Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear

by Elizabeth Gilbert

Without bravery, their lives would remain small—far smaller than they probably wanted their lives to be.

“Do you have the courage? Do you have the courage to bring forth this work? The treasures that are hidden inside you are hoping you will say yes.”

The courage to go on that hunt in the first place—that’s what separates a mundane existence from a more enchanted one.

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.

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.

Bravery means doing something scary. Fearlessness means not even understanding what the word scary means.

I decided that I would need to build an expansive enough interior life that my fear and my creativity could peacefully coexist, since it appeared that they would always be together.

Creativity and I are the only ones who will be making any decisions along the way.

because your life is short and rare and amazing and miraculous, and you want to do really interesting things and make really interesting things while you’re still here.

When you say no, nothing happens at all.

You can measure your worth by your dedication

to your path, not by your successes or failures.

I understood that the best you can hope for in such a situation is to let your old idea go and catch the next idea that comes around. And the best way for that to happen is to move on swiftly, with humility and grace. Don’t fall into a funk about the one that got away. Don’t beat yourself up.

I believe that inspiration will always try its best to work with you—but if you are not ready or available, it may indeed choose to leave you and to search for a different human collaborator.

Work with that stubbornness. Work with it as openly and trustingly and diligently as you can.

nicely taken care of by some external divine creative spirit guide. (Modern commentators, perhaps uncomfortable with this sense of divine mystery, simply call it “flow” or “being in the zone.”)

the Romans didn’t believe that an exceptionally gifted person was a genius; they believed that an exceptionally gifted person had a genius.