Quotes About Expression

When artists are burdened with the label of "genius," I think they lose the ability to take themselves lightly, or to create freely.

You can believe that you are neither a slave to inspiration nor its master, but something far more interesting—its partner—and that the two of you are working together toward something intriguing and worthwhile.

I think that the difference between a tormented creative life and a tranquil creative life is nothing more than the difference between the word awful and the word interesting.

Well... why is a hard question to answer in any language.

Pure creativity is something better than a necessity; it's a gift. It's the frosting. Our creativity is a wild and unexpected bonus from the universe. It's as if all our gods and angels gathered together and said, "It's tough down there as a human being, we know. Here—have some delights.

As a creator, you can design any sort of jewelry that you like for the inside of other people's minds (or simply for the inside of your own mind). You can make work that's provocative, aggressive, sacred, edgy, traditional, earnest, devastating, entertaining, brutal, fanciful . . . but when all is said and done, it's still just intracranial jewelry-making. It's still just decoration. And that's glorious.

I had creativity within me that was original; I had a personality within me that was original; I had dreams and perspectives and aspirations within me that were original.

Your fear will always be triggered by your creativity, because creativity asks you to enter into realms of uncertain outcome, and fear hates uncertain outcome. Your fear—programmed by evolution to be hypervigilant and insanely overprotective—will always assume that any uncertain outcome is destined to end in a bloody, horrible death. Basically, your fear is like a mall cop who thinks he's a Navy SEAL:

Creative living is a path for the brave. a

Creativity is a path for the brave, yes, but it is not a path for the fearless, and it's important to recognize the distinction.

I tried to look like someone who was busy expanding her horizons and building her character through intentional fraternization with her social inferiors. A difficult look to master in a single facial expression, but I did my best.

Dal centro della mia vita venne una grande fontana… "From the center of my life, there came a great fountain…

Stop treating your creativity like it's a tired, old, unhappy marriage (a grind, a drag) and start regarding it with the fresh eyes of a passionate lover. Even if you have only fifteen minutes a day in a stairwell alone with your creativity, take it. Go hide in that stairwell and make out with your art.

The guardians of high culture will try to convince you that the arts belong only to a chosen few, but they are wrong and they are also annoying. We

But if your calling is to make things, then you still have to make things in order to live out your highest creative potential—and also in order to remain sane.

Boris Pasternak described this phenomenon beautifully, when he wrote, "No genuine book has a first page.

Aside from my cockeyed internal compass, I also have a shortage of personal coolness, which can be a liability in travel. I have never learned how to arrange my face into that blank expression of competent invisibility that is so useful when traveling in dangerous, foreign places. You know - that super-relaxed, totally-in-charge expression which makes you look like you belong there, anywhere, everywhere, even in the middle of riot in Jakarta.

Whether you think you're brilliant or you think you're a loser, just make whatever you need to make and toss it out there.

Pure creativity is something better than a necessity; it's a gift. It's the frosting.

And while the paths and outcomes of creative living will vary wildly from person to person, I can guarantee you this: A creative life is an amplified life. It's a bigger life, a happier life, an expanded life, and a hell of a lot more interesting life. Living in this manner—continually and stubbornly bringing forth the jewels that are hidden within you—is a fine art, in and of itself.

Everything reminds us of something. But once you put your own expression and passion behind an idea, that idea becomes yours.

You can recognize the people who live for others by the haunted look on the faces of the others. I would so much rather you wrote a book in order to entertain yourself than to help me. Or if your subject matter is darker and more serious, I would prefer that you made your art in order to save yourself or to relive yourself of some great psychic burden, rather than to save or relieve us.

But you do not need your fear in the realm of creative expression.

There is only so long that a person can keep her enthusiasms locked away within her heart before she longs to share it with a fellow soul, and Alma had many decades of thoughts much overdue for sharing.