally starving children are easier to control, well fed children don’t need to be. -§ I remember a family of fundamentalists who came to my office to help little Matthew with his anger problem. The parents wanted me to teach little Matthew how to “express his anger nicely.” Now if that is not a formula making someone crazy I do not know what would be. Another woman told me that after her stinking drunk husband tore the house up after a Christmas party, breaking most of the dishes in the kitchen, she meekly told him, “Dear, I think you need a breath mint.” Many families I work with go through great anxiety around the holidays because they are going to be forced to be with each other and are scared of resuming their covert war. They are scared that they might not keep the nice garbage can lid on, and all the rotting resentments and hopeless hurts will be exposed. In the words to the following song, artist David Wilcox explains to his parents why he will not be coming home this Thanksgiving: Covert War by David Wilcox
Kelly Bryson (Don't Be Nice, Be Real)
With its wide, tree-lined boulevards and rich architectural heritage dating back over a thousand years, Paris had long been considered a jewel amongst Europe’s capital cities; a place that had inspired the dreams of romantics, artists and connoisseurs of every kind, from every country. But for Drake, crouched in the shadows of a dimly lit stairwell that smelled of stale urine and damp, it was an entirely different prospect. The rundown residential apartment block in which he found himself was, in contrast to the ornate architecture the city was known for, a product of cheap 1940s utilitarianism. Stark, bleak and inhabited by people who clearly wished they were living somewhere else, it certainly wasn’t the kind of place he’d visit by choice
Will Jordan (Deception Game (Ryan Drake #5))
an emigres artistic problem: the numerically equal blocks of a lifetime are unequal in weight, depending on whether they comprise young or adult years. The adult years may be richer and more important for life and for creative activity both, but the subconscious, memory, language, all the understructure of creativity, are formed very early; for a doctor, that won't make problems, but for a novelist or a composer, leaving the place to which his imagination, his obsessions, and thus his fundamental themes are bound could make for a kind of ripping apart. He must mobilize all his powers, all his artists wiles, to turn the disadvantages of that situation to benefits. [...] Only returning to the native land after a long absence can reveal the substantial strangeness of the world and of existence.
Milan Kundera (Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts)
Every Pirate Wants to Be an Admiral IT’S NOT AS though this is the first time we’ve had to rethink what copyright is, what it should do, and whom it should serve. The activities that copyright regulates—copying, transmission, display, performance—are technological activities, so when technology changes, it’s usually the case that copyright has to change, too. And it’s rarely pretty. When piano rolls were invented, the composers, whose income came from sheet music, were aghast. They couldn’t believe that player-piano companies had the audacity to record and sell performances of their work. They tried—unsuccessfully—to have such recordings classified as copyright violations. Then (thanks in part to the institution of a compulsory license) the piano-roll pirates and their compatriots in the wax-cylinder business got legit, and became the record industry. Then the radio came along, and broadcasters had the audacity to argue that they should be able to play records over the air. The record industry was furious, and tried (unsuccessfully) to block radio broadcasts without explicit permission from recording artists. Their argument was “When we used technology to appropriate and further commercialize the works of composers, that was progress. When these upstart broadcasters do it to our records, that’s piracy.” A few decades later, with the dust settled around radio transmission, along came cable TV, which appropriated broadcasts sent over the air and retransmitted them over cables. The broadcasters argued (unsuccessfully) that this was a form of piracy, and that the law should put an immediate halt to it. Their argument? The familiar one: “When we did it, it was progress. When they do it to us, that’s piracy.” Then came the VCR, which instigated a landmark lawsuit by the cable operators and the studios, a legal battle that was waged for eight years, finishing up in the 1984 Supreme Court “Betamax” ruling. You can look up the briefs if you’d like, but fundamentally, they went like this: “When we took the broadcasts without permission, that was progress. Now that someone’s recording our cable signals without permission, that’s piracy.” Sony won, and fifteen years later it was one of the first companies to get in line to sue Internet companies that were making it easier to copy music and videos online. I have a name for the principle at work here: “Every pirate wants to be an admiral.
Cory Doctorow (Information Doesn't Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age)
On the Craft of Writing:  The Story Grid: What Good Editors Know by Shawn Coyne The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White 2K to 10K: Writing Faster, Writing Better, and Writing More of What You Love by Rachel Aaron  On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King Take Off Your Pants! Outline Your Books for Faster, Better Writing by Libbie Hawker  You Are a Writer (So Start Acting Like One) by Jeff Goins Prosperity for Writers: A Writer's Guide to Creating Abundance by Honorée Corder  The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles by Steven Pressfield Business for Authors: How To Be An Author Entrepreneur by Joanna Penn  On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction by William Zinsser Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer by Roy Peter Clark On Mindset:  The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan The Art of Exceptional Living by Jim Rohn Vision to Reality: How Short Term Massive Action Equals Long Term Maximum Results by Honorée Corder The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change by Stephen R. Covey Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg Mckeown Mastery by Robert Greene The Success Principles: How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be by Jack Canfield and Janet Switzer The Game of Life and How to Play It by Florence Scovel Shinn The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy Taking Life Head On: How to Love the Life You Have While You Create the Life of Your Dreams by Hal Elrod Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill In
Hal Elrod (The Miracle Morning for Writers: How to Build a Writing Ritual That Increases Your Impact and Your Income, Before 8AM)
There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself and your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. . . . No artist is pleased. [There is no] satisfaction whatever at any time . . . There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.
Agnes de Mille
Now, you might think that because there are more poets than ever, there might be more opportunities for poets than ever. And you’d be correct. If your fondest wish is to become the next totally obscure minor poet on the block, well, you’re probably already successful at that. This literary landscape has proven itself infinitely capable of absorbing countless interchangeable artists, all doing roughly the same thing in relative anonymity: just happily plucking away until death at the grindstone, making no great cultural headway, bouncing poems off their friends and an audience of about 40 people. A totally fine little life for an artist, to be sure. No grand expectations from the world to sit up and listen. One can live out one’s days quite satisfied to create something enjoyed by a genial cult. But that’s not why any of us are here tonight. We’re here to conquer American Poetry and suck it dry of all glory and juice.
Jim Behrle
What motivates Olympic athletes to train for years for one event—in some cases, for just seconds of actual competition? It’s the same thing that kept my friend Pete nosing around old bookstores for years. It’s the same thing that makes a person venture out of a comfortable job to start a new business. We see it in the artist who spends day after day in a studio chipping away at a block of stone. Look closely and you’ll find it in the shopper who passes up the good deal in search of the best deal. It’s one of the things that makes us most human. We consciously pursue what we value. It’s not simply a matter of being driven by biology or genetics or environmental conditioning to satisfy instinctive cravings. Rather, we perceive something, prize it at a certain value, then pursue it according to that assigned value because we were created that way. This ability to perceive, prize, and pursue is part of our essential humanness, and it’s the essence of ambition.
Dave Harvey (Rescuing Ambition)
Quickly she shredded the cabbage on the chopping block and tossed it along with the onion and tomatoes in a blue Pyrex bowl. Then she slid the lamb chops, encrusted with fresh rosemary, into the oven. While the lamb baked, she brushed her hair in the washroom and pinned it back again. Then she zipped on a silk floral dress she'd purchased in Bristol and retrieved her grandmother's rhinestone necklace, one of the few family heirlooms her mother packed for her, to clasp around her neck. At the foot of the bed was the antique trunk she'd brought from her childhood home in Balham more than a decade ago. Opening the trunk, she removed her wedding album along with her treasured copy of 'The Secret Garden' and the tubes of watercolors her father had sent with her and her brother. Her father hoped she would spend time painting on the coast, but Maggie hadn't inherited his talent or passion for art. Sometimes she wondered if Edmund would have become an artist. Carefully she took out her newest treasures- pieces of crystal she and Walter hd received as wedding presents, protected by pages and pages of her husband's newspaper. She unwrapped the crystal and two silver candlesticks, then set them on the white-cloaked dining table. She arranged the candlesticks alongside a small silver bowl filled with mint jelly and a basket with sliced whole-meal bread from the bakery. After placing white, tapered candles into the candlesticks, she lit them and stepped back to admire her handiwork. Satisfied, she blew them out. Once she heard Walter at the door, she'd quickly relight the candles. When the timer chimed, she removed the lamb chops and turned off the oven, placing the pan on her stovetop and covering it with foil. She'd learned a lot about housekeeping in the past decade, and now she was determined to learn how to be the best wife to Walter. And a doting mother to their children. If only she could avoid the whispers from her aunt's friends.
Melanie Dobson (Shadows of Ladenbrooke Manor)
Catch Either/Or Thinking Anxious perfectionists will typically think “I need to perform flawlessly at all times,” with their underlying assumption being “or else it will result in disaster.” This is a common type of thinking trap termed either/or thinking. In this case, the either/or is this: Either there is flawless performance or complete and utter failure, and nothing in between. Not only can this style of thinking make you feel crushed when you don’t meet your own ideal standards, but it also often leads to perfectionism paralysis. Take, for example, an artist who sees his future career prospects as becoming either the next Picasso or a penniless flop; this person doesn’t see other possible outcomes in between. You can see how this would give the artist a creative block. For other folks, their hidden assumption may be slightly different: “Either I need to perform flawlessly at all times, or other people will reject me.” When I look back at my clinical psychology training, I realize I had this belief at that time. At a semiconscious level, I thought that the only way to prevent getting booted out of the program was to score at the top of the class for every test or assignment. Ultra-high standards often arise because a person is trying to hide imagined catastrophic flaws. In this scenario, people often think that if their flaws get revealed they’ll be shunned, and so the only way to conceal their defects is by always excelling. When people who have this belief do excel, their brain jumps to the conclusion that excelling was the only reason they managed to avoid catastrophe. This then perpetuates their belief that excelling is necessary for preventing future disasters. Researchers have used the term clinical perfectionism to describe the most problematic kind of perfectionism. When clinical perfectionists manage to meet their ultra-high standards, they often conclude that those standards must not have been high enough and revise them upward, meaning they can never feel any sense of peace. All this being said, I’m not suggesting you shoot for “acceptable” performance standards if you’re capable of excellence. Most of the anxious perfectionists I’ve worked with would hate that. It’s not in their nature to feel comfortable with mediocre performance.
Alice Boyes (The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points)
THE PARTY And at last the police are at the front door, summoned by a neighbor because of the noise, two large cops asking Peter, who had signed the rental agreement, to end the party. Our peace can’t be disturbed, one of the officers states. But when we receive a complaint we act on it. The police on the front stoop wear as their shoulder patch an artist’s palette, since the town likes to think of itself as an art colony, and indeed, Pacific Coast Highway two blocks inland, which serves as the main north-south street, is lined with commercial galleries featuring paintings of the surf by moonlight —like this night, but without anybody on the sand and with a bigger moon. And now Dennis, as at every party once the police arrive at the door, moves through the dancers, the drinkers, the talkers, to confront the uniforms and guns, to object, he says, to their attempt to stop people harmlessly enjoying themselves, and to argue it isn’t even 1 a.m. Then Stuart, as usual, pushes his way to the discussion happening at the door and in his drunken manner tries to justify to the cops Dennis’ attitude, believing he can explain things better to authority, which of course annoys Dennis, and soon those two are disputing with each other, tonight exasperating Peter, whose sole aim is to get the officers to leave before they are provoked enough to demand to enter to check ID or something, and maybe smell the pot and somebody ends up arrested with word getting back to the landlord and having the lease or whatever Peter had signed cancelled, and all staying here evicted. The Stones, or Janis, are on the stereo now, as the police stand firm like time, like death—You have to shut it down—as the dancing inside continues, the dancers forgetting for a moment a low mark on a quiz, or their draft status, or a paper due Monday, or how to end the war in Asia, or some of their poems rejected by a magazine, or the situation in Watts or of Chavez’s farmworkers, or that they wish they had asked Erin rather than Joan to dance. That dancing, that music, the party, even after the cops leave with their warning Don’t make us come back continues, the dancing has lasted for years, decades, across a new century, through the fear of nuclear obliteration, the great fires, fierce rain, Main Beach and Forest Avenue flooded, war after war, love after love, that dancing goes on, the dancing, the party, the night, the dancing
Tom Wayman
Sam was about to travel to Asia with her boyfriend and she was fretting about what her backers would think if she released some of her new songs while she was 'on vacation'. She was worried that posting pictures of herself sipping a Mai Tai was going to make her look like an asshole. What does it matter? I asked her, where you are whether you're drinking a coffee, a Mai Tai or a bottle of water? I mean, aren't they paying for your songs so that you can... live? Doesn't living include wandering and collecting emotions and drinking a Mai Tai, not just sitting in a room writing songs without ever leaving the house? I told Sam about another songwriter friend of mine, Kim Boekbinder, who runs her own direct support website through which her fans pay her monthly at levels from $5 to $1,000. She also has a running online wishlist of musical gear and costumes kindof like a wedding registry, to which her fans can contribute money anytime they want. Kim had told me a few days before that she doesn't mind charging her backers during what she calls her 'staring at the wall time'. She thinks this is essential before she can write a new batch of songs. And her fans don't complain, they trust her process. These are new forms of patronage, there are no rules and it's messy, the artists and the patrons they are making the rules as they go along, but whether these artists are using crowdfunding (which is basically, front me some money so I can make a thing) or subscription services (which is more like pay me some money every month so that I can make things) or Patreon, which is like pay per piece of content pledge service (that basically means pay me some money every time I make a thing). It doesn't matter, the fundamental building block of all of these relationships boils down to the same simple thing: trust. If you're asking your fans to support you, the artist, it shouldn't matter what your choices are, as long as you're delivering your side of the bargain. You may be spending the money on guitar picks, Mai Tais, baby formula, college loans, gas for the car or coffee to fuel your all-night writing sessions. As long as art is coming out the other side, and you're making your patrons happy, the money you need to live (and need to live is hard to define) is almost indistinguishable from the money you need to make art. ... (6:06:57) ... When she posts a photo of herself in a vintage dress that she just bought, no one scolds her for spending money on something other than effects pedals. It's not like her fan's money is an allowance with nosy and critical strings attached, it's a gift in the form of money in exchange for her gift, in the form of music. The relative values are... messy. But if we accept the messiness we're all okay. If Beck needs to moisturize his cuticles with truffle oil in order to play guitar tracks on his crowdfunded record, I don't care that the money I fronted him isn't going towards two turntables or a microphone; just as long as the art gets made, I get the album and Beck doesn't die in the process.
Amanda Palmer (The Art of Asking; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help)
The struggle for a life extracts all our attention, and leaves us blind, deaf, dumb and senseless. The writer, the artist, the musician vanishes, without even the charity of a proper cremation. At this point words become formless sounds, and thoughts run out of paper and jump out of the terra firma and fly in the air, forcing us to find someone to share them with, someone who could understand. The fear of wasting words is the worst kind of it, only a writer knows.
Anu Lal (Wall of Colours and Other Stories)
The marble not yet carved can hold the form of every thought the greatest artist has.” - Michelangelo “Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.” - Michelangelo “I have found that these quotes from Michelangelo are not only true for artists, but are also very true for writers and the stories we create. We must look at stories as blocks of stone or wood, waiting for their creation to be released. These stories are already there for us to capture, we only need to find the means of using our imagination to sculpt these stories into books and share them with the world.
Corey M. LaBissoniere
Create a Chocolate Factory There may be as many different types of playrooms as there are families, but every one of them should have the following design element: lots of choices. A place for drawing. A place for painting. Musical instruments. A wardrobe hanging with costumes. Blocks. Picture books. Tubes and gears. Anything where a child can be safely let loose, joyously free to explore whatever catches her fancy. Did you see the movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory? If so, you may have been filled with wonder at the chocolate plant, complete with trees, lawns, and waterfalls—a totally explorable, nonlinear ecology. That’s what I mean. I am focusing on artistic pursuits because kids who are trained in the arts
John Medina (Brain Rules for Baby: How to Raise a Smart and Happy Child from Zero to Five)
Michelangelo wasn’t the artist who began the sculpture—in fact, he hadn’t even been born when it was commissioned. The nineteen-foot block of marble had originally been the project of an artist named Agostino di Duccio, but after shaping some of the legs, feet, and torso, he inexplicably abandoned the work. Ten years later, an artist named Antonio Rossellino was hired to complete it, but his contract was subsequently cancelled. It was nearly twenty-five years before Michelangelo, just twenty-six, picked up a chisel and dared to believe he could complete a masterpiece.
Lysa TerKeurst (Unglued: Making Wise Choices in the Midst of Raw Emotions)
One of the methods that he and Bowie used on Low was the “Oblique Strategies” he’d created with artist Peter Schmidt the year before. It was a deck of cards, and each card was inscribed with a command or an observation. When you got into a creative impasse, you were to turn up one of the cards and act upon it. The commands went from the sweetly banal (“Do the washing up”) to the more technical (“Feedback recordings into an acoustic situation”; “The tape is now the music”). Some cards contradict each other (“Remove specifics and convert to ambiguities”; “Remove ambiguities and convert to specifics”). Some use Wildean substitution (“Don’t be afraid of things because they’re easy to do”). And several veer towards the Freudian (“Your mistake was a hidden intention”; “Emphasise the flaws”). The stress is on capitalising on error as a way of drawing in randomness, tricking yourself into an interesting situation, and crucially leaving room for the thing that can’t be explained—an element that every work of art needs. Did the Oblique Strategy cards actually work? They were probably more important symbolically than practically. A cerebral theoretician like Eno had more need of a mental circuit-breaker than someone like Bowie, who was a natural improviser, collagiste, artistic gadfly. Anyone involved in the creative arts knows that chance events in the process play an important role, but to my mind there’s something slightly self-defeating about the idea of “planned accidents.” Oblique Strategies certainly created tensions, as Carlos Alomar explained to Bowie biographer David Buckley: “Brian Eno had come in with all these cards that he had made and they were supposed to eliminate a block. Now, you’ve got to understand something. I’m a musician. I’ve studied music theory, I’ve studied counterpoint and I’m used to working with musicians who can read music. Here comes Brian Eno and he goes to a blackboard. He says: ‘Here’s the beat, and when I point to a chord, you play the chord.’ So we get a random picking of chords. I finally had to say, ‘This is bullshit, this sucks, this sounds stupid.’ I totally, totally resisted it. David and Brian were two intellectual guys and they had a very different camaraderie, a heavier conversation, a Europeanness. It was too heavy for me. He and Brian would get off on talking about music in terms of history and I’d think, ‘Well that’s stupid—history isn’t going to give you a hook for the song!’ I’m interested in what’s commercial, what’s funky and what’s going to make people dance!” It may well have been the creative tension between that kind of traditionalist approach and Eno’s experimentalism that was more productive than the “planned accidents” themselves. As Eno himself has said: “The interesting place is not chaos, and it’s not total coherence. It’s somewhere on the cusp of those two.
Hugo Wilcken (Low)
You may be all too conscious of your own blemishes and feel like that imperfect, rejected block (or an imperfect blockhead), but the Master Artist, who knows what you're made of better than you do, takes your worst flaws and incorporates them into the beauty of his creation-you!
Kevin Leman (What Your Childhood Memories Say about You: And What You Can Do about It)
Artist and EverQuest veteran Roman Kenney was well-known for being the most creative exploit-finder in the company. When game designers blocked off unplayable zones with killer mobs, Roman figured out ways past them. For instance, he once performed an action that caused his character to dismount from a flying taxi, dropping him from the flightpath into an off-limits, high-level zone below. His hijinks didn’t stop there. After retrieving his corpse (he died from falling damage) in the forbidden area, he found partially implemented vendors who sold weapons that were better than what was available in the newbie zone loot tables. He clicked on the high-level weapons, linking the stats in world-chat, and asked if anyone wanted to buy them. People enthusiastically made offers thinking he had looted them off mobs. He purchased the weapons from the vendor and resold them for a huge profit. The game designers were amused at his ingenuity, even if it sullied the game’s economy, so they quickly removed dismount actions from our flying taxis to prevent further such excursions.
John Staats (The World of Warcraft Diary: A Journal of Computer Game Development)
This book is about how to hold open that place in the sun. It is a field guide to doing nothing as an act of political resistance to the attention economy, with all the stubbornness of a Chinese “nail house” blocking a major highway. I want this not only for artists and writers, but for any person who perceives life to be more than an instrument and therefore something that cannot be optimized. A simple refusal motivates my argument: refusal to believe that the present time and place, and the people who are here with us, are somehow not enough. Platforms such as Facebook and Instagram act like dams that capitalize on our natural interest in others and an ageless need for community, hijacking and frustrating our most innate desires, and profiting from them. Solitude, observation, and simple conviviality should be recognized not only as ends in and of themselves, but inalienable rights belonging to anyone lucky enough to be alive.
Jenny Odell (How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy)
THERE IS ANOTHER WAY through and past the delusion of “barren.” People who are addicted to power can live on the same street or attend the same school as us or even play on the world stage. They can weaponize the thought of being creatively barren in order to debilitate the artist. They target artists specifically because they know that artists have the ability to reach the public in ways no one else can. They know this. And what they do not want is to be called out or held to account or revealed to be the manipulator they are and that they are a person aroused by the possibility of absolute power. That is a naked truth. And they do not want it exposed in pictures or songs or poems or articles or books or film or through dance. So when the propaganda spreads about “writer’s block” or “an artistically barren portion of time,” especially when it comes to women, this poisonous propaganda gets magnified. And then it can drown out reason and become a probable eventuality. Although it is merely a projection, unfortunately it can become an imposed self-fulfilling prophecy.
Tori Amos (Resistance: A Songwriter's Story of Hope, Change, and Courage)
themselves as blocked internally, unable to take the risk of moving into new and more satisfying artistic territory.
Julia Cameron (The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity)
In recovering from our creative blocks, it is necessary to go gently and slowly. What we are after here is the healing of old wounds—not the creation of new ones. No high jumping, please! Mistakes are necessary! Stumbles are normal. These are baby steps. Progress, not perfection, is what we should be asking of ourselves.
Julia Cameron (The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity)
We designed a workshop introducing hundreds of employees to the notion that jobs are not static sculptures, but flexible building blocks. We gave them examples of people becoming the architects of their own jobs, customizing their tasks and relationships to better align with their interests, skills, and values—like an artistic salesperson volunteering to design a new logo and an outgoing financial analyst communicating with clients using video chat instead of email.
Adam M. Grant (Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World)
All the art experts, all the big galleries, if not maybe quite all of the humble folk who look at them, agree Jackson Pollock’s splatter paintings do indeed count as great art. And JP intended it to be art too. But what’s curious about most of the most radical artists of the post-Second World War period is that they came from nowhere to prominence with the support of . . . the CIA! Yes, the American secret services actively promoted (through books, funding schemes, newspapers and of course galleries) radical art as part of a labyrinthine strategy to undermine the Soviet Union. This was all part of a special strategy to win over intellectuals – including philosophers – described as ‘the battle for Picasso’s mind’ by one former CIA agent, Thomas Braden, in a television interview in the 1970s. Tom Braden was responsible for dispensing money under the heading Congress for Cultural Freedom. Naturally, most of the people he gave money to had no idea that the funds, and hence the artistic direction, actually came from the CIA. Intellectuals and great artists, after all, hate being told what to think. And what was the communist empire doing meanwhile? They were promoting, through galleries, public funding and so on, a very different kind of art supposedly reflecting communist political values. ‘Soviet realism’ was a kind of reaction to ‘Western Impressionism’ (all those dotty – pointilliste the art-experts call them – landscapes and swirling, subjective shapes) and ensured that people in the paintings looked like people, decent, hard-working types too, and what’s more were doing worthy things – like making tractors or (at least) looking inspirationally at the viewer. When Soviet art wasn’t figurative (as this sort of stuff is called), it was very logical and mathematical, full of precise geometrical shapes and carefully weighted blocks of colour.
Martin Cohen (Philosophy For Dummies, UK Edition)
Do not call the inability to start laziness. Call it fear. Fear is the true name for what ails the blocked artist. It may be fear of failure or fear of success. Most frequently, it is fear of abandonment. This fear has roots in childhood reality.
Julia Cameron (The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity)
Hey, Hayley,” I say as I sit down and pick up one of her action figures. She has Barbies, too, but she would rather play with her Legos and building blocks. Maybe she’ll be an engineer one day. Or maybe she’ll be an amazing tattoo artist like her dad. I make her action figure kiss her Barbie, and she giggles. “I think they’re in love,” I whisper. “Like you and my daddy,” she says back quietly. I nod. And emotion clogs my throat again. I turn my head and cough, and then I dump a box of Legos on the floor. “I think Barbie needs a fortress,” I say. She nods, and we start to build a plastic fortress together, because sometimes a girl just needs a fucking fortress.
Tammy Falkner (Proving Paul's Promise (The Reed Brothers, #5))
Another difference between amateur and professional writers, almost by definition, is that the latter more successfully engage their audience. It is partly a question of skill, but more often a matter of goals. Amateur writers tend to write primarily for self-expression, whereas writers able to become professional can hide or transform their own agendas enough so that they are of interest to others. Is this position the same as Freud's famous dictum that artists take unacceptable drives and present them in an acceptable way?
Alice W. Flaherty (The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain)
He rose and held out a hand to her, and Jenny hoped it wasn’t the whisky inspiring Elijah’s overture. She gave him her hand and was tugged into an embrace, Elijah’s cheek resting against her hair. “While you sketch your cat, visit the sick with your mother, and seethe with frustrated artistic talent. Let’s hear a curse, Genevieve. Let the drink, the lateness of hour, and the company inspire you, hmm?” No cat came between them, no stays, no layers of proper attire. Held against Elijah’s body, Jenny felt the implacable structure of a large, fit man. His person was as soft and giving as a sculptor’s block of raw marble, but much, much warmer. “The only curse I know is damn—double damn.” “That’s a start, like a few lines on a page. Damn has promise, but it needs embellishment. Bloody double damn?” He spoke near her ear, his breath tickling her neck. “Bloody is vulgar and graphic. Also quite naughty, and daring.” “All the better. Come, let’s be vulgar and graphic on the subject of my sketches for the day.” He
Grace Burrowes (Lady Jenny's Christmas Portrait (The Duke's Daughters, #5; Windham, #8))
sit well with Michelangelo. The project seemed like a series of insurmountable challenges: •​It would be the largest fresco on earth—there would be more than twelve thousand square feet to cover. •​He had never frescoed before. •​His competition would be staring him in the face every day—the Moses and Jesus wall panels, world-class masterpieces created by the top fresco artists in the world—including his own first maestro, Ghirlandaio. When and if he ever finished the ceiling, his beginner’s work would be compared with these. •​The chapel was in constant use, more than twenty times per month. The scaffolding could not be of the traditional kind, which would require too much wood and thus block up the chapel and render it unusable for years. •​The pope’s rigid and unimaginative concept for the ceiling stood against everything Michelangelo believed in, both as a spiritual seeker and as an artist. •​The pope’s advisers would be trying to catch him at any changes or “heresies” that he might insert in the work. •​The pope and Bramante had given him a large number of Roman assistants to help with the plaster and paint—but Michelangelo knew very well that their other job would be to spy on his work.
Benjamin Blech (The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo's Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican)
Laura's mind was already racing with the creative possibilities presented to her. She whipped out her sketchbook and started to work away with a stump of charcoal, trying to capture the sweep of the hills and the patterns made by the blocks of light and dark. She half closed her eyes, the better to appreciate the variations in tone and depth. She was astonished to find just how brash and vivid and wonderfully discordant colors in nature could be. At this time of year there was no sense that things were attempting to blend or mingle or go unseen. Every tree, bush, and flower seemed to be shouting out its presence, each one louder than the next. On the lower slopes the leaves of the aged oak trees sang out, gleaming in the heat. On every hill bracken screamed in solid swathes of viridian. At Laura's feet the plum purple and dark green leaves of the whinberry bushes competed for attention with their own indigo berries. The kitsch mauve of the heather laughed at all notions of subtlety. She turned to a fresh page and began to make quick notes, ideas for a future palette and thoughts about compositions. She jotted down plans for color mixes and drew the voluptuous curve of the hills and the soft shape of the whinberry leaves.
Paula Brackston (Lamp Black, Wolf Grey)
The artist and the fundamentalist both confront the same issue, the mystery of their existence as individuals. Each asks the same questions: Who am I? Why am I here? What is the meaning of my life?
Steven Pressfield (The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles)
Women born works of art, men doomed to spend entire lifetimes trying to create just one.
J. Andrew Schrecker (Insomniacs, We)
A curator's job does not involve wizardry, but requires a wealth of experience and knowledge, responsibility, and a good overview of artistic developments. But if we are lucky, we curators still manage to enchant visitors with the results. - René Block
Carin Kuoni (Words Of Wisdom: A Curator's Vade Mecum (INDEPENDENT CUR))
Noa sleeps with the curtains open, allowing as much moonlight as possible to flood her bedroom, allowing her to see each and every picture on the walls, if only as a pale glimmer. It took Noa weeks to perfect the art display. Reproductions of Monet's gardens at Giverny blanket one wall: thousands of violets- smudges of purples and mauves- and azaleas, poppies, and peonies, tulips and roses, water lilies in pastel pinks floating on serene lakes reflecting weeping willows and shimmers of sunshine. Turner's sunsets adorn another: bright eyes of gold at the center of skies and seas of searing magenta or soft blue. The third wall is splashed with Jackson Pollocks: a hundred different colors streaked and splattered above Noa's bed. The fourth wall is decorated by Rothko: blocks of blue and red and yellow blending and bleeding together. The ceiling is papered with the abstract shapes of Kandinsky: triangles, circles, and lines tumbling over one another in energetic acrobatics.
Menna van Praag (The Witches of Cambridge)
Before he stepped into the elevator, Ken stopped at the art gallery at the back of the lobby. Every few months the courthouse featured a new exhibit by a local artist.
Block Frederic (Race to Judgment)
It is my own belief (and here I shall not feel bad if no one follows me) that every good and beautiful thing which man has produced in the world has been the result of his faulty and sin-blocked response to the creative Voice sounding over the earth. The moral philosophers who dreamed their high dreams of virtue, the religious thinkers who speculated about God and immortality, the poets and artists who created out of common stuff pure and lasting beauty: how can we explain them? It is not enough to say simply, “It was genius.” What then is genius? Could it be that a genius is a man haunted by the speaking Voice, laboring and striving like one possessed to achieve ends which he only vaguely understands? That the great man may have missed God in his labors, that he may even have spoken or written against God does not destroy the idea I am advancing. God's redemptive revelation in the Holy Scriptures is necessary to saving faith and peace with God. Faith in a risen Saviour is necessary if the vague stirrings toward immortality are to bring us to restful and satisfying communion with God. To me this is a plausible explanation of all that is best out of Christ. But you can be a good Christian and not accept my thesis.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God)
François Truffaut contended that critics were themselves blocked directors, as he had been when he was a critic.
Julia Cameron (The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity)
Oh, my goodness," Sylvie said with obvious delight, immediately leaning down for a closer look at the former professor's Beauty and the Beast spread. There were iced biscuits, piped well, each in the shape of an animated character. Happily chomping down on a smiling teapot, Mariana cooed, "Look at the gingerbread houses." Adam had re-created the central square of a small French-inspired town in gingerbread blocks, chocolate beams, and blown sugar fountains. He'd mechanized the latter to spill out a cascade of syrup, which fizzed like sherbet and tasted far better than Dominic had expected. Most of the sugar-craft requirements had been checked off on the cake, however, and the sculpted objects that stood atop the icing. Even for a highly skilled, trained sugar artist, it was difficult to pull off a human figure, and Adam had wisely opted for the Beast's enchanted household: the clock, the candelabra, and so on.
Lucy Parker (Battle Royal (Palace Insiders, #1))
The buildings looked like mere children’s blocks from a distance. The sun hid behind the interlaced clouds, softening the atmosphere and blurring the edges of the individual objects in the landscape. Paris appeared as it would on an impressionist artist’s canvas – real but without exact details.
Baheya Zeitoun (Toxic Relief)
Tell the truth. What habit do you have that gets in the way of your creativity? Tell the truth. What do you think might be a problem? It is. What do you plan to do about the habit or problem? What is your payoff in holding on to this block? If you can’t figure out your payoff, ask a trusted friend. Tell the truth. Which friends make you doubt yourself? (The self-doubt is yours already, but they trigger it.) Tell the truth. Which friends believe in you and your talent? (The talent is yours, but they make you feel it.)
Julia Cameron (The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity)
Be careful to safeguard your newly recovering artist. Often, creativity is blocked by our falling in with other people's plans for us. We want to set aside time for our creative work, but we feel we should do something else instead. As blocked creatives, we focus not on our responsibilities to ourselves, but on our responsibilities to others. We tend to think such behavior makes us good people. It doesn't. It makes us frustrated people.
Julia Cameron (The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity)
Il n'y a qu'une chose qui puisse arrêter le cheminement d'un peintre et c'est le succès. Van Gogh a vu cela bien avant moi. La peinture est un cheminement dans l'espace - et non dans le temps. Le peintre cherche en permanence la couleur et le style. S'il rencontre le succès, il bloque son style, il le fige. Pourquoi ? Simplement parce que l'acheteur - le marchand - demande uniquement le style qui se vend, le style qui a du succès. Voyez Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali ou Bernard Buffet...etc, etc. L'artiste connu et reconnu est condamné, à vie, à se copier lui-même ; à copier un moment de son cheminement. Alphonse Daudet disait que le succès (la gloire), c'était la même chose que de fumer un cigare par l'autre bout. Le bout de la braise; donc. Et il avait raison. Mais comme personne n'a le choix - s'agissant du destin - on se situe ici par-delà le bien et le mal et tout jugement moral n'a ici aucune portée *** There is only one thing that can stop the pathway of an artist and this thing is called : success. Van Gogh wrote it long before me. Painting is a pathway through space - and not through time. The painter is constantly looking for new color and new style. If he meets success, he blocks his style, he freezes it. Why ? Simply because the buyer - the merchant - asks only for the style that can be sold, the style that is successful. See Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, Bernard Buffet ... etc, etc. The successful artist is therefore condemned, for life, to copy himself; to copy a moment of his pathway. Alphonse Daudet said that success (glory) was the same as smoking a cigar on the other side. The side of the embers. And he was right. But since no one has the choice - when it comes about fate - we are here beyond good and evil and any moral judgment has no value.
Jean-Michel Rene Souche
In the beginning was the word. Once terms like identity doubts and midlife crisis become current, the reported cases of them increase by leaps and bounds, affecting people unaware there is anything wrong with them until they have got a load of the coinages. You too may have an acquaintance or even relative with a block about paperhanging or dog grooming, a highflown form of stagnation trickled down from writers and artists. Once my poor dear mother confided in me in a hollow whisper, "I have an identity crisis." I says, "How do you mean?" and she says, "I no longer understand your father." Now we have burnout, and having heard tell of it on television or read about it in a magazine, your plumber doubts he can any longer hack it as a pipefitter, while a glossary adopted by his wife has turned him overnight into a sexist, to say nothing of a male chauvinist pig, something she would never have suspected before she encountered the terminology. The word was made flesh.
Peter De Vries (Slouching Towards Kalamazoo)
Single-sheet prints in the ukio-e style began to appear around 1680, offered by the same publishers who were producing woodblock-printed books. An efficient devision of labor allowed multiple copies to be produced at high speed, without the need of a printing press. The publisher controlled the entire process, contracting with an artist to design the images; a block cutter to carve the wooden printing blocks, one for each color; and a printer to ink and print the blocks, placing each sheet of paper face down on the inked block and rubbing the back of the sheet with a pad to transfer the ink. Each of these artisans might have apprentices or assistants who were also involved in the process.
Sarah E. Thompson
[W]hen the narrative of climbing makes others put profits before people, fitting cheap cladding into their tower blocks, what then? How many other potential artists with stories we want and need have we lost for the sake of financial profit; have we lost to thoughtless education systems, thoughtless nurturing, thoughtlessness? Why are we platforming misfits, heralding them as newly rich successes, while they balance on creaking ladders with little chance of social mobility? I can't help usher them into this house if there are doors within it they can't open. It feels complicit.
Michaela Coel (Misfits: A Personal Manifesto)
An Almost Made Up Poem I see you drinking at a fountain with tiny blue hands, no, your hands are not tiny they are small, and the fountain is in France where you wrote me that last letter and I answered and never heard from you again. You used to write insane poems about ANGELS AND GOD, all in upper case, and you knew famous artists and most of them were your lovers, and I wrote back, it’ all right, go ahead, enter their lives, I’ not jealous because we’ never met. We got close once in New Orleans, one half block, but never met, never touched. So you went with the famous and wrote about the famous, and, of course, what you found out is that the famous are worried about their fame –– not the beautiful young girl in bed with them, who gives them that, and then awakens in the morning to write upper case poems about ANGELS AND GOD. We know God is dead, they’ told us, but listening to you I wasn’t sure. Maybe it was the upper case. You were one of the best female poets and I told the publishers and editors: “Her, print her, she’ mad but she’ magic. There’ no lie in her fire.” I loved you like a man loves a woman he never touches, only writes to, keeps little photographs of. I would have loved you more if I had sat in a small room rolling a cigarette and listened to you piss in the bathroom, but that didn’ happen. Your letters got sadder. Your lovers betrayed you. Kid, I wrote back, all lovers betray. It didn’ help. You said you had a crying bench and it was by a bridge and the bridge was over a river and you sat on the crying bench every night and wept for the lovers who had hurt and forgotten you. I wrote back but never heard again. A friend wrote me of your suicide 3 or 4 months after it happened. If I had met you I would probably have been unfair to you or you to me. It was best like this.
Charles Bukowski (Love Is a Dog from Hell)
Dunne’s dreams seemed to him evidence for what Einstein and other physicists and mathematicians were just beginning to assert: that since the present moment depends entirely on where you stand in relation to events—what might be in the past for one observer may still be in the future for another observer, and vice versa—then the future must in some sense already exist. Einstein’s theory of relativity suggested that time was a dimension like space. To help visualize this, his teacher, Hermann Minkowski, pictured “spacetime” as a four-dimensional block. For the purposes of this book, let’s make it a glass block so we can see what is happening inside it. One’s life, and the “life” of any single object or atom in the universe, is really a line—a “world line”—snaking spaghetti-like through that glass block. The solid three-dimensional “you” that you experience at any moment is really just a slice or cross section of a four-dimensional clump of spaghetti-like atoms that started some decades ago as a zygote, gradually expanded in size by incorporating many more spaghetti-strand atoms, and then, after several decades of coherence (as a literal “flying spaghetti monster”) will dissipate into a multitude of little spaghetti atoms going their separate ways after your death. (They will recoalesce in different combinations with other spaghetti-strand atoms to make other objects and other spaghetti beings, again and again and again, until the end of the universe.) What we perceive at any given moment as the present state of affairs is just a narrow slice or cross-section of that block as our consciousness traverses our world-line from beginning to end. (If it helps envision this, the comic artist, occult magician, and novelist Alan Moore has recently revised the “block” to a football—one tip being the big bang, the other the “big crunch” proposed in some cosmological models.32 I will stick with the term “glass block” since I am not a football fan and “glass football” sounds odd.) Precognitive dreams, Dunne argued, show that at night, as well as other times when the brain is in a relaxed state, our consciousness can wriggle free of the present moment and scan ahead (as well as behind) on our personal world-line, like a flashlight at night illuminating a spot on the path ahead. This ability to be both rooted mentally in our body, with its rich sensory “now,” and the possibility of coming unstuck in time (as Vonnegut put it) suggested to Dunne that human consciousness was dual. We not only possess an “individual mind” that adheres to the brain at any given time point, but we also are part of a larger, “Universal Mind,” that transcends the now and that spaghetti-clump body. The Universal Mind, he argued, is ultimately shared—a consciousness-in-common—that is equivalent to what has always been called “God.
Eric Wargo (Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious)
Back in North Carolina, the small office in the English Department I shared with another graduate student for our teaching assignments looked like a decorator's version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, one where Jekyll loved Stranger Things, Funko Pops, and artistically desaturated wedding photos, and Hyde loved death row cinder block walls.
Alicia Thompson (Love in the Time of Serial Killers)
In the profiles that follow we should expect to encounter men who combined an incredibly optimistic estimate of America’s cultural potential with a deep distrust of their own artistic callings, hatred for the pecuniary values of the marketplace with considerable skill as entrepreneurs, intense private ambition with a genuine craving to channel their creative energies into public service. We might be on the lookout for artists who discovered that a highly developed sense of paradox was the foundation of their best creative works. We might ask ourselves if the specific ways in which these cultural pioneers reconciled tensions and fused together the disparate strands of their personalities blocked or released their creative energies.
Joseph J. Ellis (After the Revolution: Profiles of Early American Culture)