Creativity is an act of defiance.
Art is the only way to run away without leaving home.
By making the start of the sequence automatic, they replace doubt and fear with comfort and routine.
Ultimately there is no such thing as failure. There are lessons learned in different ways.
Every work of art needs a spine – an underlying theme, a motive for coming into existence. It doesn’t have to be apparent to the audience. But you need it at the start of the creative process to guide you and keep you going.
If you only do what you know and do it very, very well, chances are that you won’t fail. You’ll just stagnate, and your work will get less and less interesting, and that’s failure by erosion.
When you’re in a rut, you have to question everything except your ability to get out of it.
Our ability to grow is directly proportional to an ability to entertain the uncomfortable.
You don’t get into the mood to create – it’s discipline.
Playwrights have texts, composers have scores, painters and sculptors have the residue of those activities, and dance is traditionally an ephemeral, effervescent, here-today-gone-tomorrow kind of thing.
Without passion, all the skill in the world won’t lift you above craft. Without skill, all the passion in the world will leave you eager but floundering. Combining the two is the essence of the creative life.
More often than not I’ve found, a rut is a consequence of sticking to tried and tested methods that don’t take into account how you or the world has changed.
Reading, conversation, environment, culture, heroes, mentors, nature – all are lottery tickets for creativity. Scratch away at them and you’ll find out how big a prize you’ve won.
I think that anyone who’s pushed to do the very best that they can is privileged. It’s a luxury.
No one is born with skill. It is developed through exercise, through repetition, through a blend of learning and reflection that’s both painstaking and rewarding. And it takes time.
Art is an investigation.
If art is the bridge between what you see in your mind and what the world sees, then skill is how you build that bridge.
Life is about moving, it’s about change. And when things stop doing that they’re dead.