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Take what you need and leave the rest.
“What would you do if you were stuck in one place, and every day was exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered?”
No matter how successful you get, no matter what level of achievement you reach, you will never really “arrive.”
“Any man can fight the battles of just one day,” begins a passage collected in Richmond Walker’s book of meditations for recovering alcoholics, Twenty-Four Hours a Day. “It is only when you and I add the burden of those two awful eternities, yesterday and tomorrow, that we break down. It is not the experience of today that drives men mad. It is remorse or bitterness for something which happened yesterday or the dread of what tomorrow may bring. Let us therefore do our best to live but one day at a time.”
social lives—and every creative person has a different temperament.
a person's nature, Especially as it permanently affects behavior
A little imprisonment—if it’s of your own making—can set you free. Rather than restricting your freedom, a routine gives you freedom by protecting you from the ups and downs of life and helping you take advantage of your limited time, energy, and talent. A routine establishes good habits that can lead to your best work.
David Shrigley will make a huge list of fifty things to draw a week in advance. Having the list means he doesn’t have to waste studio time worrying about what to make.
“The simple thing I’ve learned over the years is just to have a starting point and once you have a starting point the work seems to make itself,” he says.
When I’m stuck in the morning and I don’t know what to write about in my diary, I’ll modify the pros-and-cons list. I’ll draw a line down the middle of the page, and in one column I’ll list what I’m thankful for, and in the other column, I’ll write down what I need help with. It’s a paper prayer.
“A list is a collection with purpose,”
“Your list is your past and your future. Carry at all times. Prioritize: today, this week, and eventually. You will someday die with items still on your list, but for now, while you live, your list helps prioritize what can be done in your limited time.” —Tom Sachs
blunders
stupid or careless mistake
absurdities
A state of being ridiculous
serenely,
Calm peaceful untroubled
cumbered
Hampe or hinder
Before you go to bed, make a list of anything you did accomplish, and write down a list of what you want to get done tomorrow.
“The greatest need of our time is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds and makes of all political and social life a mass illness. Without this housecleaning, we cannot begin to see. Unless we see, we cannot think.” —Thomas Merton
When you reach for your phone or your laptop upon waking, you’re immediately inviting anxiety and chaos into your life. You’re also bidding adieu to some of the most potentially fertile moments in the life of a creative person.
Goodbye
The easiest way I get my feelings hurt is by turning on my phone first thing in the morning. Even on the rare occasion I don’t get my feelings hurt, my time is gone and my brains are scattered.
brain cells dead on arrival
You can be woke without waking up to the news.
“The phone gives us a lot but it takes away three key elements of discovery: loneliness, uncertainty, and boredom. Those have always been where creative ideas come from.” —Lynda Barry
find planes to be a terrific place to get work done. But why not replicate the experience on the ground?
time of their life at something that you might have loved to, but are simply skipping.” Saying “no” to the world can be really hard, but sometimes it’s the only way to say “yes” to your art and your sanity. “I paint with my back to the world.” —Agnes Martin
This is our best compliment: telling somebody they’re so good at what they love to do they could make money at it.
You can also focus more on what the work does that can’t be measured. What it does to your soul.
Making gifts puts us in touch with our gifts. “What I’m really concerned about is reaching one person.” —Jorge Luis Borges
Finding God in all things is one of the tasks of the believer, and Kent found God in advertising, of all things. Kent took the manmade landscape of Los Angeles—not necessarily the first place you’d look for beauty—and she found the beauty in it.
Everything you need to make extraordinary art can be found in your everyday life. René
By paying extra attention to their world, they teach us to pay more attention to ours. The first step toward transforming your life into art is to start paying more attention to it.
He said his drawings were “a means of experiencing a place or a moment more deeply.”
“If you draw,” said the cartoonist E. O. Plauen, “the world becomes more beautiful, far more beautiful.”
Your attention is one of the most valuable things you possess, which is why everyone wants to steal it from you. First you must protect it, and then you must point it in the right direction.
We pay attention to the things we really care about, but sometimes what we really care about is hidden from us.
I’ve found that rereading doubles the power of a diary because I’m then able to discover my own patterns, identify what I really care about, and know myself better.
If you want to change your life, change what you pay attention to. “We give things meaning by paying attention to them,” Jessa Crispin writes, “and so moving your attention from one thing to another can absolutely change your future.” “Attention is the most basic form of love,” wrote John Tarrant. When you pay attention to your life, it not only provides you with the material for your art, it also helps you fall in love with your life.
“Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are.” —José Ortega y Gassett
reprehensible
Deserving censure or.condemnation
“The purpose of being a serious writer is to keep people from despair,” writes Sarah Manguso. “If people read your work and, as a result, choose life, then you are doing your job.”
The world doesn’t necessarily need more great artists. It needs more decent human beings. Art is for life, not the other way around.
He suspected it had to do with the creative spirit, that connection you feel with another person you know is trying their best to bring new, beautiful things into the world. Try your best to seek out the like-hearted people with whom you feel this connection.
Mm
To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them.”
The Roman statesman and philosopher Seneca said that if you read old books, you get to add all the years the author lived onto your own life. “We
“The disorder of the desk, the floor; the yellow Post-it notes everywhere; the whiteboards covered with scrawl: all this is the outward manifestation of the messiness of human thought.” —Ellen Ullman
juxtapositions,
The fact of two things being placed together with a contrasting effect
You’re often most creative when you’re the least productive. There is, of course, such a thing as too much
paintings. Writer Philip Roth said he learned his nap technique from his father: Take your clothes off and pull a blanket over you, and you sleep better. “The best part of it is that when you wake up, for the first fifteen seconds, you have no idea where you are,” Roth said. “You’re just alive. That’s all you know. And it’s bliss, it’s absolute bliss.”
will try this
“No matter what time you get out of bed, go for a walk,”
Doing this later
When we’re glued to our screens, the world looks unreal. Terrible. Not worth saving or even spending time with. Everyone on earth seems like a troll or a maniac or worse.
Like a tree, creative work has seasons. Part of the work is to know which season you’re in, and act accordingly. In winter, “the tree looks dead, but we know it is beginning a very deep process, out of which will come spring and summer.” The comedian George Carlin
“No time to contract before another expansion. No time to grow up,” he said. “No time to learn from your mistakes. But that notion goes against nature, which is cyclical.”
