Quotes About Expression

I believe that our creativity grows like sidewalk weeds out of the cracks between our pathologies—not from the pathologies themselves. But so many people think it's the other way around.

Sometimes 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.

The Yogic sages say that all the pain of a human life is caused by words, as is all the joy. We create words to define our experience and those words bring attendant emotions that jerk us around like dogs on a leash.

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! (You can get a lot of making out done in fifteen minutes, as any furtive teenager can tell you.)

if you dress too much in the style of the moment, it makes you look like a nervous person.

Just because creativity is mystical doesn't mean it shouldn't also be demystified—especially if it means liberating artists from the confines of their own grandiosity, panic, and ego.

There's a hole in our world from all the art those people did not make—there is a hole in us from the loss of their work—and I cannot imagine this was ever anyone's divine plan.

Creative entitlement doesn't mean behaving like a princess, or acting as though the world owes you anything whatsoever. No, creative entitlement simply means believing that you are allowed to be here, and that—merely by being here—you are allowed to have a voice and a vision of your own. The

His penmanship was shamefully crabbed. Each sentence was a crowded village of capital letters and small letters, living side by side in tight misery, crawling up on one another as though trying to escape the page. His spelling was several degrees beyond arbitrary, and his punctuation brought reason to sigh with unhappiness.

it seems to me that my fear and my creativity are basically conjoined twins—as evidenced by the fact that creativity cannot take a single step forward without fear marching right alongside it.

Creative living is a path for the brave.

because creativity is mystical doesn't mean it shouldn't also be demystified—especially if it means liberating artists from the confines of their own grandiosity, panic, and ego.

Because this is the other side of the contract with creativity: If inspiration is allowed to unexpectedly enter you, it is also allowed to unexpectedly exit you.

Creativity is sacred, and it is not sacred. What we make matters enormously, and it doesn't matter at all. We toil alone, and we are accompanied by spirits. We are terrified, and we are brave. Art is a crushing chore and a wonderful privilege.

I believe that our creativity grows like sidewalk weeds out of the cracks between our pathologies—not from the pathologies themselves.

I'm with the British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips on this point, when he observes: "If the art legitimates cruelty, I think the art is not worth having.

Let inspiration lead you wherever it wants to lead you. Keep in mind that for most of history people just made things, and they didn't make such a big freaking deal out of it.

Why would your creativity not love you? It came to you, didn't it? It drew itself near. It worked itself into you, asking for your attention and your devotion. It filled you with the desire to make and do interesting things. Creativity wanted a relationship with you. That must be for a reason, right? Do you honestly believe that creativity went through all the trouble of breaking into your consciousness only because it wanted to kill you?

I wish somebody had told them all to go fill up a bunch of pages with blah-blah-blah and just publish it, for heaven's sake, and ignore the outcome.

The hunt to uncover those jewels—that's creative living.

inspiration comes from another world, you see, and it speaks a language entirely unlike my own, so sometimes we have trouble understanding each other. But inspiration is still sitting there right beside me, and it is trying.

I realized that, as a songwriter, the only thing I really do is make jewelry for the inside of other people's minds.

No necesitas el permiso de nadie para llevar una vida creativa.

Hvad enten du mener, at du er genial, eller du tror, du er håbløs, så skab det, du har brug for at skabe, og send det ud i verden.